A joint task force, made up of senior immigration and border security officials, will probe individual cases of international students who fell victim to a fraudulent acceptance letters scam, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser told media Wednesday.
Any pending removal orders against students will be halted while individual cases are examined.
Speaking to reporters at Parliament Hill ahead of question period on Wednesday, Fraser said the officials from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) will be “likely at the ADM (assistant deputy minister) level.”
Members of both agencies will have their work cut out for them, with reports of potentially hundreds of international students impacted.
Fraser said CBSA will identify the individuals who have removal orders against them for entering Canada on fake admission letters, allegedly fraudulently supplied without their knowledge by an immigration consultant in India.
IRCC members will dig into their files to determine whether they are victims or accomplices in the scam.
“This task force will be required to carry out a case-by-case analysis of every individual case that is the subject of a removal order on the basis of fraudulent letters of acceptance,” Fraser said.
“In the interim, and this is particularly important for students who find themselves in this position, any pending removals will be halted and there will be a temporary permission to stay over the course of this period of consideration.”
According to a press release issued last week by advocates on behalf of the students, those now facing deportation orders came to Canada in 2017 and 2018 on student permits.
The press release says the students were issued “fake college admission letters drafted by their immigration consultants, namely a Jalandhar-based consultant named Brijesh Mishra.”
“After landing in Canada, the consultants told students that they could not enroll in that particular college for various reasons, such as deferral or unavailability of seats. The students were told to change colleges, which they did in order to begin their studies,” the press release states.
“Over the last five to six years, most of the students have completed their studies, entered the workforce, started families and have applied for permanent residency (PR). They were unaware of the fake offer letters until they began applying for PR.”
Fraser said the Canadian government will make sure that innocent victims of the scam are not penalized.
“The task force will consider particular factors, including whether a person completed their study, including their level of knowledge of any fraudulent scheme that may have underpinned their application,” he said.
“And those who are found not to have had knowledge and have been found to have been genuine applicants to the student program will be given permission to stay in Canada for a period of a few years, so they can either complete their studies or potentially remain in Canada and work over the next few years.”
Mishra, the immigration consultant cited in the press release, allegedly charged these students thousands of dollars and is said to be behind the fake admission letters. Mishra’s company is now closed and he has reportedly not been seen for several months.
While some sections of the Indian media reported that the number of international students who fell victim to this scam was close to 700, Fraser said the number was “in the dozens, not hundreds.”
He added, however, that the number of bad-faith actors trying to take advantage of Canada’s immigration system was “in the thousands.”
He said this was why the Canadian government was working to establish a stronger system to better detect fraud when it comes to letters of acceptance.