What Stops ICE from Crossing into Canada to Snatch People? Very Little

Late last month, New Brunswick premier Susan Holt told media that American Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were at the Calais, Maine, border along New Brunswick. She described the situation as “very, very uncomfortable” for people with cross-border family and business ties, leaving the impression of a United States immigration crackdown spilling into neighbouring communities.

Later the same day, Holt clarified her remarks, distancing herself from claims that ICE was operating near the Canada–US line. But the episode tapped into broader anxiety about the unrestrained and often brutal tactics the agency has used against immigrant communities in blue states—an unease sharpened by reports that ICE maintains field offices in five Canadian cities. ICE’s presence in Canada is limited to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents based at US embassies and consulates. ICE told the CBC that agents investigate transnational crime with Canadian partners but carry no firearms and have no authority to arrest, raid, or enforce US immigration law here.

To better understand how Canadians should think about this relationship, given what ICE has become in the US, I decided to reach out to Kent Roach, a leading Canadian constitutional law scholar at the University of Toronto, known for his work on national security, policing, and Charter rights.

The following interview, conducted over Zoom, has been condensed and edited.

Here’s a scenario: Minnesota shares a border with Canada. Let’s say a stream of undocumented people decided to make a run for Sprague, Manitoba. Let’s say they somehow end up on the other side. ICE isn’t happy about it, and, on this day, agents decide to ignore the fact there’s a border.

It would be an invasion of Canadian sovereignty if they’re coming onto our soil and snatching people. The other thing I think Canadians should know is something I have called American extra-legalism. It’s what appears to have happened with Ryan Wedding, where they go and they snatch someone from a foreign country—arrest him and extradite him without any judicial process, extra judicially, as it were. The US Supreme Court said that’s perfectly legal under American law. The law authorizes extra-legal arrests and extradition, and a snatching victim cannot even sue. A Canadian or a British court would have a big problem exercising jurisdiction over that person; American courts don’t, and that was long before President Donald Trump stacked the US Supreme Court.

And say they did snatch someone? What happens next?

Again, I think the American courts would have no problem with it. It would be up to Canada whether we would expend our limited capital with the US in protesting it and serving a diplomatic note. There will be a political and economic price if Canada followed member of Parliament Heather McPherson’s call for all ICE out of Canada—we will find out whether the Mark Carney government is willing to pay the price. I doubt it.

Has anything like this happened before?

We can look at the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian captured by US forces in Afghanistan in 2002, at age fifteen, after a firefight in which a US soldier was killed. Canadian intelligence agents became complicit with American mistreatment of him when they went to Guantánamo Bay to question the Canadian teenager. The Supreme Court of Canada decided that Canadian officials had violated his Charter rights but, in 2010, was only prepared to issue a declaration that Khadr’s rights had been violated, essentially leaving it to the government to decide what to do by way of a diplomatic protest. Our courts have been pretty cautious with respect to forcing Canada to make a big stink to the United States. We might make a big stink, and it might have absolutely no effect, although, who knows, our tariffs could go up another 10 percent.

The Charter won’t bind ICE or other American officials, even if they are in Canada. If Canadian police knew that American officials were snatching someone from Canada, I would hope they would charge them with kidnapping or conspiracy to kidnap. Canadian police officers should have independence in deciding to lay such charges. Hopefully, that would happen in Canada even though it has not happened in Minnesota in relation to ICE’s killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

Do you find yourself in a situation where things that were once unthinkable are much more thinkable?

Absolutely. What you depict is credible. I think immigration lawyers are, as we speak, likely thinking of relitigating the Safe Third Country Agreement. Because even though the Supreme Court, in 2023, upheld the agreement—which basically says we can send a refugee claimant crossing the Canadian border back to the US and let them handle it—the cruelty demonstrated by ICE and its ultimate leader, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, means that the US is not a safe country for refugees and many others. These are really unsettling times.

I lived through 9/11, and what I’ve seen in Minnesota is more unsettling than what happened after 9/11, where, you know, there were at least debates in legislature about how much we were going to change laws in an attempt to prevent another 9/11. But Congress has really become a minor player. It’s all about executive power. And executive action, unfortunately, is often not very transparent. As we saw in the streets of Minneapolis, it can be quite brutal.

Any concerns about information-sharing arrangements between Canadian and American agencies? Could there be situations where we’re sharing intel that’s then used by ICE for its domestic arrests, detentions, deportations?

Yes. I worked on the commission of inquiry into the activities of Canadian officials with respect to Maher Arar. We know that, after 9/11, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police shared raw intelligence, without caveats, with the American authorities, and that that played a role in Arar’s extraordinary rendition to Syria, where he was tortured. As a result of Arar and others, we have agencies like the National Security Intelligence Review Agency, which, hopefully, is keeping a pretty close eye on what information and other co-operation we’re having with American agencies, including ICE. Canadians need to be vigilant that we’re not going to repeat those mistakes. Because, frankly, as bad as some of the things the George W. Bush administration did after 9/11 were, it looks relatively benign compared to what the Trump administration is prepared to do.

How should we feel about Homeland Security Investigations—ICE’s law enforcement component—conducting work on Canadian soil with a mandate to stop crime “before it reaches the United States”?

We need to know more about the number and training of Homeland Security investigators, who are part of ICE, and are present in five Canadian cities. What are their qualifications? ICE says that they are investigating “terrorists” in Canada who may attack the United States, but how do they define terrorism? High officials in the Trump administration called Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists.” Is that ICE’s definition of terrorism? Is ICE working on their own in Canada or in concert with Canadian officials? Are Canadian officials making sure that they obey Canadian laws? We need to be concerned about repeating the mistakes of the Arar era in terms of Canadian complicity in American misconduct.

Does it worry you?

All of it worries me. If I was an American, ICE would be my number one problem. I wouldn’t sleep at night. It’s an undisciplined private army with frankly fascistic overtones. But as a Canadian, I can’t ignore ICE either. Its budget has just been dramatically expanded. Under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, ICE now has $85 billion. It’s the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the US. Just one problem: it’s not really a law enforcement agency at all. What its officers are doing in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Portland is something ICE officers weren’t really trained to do. And it’s pretty obvious they’re not doing it very well.

But any accountability is also gone. Look at the Good and Pretti killings. There’s not even a decent, transparent investigation. If that happened in Canada, I would hope that the various Special Investigations Units most provinces have would at least make sure the scene was preserved and that there was an investigation. Instead, you have J. D. Vance saying, agents—they’re absolutely immune. That’s simply false. And as a graduate of Yale Law School, he should know better.

But this is the contradiction at the heart of it. The US wraps itself in the language of states’ rights, but ICE looks an awful lot like federal authoritarianism. And when that mindset thinks it sees a national security breach, that affects us too. I mean, “Blame Canada” happened in the past, even with people like Hillary Clinton, who tried to blame Canada for 9/11. It wasn’t true. But truth matters less today than ever.

Is it also the unpredictability of what can happen when an agency grows that big and unrestrained?

I think a lot of Canadians worry about an American invasion. Would ICE be at the forefront? Maybe it would, because it seems to have the sort of people the Trump administration wants.

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I followed the Conservative convention, and it’s interesting how much the right in Canada appears excited by the idea of an ICE-like organization here. There was even talk of more aggressive deportations.

I think we need to be very attentive to the language our politicians use. I really hope they don’t get into calling people “illegals” or “the worst of the worst.” Once that kind of talk gets out there, and gets legitimized, the battle is lost. When you dehumanize people, and especially non-citizens, without paying any consequences, it becomes very appealing to use such language and people’s fears about crime and immigration as wedge issues. So that concerns me. History tells us it does not end well. But the Liberal government is also not immune.

What do you mean?

The Canadian Border Services Agency is an outgrowth of 9/11, much like the Department of Homeland Security. But until recently, the CBSA—about 8,000 agents at the border, with guns—had no agency to handle complaints about them or to review their activities. Well, there is now new legislation that gives the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP jurisdiction over CBSA. But one big problem: the federal government has left that commission without a chair or any other cabinet-appointed members for all of 2025. No appointments yet in 2026. That is absolutely shocking. It is potentially dangerous.

Like a lot of Canadians, I’m always going between two poles. One is, thank goodness we’re not the fifty-first state. If it comes to it, I hope I would fight for my country. But at the other time, I’m increasingly critical of any smug and complacent sense of Canadian exceptionalism, which maintains that problems south of the border will always remain south of the border. It’s a pretty permeable border, and we all live in increasingly dangerous times.

Is this a situation where I’m calling you to talk about ICE and you’re thinking, Yeah, we could talk about ICE, but we have problems here.

Oh yes. Just this January, we’ve seen two First Nations people killed by the RCMP, which is really not the right institution to be policing Indigenous communities. Ever since Murray Sinclair did the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba in 1991, it should have been crystal clear to every Canadian that Canadian policing is failing and is dangerous for Indigenous people. It’s failing them as victims. It’s failing them as suspects, and I think we really need to invest heavily in Indigenous methods of policing and peacekeeping, but again, that’s going to require us to relinquish a degree of colonial control that we’ve not been willing to do.

So, everyone is talking about Alex Pretti and Renée Good, and they absolutely should be. But what about Bronson Paul and Darrell Augustine? They’re just as dead as Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti. Bruce Springsteen isn’t likely to write a song about them, but someone should.