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On 12 August 2026, Canada Border Services Agency officers attended a protest in northeast Calgary and checked the immigration status of the people taking part. Since then the commentary accounts and social media have been busy with opinions, and a few clients have asked me about it as well. The same questions keep coming up. Was that a raid. Was it legal. Does the Charter not protect people who are protesting. Did IRCC or CBSA do something wrong.

I do have a view on the CBSA Calgary protest and I will give it below. Before that, the facts need dissecting, because a fair amount of what is circulating does not match the record or the law. This article sets out what happened, what the law provides, and what genuinely assists the people affected.

What happened

The protest began on 24 July 2026 at Saddletowne Circle in northeast Calgary. It continued for roughly three weeks and included a rotating hunger strike from about the tenth day. Those taking part were largely Punjabi international graduates whose post-graduation work permit applications had been refused.

On 12 August, CBSA officers attended the site and verified the immigration status of twenty people. Twelve were identified as possibly inadmissible and were asked to attend a CBSA office later the same day for a follow-up interview. CBSA declined further comment, citing the Privacy Act. The protest concluded within approximately two days.

Why the permits were refused

Several hundred graduates in Alberta, predominantly from Portage College, received PGWP refusals in mid 2026. Reported figures vary widely and I would not take any at face value, since everyone describing this has a position. The law is the neutral lens here. The refusals turn on a single point: whether the programs were non-credit continuing education programs that do not lead to a degree, diploma or certificate.

IRCC’s position is that nothing changed. It states that the credential requirement is longstanding, that its June 2026 website update clarified existing guidance rather than altering it, and that non-credit programs have never qualified. The college’s position, in its own public statement, is that its understanding was that students enrolled in non-credit public-private partnership programs before 15 May 2024 would be eligible. The students say they were told they would qualify, by the college and by recruiters overseas, and paid approximately thirty-two thousand dollars each in tuition.

That disagreement is now before the Federal Court, where a Calgary lawyer acts for a number of the affected graduates. I will not comment on the merits of a live proceeding. What follows is the law that will govern it.

Was the CBSA Calgary protest action lawful?

On the facts as reported, yes, and in my assessment the question is not a close one.

Begin with status. A PGWP applicant who applied before their study permit expired holds maintained status while the application is pending. The moment the application is refused, that ends. There is no grace period. From that moment the person is inadmissible under section 41 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act for failing to comply with the Act, and is reportable under section 44.

On jurisdiction, there is a claim in wide circulation that CBSA’s powers are confined to ports of entry. That is incorrect, and CBSA says so in its own published material. It operates a national Inland Enforcement Program handling in excess of 220,000 files, in which officers prepare inadmissibility reports, conduct interviews, and arrest with or without a warrant.

On location, section 55 of the Act permits arrest without a warrant of a foreign national where an officer has reasonable grounds to believe the person is inadmissible and is either a danger to the public or unlikely to appear, or where the officer is not satisfied as to identity. In a public place an officer may approach a person and ask questions. Entry into a private dwelling to effect an arrest is an entirely different matter and, absent consent or exigent circumstances, requires a warrant, following the constitutional baseline established in R v Feeney, [1997] 2 SCR 13. A public plaza engages none of the dwelling protections, and on the reported facts no dwelling was entered and no arrest was made.

If you received a notice to attend

A notice to attend is an administrative summons, not an arrest, and it carries no criminal consequence. It does carry a serious practical one. Failure to appear is what converts an administrative process into a Canada-wide arrest warrant.Attend. Take a representative if you can arrange one. Do not treat the appointment as optional, and do not treat it as something that can be avoided by staying away.

Does the Charter protect a person because they were protesting?

In part, and not in the manner most people expect.

Sections 2(b) and 2(c) of the Charter, freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly, apply to “everyone”. They are not confined to citizens. A foreign national physically present in Canada holds them.

What does not follow is that exercising them suspends the operation of immigration law. No doctrine in Canadian law renders a person immune from enforcement by reason of participation in a protest. The inadmissibility arises from the absence of status, not from the expression. In Suresh v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2002 SCC 1, challenges under sections 2(b) and 2(d) to the security inadmissibility provisions were unsuccessful. Section 2 arguments are largely absent from the immigration enforcement jurisprudence generally.

The remaining Charter provisions do not carry matters much further. Singh v Minister of Employment and Immigration, [1985] 1 SCR 177 establishes that section 7 applies to non-citizens present in Canada. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration) v Chiarelli, [1992] 1 SCR 711 holds that removal of a non-citizen does not of itself engage liberty and security interests, although the process must be fair. Charkaoui v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2007 SCC 9 confirms that features associated with removal, and detention in particular, do engage section 7. Applied here, a status check and a notice to attend engage section 7 weakly if at all. Detention would have presented a different question, and there was none.

Equality arguments encounter Chiarelli as well. Because the Charter itself contemplates differential treatment of citizens and non-citizens through the section 6 mobility rights, a removal scheme applying only to non-citizens is not section 15 discrimination.

One argument is available in theory: abuse of process, namely that a discretionary enforcement decision was made for an improper purpose. The threshold is high, the burden rests on the applicant, and I was unable to locate a single Canadian decision in which it succeeded against enforcement directed at protesters. It should be regarded as untested rather than as an established rule.

Sensitive locations: what the United States had, and what Canada has

Here’s the plain background, and I have tried to simplify the best I could.

A sensitive locations rule is a policy that tells immigration officers to stay away from certain kinds of places, schools, hospitals, churches, protests, unless something serious is going on. The United States had one for years. A lot of people assume Canada has the same thing. Canada does not, and the American rule is no longer what it was either.

Here is how the American version ran.

It began in 2011. ICE Directive 10029.2, “Enforcement Actions at or Focused on Sensitive Locations”, dated 24 October 2011, told officers to avoid enforcement at schools, hospitals, places of worship, funerals and weddings, and public demonstrations. Customs and Border Protection issued a matching memorandum in January 2013.

It got wider in 2021. “Guidelines for Enforcement Actions in or near Protected Areas”, signed by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on 27 October 2021, replaced both. It added childcare centres, shelters, food banks and disaster response sites, and extended the caution to places near those locations.

It was cancelled in 2025. On 20 January 2025 Acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman rescinded the 2021 guidance in full. His memorandum declined to set bright line rules and told officers to use their discretion instead. Because the 2021 memorandum had already replaced the 2011 and 2013 documents, cancelling it revived nothing. A narrower ICE memorandum of 31 January 2025 still names schools, hospitals, houses of worship and active demonstrations, but approval now sits with local supervisors and can be given verbally.

Two things about all of that matter, and both are easy to miss.

• First, none of these documents ever gave anyone a right. Each one said in terms that it created no rights, substantive or procedural, enforceable by any person. They were instructions to staff. Someone arrested at a school could not sue over a breach of the policy.
• Second, whatever protection exists in the United States today came from courts rather than policy, and it covers only the people who went to court. In Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v United States Department of Homeland Security, No. 8:25-cv-00243 (D. Md.), a group of congregations obtained a preliminary injunction, which the Fourth Circuit affirmed on 18 August 2026. It protects their own facilities and nobody else’s. A parallel case, Mennonite Church USA v United States Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:25-cv-00403 (D.D.C.), was refused an injunction on standing grounds in April 2025. Schools have so far obtained nothing.

Now in context of Canada, and I would like to be precise because I have seen this overstated in both directions.

No statute or regulation restricts CBSA enforcement by location. Section 55 of the Act is written purely in terms of grounds and belief. It says nothing about where an officer may act.

Canada is not a complete blank, though. In its response to the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, tabled 30 May 2007, the Government of Canada said that “although there is no legal impediment to prevent the CBSA from entering a place of worship to remove someone, the CBSA has traditionally not done so as a matter of policy”. The same response says CBSA will enter schools only for national security, serious criminality, or family reunification at the request of a parent, guardian or school official. CBSA’s removals manual, ENF 10, contains a section headed “Procedure: Sanctuary in places of worship”.

Should it have happened?

This is a separate question from whether it was lawful, and what follows is my opinion rather than a statement of law.

The case for CBSA is straightforward. The agency is under no duty to look away. Where a group publicly and continuously announces that its members have no status, it is difficult to articulate a principle requiring the agency charged with enforcement to disregard it, and any such principle would amount to protest conferring practical immunity.

The case against concerns cost. Even lawful enforcement at a protest produces a chilling effect that outlasts the protest itself. The message conveyed to every out-of-status person in Canada is that assembling publicly to seek redress carries personal risk. That is significant, because these are people with very few other means. They cannot vote, they frequently cannot afford counsel, and the Federal Court is slow and expensive. It is worth noting that a comparable encampment continued outside a CBSA office in Brampton for more than one hundred days in 2024 without any reported status verification operation at the site.

My own view is that the operation was lawful, entirely foreseeable, and nevertheless a poor exercise of judgement. Not because CBSA lacked the power, but because nothing required that power to be exercised on the nineteenth day of a protest and the ninth of a hunger strike. Discretion exists so that it may be declined. Others will reasonably disagree, and the foreseeability point carries real weight. Counsel for the graduates observed publicly that a large group of undocumented people publicly identifying themselves as such was an obvious exposure.

Does not having known of the ineligibility assist a person legally?

In my opinion, the facts may not be very comforting.

The closest authority on these facts is Komljenovic v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2018 FC 460, Court file IMM-704-17, decided 27 April 2018. The applicant was refused a post graduation work permit because the institution she had attended did not meet the program requirements. Her evidence was that both her educational institution and IRCC had told her that her institution and her program were suitable for a PGWP. The Court accepted that she had shown adequate due diligence. Her application for judicial review was dismissed anyway, because the doctrine of legitimate expectations could not displace Parliament’s clearly expressed intent.

The reason it failed is doctrinal and settled already. The doctrine of legitimate expectations in Canada is procedural only. Agraira v Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness), 2013 SCC 36 requires any representation to be clear, unambiguous and unqualified, and holds at paragraph 97 that the doctrine cannot give rise to substantive rights. Canada (Attorney General) v Mavi, 2011 SCC 30 at paragraph 68 adds that the representation must be within the official’s authority, procedural in nature, and not in conflict with a statutory duty. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Dela Fuente, 2006 FCA 186 states the position plainly in the immigration context at paragraph 19: the doctrine “does not create substantive rights and cannot be used to counter Parliament’s clearly expressed intent”. The same conclusion was reached in the PGWP context in Saloni v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2021 FC 474 and Kaura v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2022 FC 51.

One narrow reservation exists. In Mount Sinai Hospital Center v Quebec (Minister of Health and Social Services), 2001 SCC 41, Binnie J left open the possibility that public law promissory estoppel, a distinct and more demanding doctrine, might afford substantive relief in narrow circumstances, and the majority declined to decide the point. Even that is expressly subject to yielding to an overriding public interest expressed in the legislation. On estoppel against the Crown generally, Immeubles Jacques Robitaille inc v Québec (City), 2014 SCC 34 holds that estoppel “must yield to an overriding public interest and may not be invoked to prevent the application of an express legislative provision”.

A further question arises: whether an officer could simply have exercised discretion and issued the permit. The answer is no. Nookala v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2016 FC 1019 holds that the PGWP program document establishes criteria that must be satisfied and that “nothing in the document confers any discretion on immigration officers to modify or waive” them. Brown v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2018 FC 452 sets out the architecture, namely that the Minister may establish the policy under subparagraph 205(c)(ii) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations and that the resulting eligibility criteria are mandatory. Osahor v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2017 FC 666 rejected both a fettering argument and a legitimate expectations argument on comparable facts.

Reference is also made to the students supplied with fraudulent college acceptance letters by agents overseas, as though that line of cases assists. It does not. In Singh v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2023 FC 747 the Immigration Division accepted that the applicant honestly believed he was not misrepresenting anything, and the application nevertheless failed, because the belief was not objectively reasonable and because a person is responsible in law for representations made by an agent on their behalf. Kaur v Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness), 2023 FC 87 and Kumari v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2024 FC 1256 follow the same pattern.

The arguments that remain available

Four, none of which offers a cohort-wide solution.

1. The GCMS notes, and whether extrinsic evidence was used

Start with the general rule, because it is not obvious. An officer does not always have to warn you before refusing. Where the problem is simply that you do not meet a published requirement, the officer can refuse without asking you anything first.

Two cases show how firmly that applies.

In Ntamag v Canada (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship), 2020 FC 40, Associate Chief Justice Gagné dealt with a student whose permit expired on 30 November 2018. She completed her studies and received confirmation on 4 December 2018, but waited until 16 February 2019 to apply to change her status to visitor, relying on the ninety day restoration window in section 182 of the Regulations. The officer refused. She argued she was entitled to a fairness letter or an interview before that happened. The Court disagreed at paragraph 9, holding that the officer’s concerns arose directly from the requirements of the Regulations, both the proof of funds and departure requirements in section 179 and her confusion between a fresh application and restoration of an existing status, so the officer was under no obligation to issue a fairness letter or conduct an examination.

In Odeseye v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 FC 93, Justice Gleeson dealt with a Nigerian graduate who applied to restore a lapsed study permit and for a PGWP. The officer refused on 2 March 2023 because she had not maintained full-time student status during each academic session, which the PGWP Program Delivery Instructions require. At paragraph 14 the Court held that there was no breach of procedural fairness, because “the Officer’s concerns arose directly from the requirements of the PGWP-PDI; as such, the Officer had no obligation to issue a procedural fairness letter or offer to interview the Applicant”. The application was dismissed.

Now the line, and this is where the Portage cases may differ.

Bui v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2019 FC 440 sets out both sides of it. Justice LeBlanc was dealing with a start-up business class refusal, where the officer found the applicant had entered a commitment with an incubator mainly to acquire status rather than to run a business. At paragraph 26 the Court confirmed that the fairness owed to a visa applicant sits at the lower end of the spectrum. But paragraph 27 is the important one. Fairness still requires that an applicant be told about, and given a chance to answer, perceived material inconsistencies, credibility concerns, accuracy or authenticity concerns, or an officer’s reliance on extrinsic evidence. Only at paragraph 28 does the Court add that where the concern arises directly from the requirements of the Act or the regulations, the officer is not normally obliged to say anything first.

Extrinsic evidence means information the officer obtained from somewhere other than your own application, which you never saw and never had a chance to answer.

That is why the notes matter here. If the officers simply looked at the transcripts and completion documents on file and concluded the programs were non-credit, Odeseye and Ntamag apply and no fairness letter was owed. If instead the officers contacted Portage College and relied on what the college told them about how these programs were structured, that is extrinsic evidence under Bui at paragraph 27, the applicant never saw it, and the position is materially different.

Nobody can know which of those happened without the GCMS notes. That is why obtaining them is the first step, before any other argument is chosen.

2. Individual unreasonableness

This is not an argument that the rule is unfair. That will fail. It is an argument that this particular officer’s reasons do not hold together, or that the officer ignored something in the record.

Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65 sets the framework. A decision must be justified in relation to the factual and legal constraints bearing on it, at paragraph 99, and a decision that fundamentally misapprehends or fails to account for the evidence before it may be unreasonable, at paragraphs 125 to 128. Vavilov also raises the bar where the stakes are high. At paragraphs 133 to 135 the Court held that where the impact of a decision on an individual’s rights and interests is severe, the reasons must reflect the stakes. That principle of responsive justification is worth remembering here, because losing your status and your ability to work is a severe impact by any measure.

Pepa v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 SCC 21 is the most recent word on how that review is conducted. At paragraph 47 the Court confirmed that a decision must be read holistically and contextually, in light of the evidence, the submissions and the circumstances in which it was made. At paragraph 48 it warned that a reviewing court must not build its own yardstick and then measure the officer’s decision against it. That second point cuts against applicants as much as for them, and it is why a bare disagreement with the outcome goes nowhere.

Mehmi v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2021 FC 1012 shows what a winning version looks like on PGWP facts. Mr Mehmi, a citizen of India, was refused a post graduation work permit on 6 May 2020 on the basis that he did not hold a valid study permit at the time he applied, and his restoration application was then refused as a consequence of that refusal. Justice Ahmed found the officer had misread the Program Delivery Instructions. The instructions required only that the applicant had held a valid study permit within the 180 days before applying, not that he hold one on the day he applied. At paragraph 43 the Court put it bluntly: the officer “correctly cites the PDI, yet their conclusion clearly contradicts those guidelines”. The decision did not follow a rational chain of analysis, and judicial review was granted.

What that produces is worth being clear about. Mr Mehmi did not walk away with a permit. He walked away with the refusal set aside and the file sent back for a fresh decision by a different officer. That is the realistic ceiling on this argument.

3. Temporary resident permits

Section 24 exists precisely to soften harsh outcomes like these. As the Federal Court put it in Yarimdag, the purpose of a temporary resident permit “is to mitigate harsh consequences that may arise from a strict application of the IRPA”.

Yarimdag v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 FC 1158 is close to this situation. Ms Yarimdag, a citizen of Türkiye, came to Canada on a study permit in 2017, extended it twice, and obtained a post graduation work permit valid to 17 February 2021. Before it expired she asked her immigration consultant to file an extension. The consultant told her it had been filed on time. She followed up repeatedly, and eventually the consultant stopped responding altogether. She later discovered that her permanent residence application had been rejected in August 2020 and that the PGWP extension had never been filed at all. Her status lapsed. Two lawyers then tried and failed to restore it, and a temporary resident permit application was refused on 12 February 2024.

What makes the case useful is the officer’s own wording. The officer accepted that the circumstances by which she fell out of status were “unfortunate”, but said the onus was on her to maintain her status, that she “should have been more keen on finding out the status of her applications”, and gave the whole explanation “little positive weight”. Justice granted judicial review, set the decision aside and sent it to a different officer.

Thind v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2022 FC 1644 makes the same point from a different direction. Mr Thind, a citizen of India then aged thirty-nine, had a long and tangled status history, and by 2020 could not leave Canada to regularise his status because of pandemic travel restrictions. His temporary resident permit application was refused on 15 September 2021 on the basis that there was insufficient evidence of compelling reasons. The Court held the decision unreasonable because it “fails to properly consider pivotal evidence in the Applicant’s record, resulting in gaps in the reasoning”, granted judicial review and remitted the matter to another officer.

The lesson from both is narrow but real. Where an applicant puts forward a genuine explanation for how their status was lost, an officer cannot simply note that the onus was on the applicant and move on. The explanation has to be engaged with. What that wins, in both cases, was a fresh decision by a different officer. A permit of this kind is not a work permit either, but it preserves status while other avenues are pursued.

4. Interpretation of the criteria themselves

The only argument capable of delivering the permit is that these students were eligible on a correct reading of the criteria as they stood, rather than that they should be excused for having been ineligible.

Kohli v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2026 FC 381 is the current authority on why that argument is open at all. Mr Kohli had applied to restore his temporary resident status, and the officer refused on the basis that restoration could not be used to obtain worker status he had never previously held. He argued the officer’s reading of subsection 182(1) of the Regulations was inconsistent with the Court’s own jurisprudence and therefore unreasonable. At paragraph 11 Justice Sadrehashemi held that administrative policy “does not, however, end the inquiry as to whether the contested provision is consistent with the modern principle of statutory interpretation”, citing Zeifmans LLP v Canada, 2022 FCA 160 at paragraph 12. Policy does, she added, provide “evidence of general practice and context which can be used in statutory interpretation”.

Be clear about what that means. It does not mean the Program Delivery Instructions can be ignored. It means they are not self-validating. If the instructions do not correctly reflect what the Regulations require, the instructions are not the last word.

It is also worth saying plainly that Mr Kohli lost. His application for judicial review was dismissed. The principle is sound and the door is open, but nobody should read this as an easy route.

If you are affected

Common questions

Written by Dikshit Soni, Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant, licence R536007, SAAB Immigration Services Inc., Kitchener and Mississauga. This is general commentary on public events and on Canadian immigration law. It is not legal advice, and it is not a comment on the merits of any proceeding presently before the Federal Court. The appropriate course of action depends entirely on the facts of an individual file. Statutory and case references are current to August 2026.