Canada has been trying to deport Franklin Godwin since 2000 when the former refugee was declared a danger to the public for his lengthy criminal convictions of drug offences and fraud.Twice, in 2003 and 2005, Canada Border Services Agency escorted the 54-year-old Toronto man to Liberia, where he said he ran away from due to political persecution by a dictatorial regime — a claim his successful asylum bid in 1994 was based on. Twice, he was refused item because officials didn’t believe he’s from there.Now, years after Canadian officials’ unchallenged belief that the man was a Liberian, the border agency claims Godwin is actually from Nigeria, partially based on DNA searches against ancestry websites — a controversial tool recently adopted to determine the identity of longer-term detainees.“The methodology of the DNA search is very suspect,” said Subodh Bharati, who represents Godwin through the Osgoode Hall legal clinic. “I have family in India but I was born in Canada. Does it mean that I’m lying? Does it mean that I’m not Canadian now? This smells of discrimination.”According to immigration lawyers, border officials have collected DNA samples from at least three immigration detainees in the past year in their attempts to identify their ethnicity, track down relatives and establish nationality in order to remove these individuals from Canada.“As a person, I’m concerned about people using these (ancestry) sites to track down missing family members and family history not knowing their DNA might be used for law enforcement purposes,” noted Jared Will, who represents the other two detainees.In Godwin’s case, border officials got him to sign consent for a DNA swab against databases on Familytree.com and Ancestry.com, and identified and contacted two of the matches, both of Nigerian descent, believed to be his third and fifth cousins, in the United Kingdom.“CBSA uses DNA te ...
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