'We had to escape': Growing number of Somalis face possible deportation over false documents, advocates say

Kaif Ali is only 23, but she's spent the last five years putting her life back together — starting with escaping war in Somalia, to putting her faith in a smuggler to find safety, to landing in Canada and learning English, studying nursing and becoming a front-line health-care worker. 

Now the life she's built could soon fall apart — again.

That's because the Canadian government now claims Ali is not, in fact, Somali. And she's not alone.

Ali, a Toronto resident, told CBC News she escaped Somalia with her younger sister after her father and older sister were targeted and killed. The two paid a smuggler, who arranged for them to flee with fake Kenyan passports. It's a choice she says she was forced to make in order to get to safety.

"Nobody just wakes up one day and they're like, 'Oh, I'm running away from the country,'" Ali said. "We're escaping in a short period of time. Something happens and, within a month or two months, you're in hiding."

"You don't have that leisure time to be able to prepare for that identity document... I would have lost my life and my sister's life if I had stayed there any longer," she said. "We had to escape."

Now, Ali is one of a growing number of Somalis who, advocates say, have had their refugee claims invalidated by the federal government because of those fraudulent documents.

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) says 157 people have been served with "vacate hearings" since 2019 — a move to void their protections as a refugee claimants from Somalia. Ali and others believe the actual number is in the hundreds.

From 2015-19, the number of vacate notices against those claiming asylum from Somalia averaged 19 each year. In 2020, there were 61. A year later, there were 77. 

Canada says Ali is Kenyan, that her refugee claim is therefore false and that she could be deported unless she successfully appeals. Ali says she and many others over the years openly told immigration officials when they arrived that their documents were false. 

Her last hope to stay here rests on an appeal on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. 

"If I go back to Somalia, I will die."

In 1991, Somalia's government collapsed with the outbreak of civil war and it has been widely considered a failed state since. Canada is one of a number of countries that does not consider Somali passports valid for the "purpose of traveling to Canada." The same is true of the U.K. and Germany, meaning those who try to find safety are often forced to falsify their documents. Many who have escaped the war over the past three decades haven't had so much as a birth certificate, Ali says. 

For many that means, as difficult as it's been to survive the war, escaping it can be even harder.