As U.S. politics heat up, Canada opens the door wider for American asylum seekers

The swift moves by the Trump administration to implement its program to reshape the United States has rattled many Americans. While an estimated seven million took to the streets during the No Kings Protest this month to push back on Trump’s authoritarian policies and flooding US cities with militarized immigration agents to carry out mass deportation raids some are just packing up and leaving.

Rebecca Purdy, a spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) confirmed to The Hub that Americans are now the second-largest group of asylum seekers in Canada after refugees from Haiti. The number of US citizens filing claims for asylum reached 745 by the end of June according to a dataset from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada that was provided to the outlet.

Reuters reported a significantly smaller number of refugee claims by Americans in Canada of 245 based on data published by Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board, but that is still more than all of 2024 in the first half of the year and the highest number since 2019.

Why are Americans seeking refuge in Canada?

The data provided to Reuters did not list the reasons that US citizens have given for seeking asylum in Canada. However, lawyers that spoke to the news agency said that they are hearing from more trans Americans looking for a safer place to live as protections in the US are rolled back.

The Hub notes that some of the Americans seeking asylum in Canada may be the US-born children of parents from other nationalities. They maybe trying to escape the ongoing immigration crackdown across the United States which has resulted in over two million immigrants being deported or self-deporting according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“One possibility [is when] an asylum seeker, let’s say from Venezuela, has spent some time in the US and has one or two US-born children and [flees with them to Canada], they count as US asylum seekers. So, you have one Venezuelan and two US citizens. In the past, that has accounted for most of the US asylum seekers in the system,” explained Maureen Silcoff, a Toronto-based refugee lawyer, speaking to The Hub.

However, Americans aren’t just leaving because of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. Academics are also choosing to abandon the US as Trump and his allies try to strongarm Universities into committing to his government’s political priorities on their campuses or lose their funding.

The capitulation of institutions like Columbia University have the likes of Jason Stanley packing their bags. “I believe in the values of academic freedom and defending democratic institutions. Not the idea that the proper response to authoritarians is to hide and hope you’re not next,” the Yale philosophy professor told the Financial Times.

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