A Muslim man with a bag and a bike snuck across the U.S. border into Canada. This is his story

‘Everything was hurting so bad’

(CBC Canada) The biting cold, the tired limbs, the feelings of despair — all those memories came flooding back to Habib Zahori as he read the story of two Ghanaian men who recently risked their lives to sneak into Canada.

They had trudged for hours through waist-deep snowfields in -18 C temperatures until they reached an unguarded border. Cold and disoriented, they managed to slip across, but it was several hours before they were able to flag down a truck driver, who called 911.

Both ended up losing fingers due to severe frostbite. According to one of the men, if it hadn’t been for that driver, “we would have died in that snow.”

Zahori knows that sense of desperation. Just over a year ago, he made a similarly treacherous winter journey through the woods and across the border — partly by foot, partly by bicycle.

“My fingers had gone numb,” Zahori recalls. “My nose, my cheeks, my lips, my entire face — everything had gone numb. And my thighs and knees, everything was hurting so bad. And I was tired, and I was thirsty.”

What makes these dramatic tales so strange is that these men weren’t coming from a country ravaged by war, civil strife, famine or disease.

They were fleeing the United States.

Zahori and the others had first landed there after escaping troubles in their home countries. But they ended up illegally crossing the world’s largest undefended border in the hopes that Canada would provide the refuge they sought.

These dangerous hikes into Canada seem to be spiking.

Some may find that a peculiar scenario – refugee claimants fleeing a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world and one that likes to cast itself as a beacon of freedom.

But concerns about the political climate and just how welcoming the U.S. will be to refugees under the Trump administration has prompted many to consider going north — even if it means illegally.

And these dangerous hikes into Canada seem to be spiking, at least in some parts of the border.

The sparsely populated stretch of the border that separates the town of Emerson, Man., and its surroundings from neighbouring North Dakota has become a magnet for those seeking to claim refugee status and may be a gauge of the size of the problem. In recent weeks, dozens more have crossed the porous border.

According to figures provided by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), in the last three years, Emerson has seen a fivefold increase in illegal crossings by refugees – from 68 in 2013 to more than 400 between April and December 2016.

On the West Coast, the number of crossings has doubled, and in Quebec, it has more than quadrupled.

Many asylum seekers choose the U.S. over Canada — initially, at least — because there are more direct flights, and presumably because of its historical reputation as a place of refuge.

With my Muslim name, coming from a Muslim country, I didn’t want to get into any type of problems with Americans.’

Some people have straightforward reasons for then wanting to get into Canada – their refugee applications have been denied in the U.S., and they see the neighbour to the north as their last hope.

Others fear the current political climate stateside.

“With my Muslim name, coming from a Muslim country, I didn’t want to get into any type of problems with Americans,” says Zahori.

With President Trump having recently signed an executive order that bans refugees from entering the country for four months, bans Syrians indefinitely and blocks travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, those concerns — and the number of people seeking sanctuary in Canada — are only likely to increase.

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