Asylum-seeker ‘deemed inadmissible,’ deported

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This article was published 23/01/2018 (2842 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ahmed Aden Ali, the Somali asylum-seeker who made headlines last April after causing a ruckus inside the Emerson border patrol office, has been removed from Canada.

His criminal defence lawyer said Ali was found inadmissible to Canada under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act for criminal convictions outside Canada.

“That law states that if the conviction has an equivalent offence in Canada, then a foreign national is deemed inadmissible and can be removed,” Ali’s lawyer, Amado Claros, said Tuesday.

According to media reports, Ali was deported to Somalia in November.

In an interview with the Free Press last May, Ali said he was charged with grand theft auto in the U.S. for stealing his uncle’s car.

The Somali refugee, who joined his sister in Minneapolis in 1999, said he struggled with mental health issues, a brain aneurysm and addictions. In addition to the auto theft, he was arrested more than once for being drunk and disorderly in the U.S. Ali said he worried that he would be deported to Somalia after the election of U.S. President Donald Trump. A friend living in Edmonton encouraged Ali to seek asylum in Canada, he said.

When Ali crossed into Canada at the Manitoba border near Emerson with a small group of asylum-seekers in April 2017, he was taken to the Canada Border Services Agency.

In his Free Press interview last year, he said he became upset when he saw the people he’d crossed the border with were being released while he was being held by CBSA officers. He set off the sprinkler system inside the building using a cigarette lighter and was charged with mischief over $5,000, as well as threatening and assaulting an officer.

Claros said he found out about Ali’s deportation in December, when the Crown prosecutor’s office told him those charges were being dropped because he was removed from Canada.