JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Canada's border agency told Lakshikan Punitharasa to report at 7:20 a.m. on Thursday to Room 2320.2A, a small office on the arrivals level of Vancouver International Airport's international terminal, three hours before a flight out of the country. If no officer was at the desk, he was to pick up a telephone mounted on the wall to the right of the reception counter, which would ring the agency's security guards, and give his name.
The letter, dated Oct. 28 and served on him in person by the Canada Border Services Agency's enforcement division for the Pacific region, reminded him that excess baggage and pets would be his to pay for. It ended with a warning in bold type that failure to comply "may result in the issuance of a warrant for your arrest and detention."
Mr. Punitharasa is a Sri Lankan Tamil. The letter does not name his destination, the type of removal order against him or the grounds for it, and Canada ordinarily returns people to their country of nationality. Jaffna Monitor, which obtained a copy, could not confirm by Friday whether he boarded the flight. The border agency does not comment on individual cases.
Letters like this one usually come at the end of the removal process, once an order to leave can be enforced, and often after a refugee claim and any appeals have been rejected. The three-hour window and the note about baggage fees suggest he was expected to board a commercial flight without an escort, with an officer confirming his departure. Only about 7 percent of removals last year involved an escort.
The agency removed 23,160 people in 2025, the most in its history and up from 17,397 the year before. A briefing note prepared for the public safety minister in June put the current pace at about 400 a week. Most are refugee claimants whose claims failed or who did not meet the conditions attached to them. Between 1,000 and 1,200 are removed a year on the most serious grounds, including organized crime, serious criminality and threats to national security. Nearly half of last year's removals took place in Quebec. Mexico, India and Haiti accounted for the largest numbers.
The push began in December 2024, when the government of Justin Trudeau, facing tariff threats from President-elect Donald Trump over border security, gave the agency 55.5 million Canadian dollars over three years and set a target of 20,000 removals in each of the next two fiscal years. Prime Minister Mark Carney's government has since promised 1,000 more border officers, some of them for removals.
It marked a sharp turn for a country that had spent most of the previous decade opening its doors. After 2015, Mr. Trudeau's Liberal government raised permanent immigration targets almost every year, pointing to labor shortages, an aging population and, later, the recovery from the pandemic. Permanent resident admissions reached about 484,000 in 2024. Temporary migration grew even faster. By 2023, more than a million international students held study permits, many of them at colleges that had come to depend on their fees.
The growth collided with a housing shortage that economists attribute partly to slow construction and high interest rates, problems that predated the surge. But the rapid rise in population added to the strain on housing and public services, and polls showed support for high immigration falling.
The government began pulling back in January 2024, when it capped new study permits and cut approvals by about a third. That September, it lowered the cap again and restricted work permits for graduates and for students' spouses. In October 2024, it cut permanent residence targets for the first time and set its first limits on temporary residents, aiming to bring them down to 5 percent of the population.
Under Mr. Carney, the tightening reached the asylum system. A law that took effect in March bars a full refugee hearing for anyone who claims asylum more than a year after first entering Canada, if that entry came after June 24, 2020. Those claimants get only a written risk review, which refugee advocates and the Canadian Bar Association have criticized as inadequate.
Statistics Canada estimates that the population shrank by about 102,000 people in 2025, the first annual decline on record, as temporary residents left faster than new ones arrived. On Thursday, the day Mr. Punitharasa was due at the airport, the government published its immigration plan for 2027 through 2029. It keeps permanent resident admissions at 380,000 a year, limits new temporary arrivals to 370,000 and offers permanent status to as many as 200,000 temporary residents already in the country.
The targets govern how many new people are admitted. They do not strip anyone already in Canada of legal status. The border agency removes people with enforceable removal orders. Most are failed refugee claimants; others were found inadmissible for crimes or misrepresentation, or stayed after their permits expired.
The agency reports to Gary Anandasangaree, who became public safety minister in May 2025. Born in Sri Lanka, the son of the veteran Tamil politician V. Anandasangaree, he arrived in Canada as a refugee in 1983. In 2010, as a lawyer, he advised many of the Tamil asylum seekers detained after the cargo ship MV Sun Sea reached British Columbia, and as a member of Parliament he continued to take up their cause. In a 2020 opinion piece in The Toronto Star, he wrote that years of detention and suspicion had broken them mentally and spiritually.
As minister, he has defended the enforcement push, telling a parliamentary committee this year that the agency had removed a record number of people in 2025.
He has also stepped back from parts of the job. In June 2025, his office said he would recuse himself from any matter involving the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which Canada lists as a terrorist organization, or the World Tamil Movement. The following month, before joining the cabinet, he had written letters backing the immigration application of a man the border agency considered a member of the Tigers. "I cannot, and will not, make decisions on any matter wherein I advocated for a constituent," he said in response, adding that this covered ministerial relief and stays of removal. The federal ethics commissioner later said the law did not require a formal screen on national security matters involving the Tamil community. Documents released under access-to-information law show that decisions related to the Tigers were handed to his deputy minister and his chief of staff.
The minister does not decide individual removals. Removal orders are issued by the Immigration and Refugee Board or by immigration officers, and border agency officers carry them out. The minister sets the agency's priorities and holds some discretionary powers, and contested cases go to the Federal Court.
He has spoken about one other. In April, as the agency prepared to deport a Sun Sea passenger to Sri Lanka, Mr. Anandasangaree said he had once argued against sending the ship's passengers back because one deportee was alleged to have been killed. He declined to step in. "I will leave it to the courts to decide," he said.
The Sun Sea arrived in August 2010 carrying 492 Tamils, a year after the Ocean Lady brought 76. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper treated both ships as security threats, and an internal border agency document told staff to "take maximum advantage" of immigration detention to discourage future arrivals.
That passenger, Kugatheeswaran Thuraisinkam, had his refugee claim rejected in 2012 and lost a pre-removal risk assessment in 2020. His current lawyer says his first lawyer never submitted evidence about what happened to passengers who had been sent back. The Federal Court blocked an attempt to deport him in 2024. When the agency tried again in April, Justice Sébastien Grammond blocked it a second time.
The judge issued a stay of removal, a temporary order that keeps a person in Canada while a legal challenge goes forward. It did not give Mr. Thuraisinkam refugee status. Justice Grammond found "serious grounds to believe that he would be exposed to a danger of torture" if he were returned, and said the risk had never been properly assessed. He drew on reports from United Nations bodies, the State Department, the British Home Office and Canada's refugee board, and found that the way Canadian officials had described the ship could lead Sri Lankan authorities to regard its passengers as suspected Tigers.
The ruling noted what had happened to the two Sun Sea passengers known to have been returned. One was tortured and later died in suspicious circumstances. The other disappeared. The first, Sathyapavan Aseervatham, said in a sworn affidavit that he was detained and tortured after Canada deported him in July 2011. He was killed in a road crash in Jaffna in 2012. His family and Tamil community leaders in Canada have said they believe he was murdered. No one has been charged.
Canadian law prohibits sending anyone to a country where they face a substantial risk of torture. The Supreme Court's leading decision on the question, issued in 2002, came in the case of another Sri Lankan Tamil, Manickavasagam Suresh. Each case is judged on its own facts, including any perceived ties to the Tigers, past detention and political activity abroad, and Justice Grammond's findings concerned Mr. Thuraisinkam alone.
Sri Lanka's government says it is changing. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake's National People's Power movement promised to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act, a 1979 law that permits lengthy detention without charge and has been used mostly against Tamils and Muslims. In September, the government published a replacement, the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill, and the Supreme Court heard 25 challenges to it in October. Journalists' groups and civil society organizations say the bill keeps many of the old powers. The cabinet spokesman, Nalinda Jayatissa, has said it is meant to protect the state while safeguarding human rights. The old law remains in force until a new one is passed.
In September, the U.N. human rights office told the Human Rights Council that torture and deaths in custody were continuing in Sri Lanka. It cited figures from the country's Human Rights Commission, which recorded 602 complaints of torture and ill-treatment in 2025 and 138 in the first four months of 2026, and said it had received at least 16 reports of surveillance targeting activists and journalists.
Canadian officials say the refugee system can keep the public's trust only if its decisions are enforced. The June briefing note says people facing removal can appeal to the refugee board, seek judicial review, apply for a risk assessment or ask for humanitarian consideration. About 30,000 people were waiting to be removed as of this spring.
Mr. Thuraisinkam used most of those avenues over 14 years. It took an emergency motion, filed days before his flight, for a judge to conclude that no one had properly examined whether he would be tortured.
Mr. Punitharasa’s flight was scheduled to leave Vancouver at about 10:20 a.m. local time on Thursday. Jaffna Monitor has not been able to confirm whether he was on board or where the flight was bound.
