Tamil migrant lawyers face money crunch

The organization that provides legal aid in B.C. says it’s running out of money in its efforts to represent the Tamil migrants who arrived in August.

“The society’s immigration funding is limited,” Legal Services Society manager Rod Holloway said in a letter Thursday to lawyers who have been representing the migrants.

“The arrival of … Tamils who are currently detained has placed us in a position where funding their detention reviews … will, very shortly, exhaust our current resources allocated to immigration matters.”

Most of the 492 migrants who arrived on Vancouver Island on Aug. 13 aboard the MV Sun Sea remain in detention in the Vancouver area.

All of the migrants have applied for refugee status, claiming their lives are in danger or that they suffer extreme discrimination as an ethnic minority in their native Sri Lanka.

The funding crunch could leave the migrants without legal representation at detention hearings.

“The Legal Services Society will be considering this issue and may be required to restrict services … to ensure the society remains within budget,” Holloway said in the letter.

Identities at issue

The primary issue in the hearings is the difficulty in establishing each migrant’s identity to the satisfaction of the Canada Border Services Agency.

The CBSA is concerned that some migrants could be members of the Tamil Tigers, an organization banned in Canada as being terrorist.

The CBSA also is bearing extraordinary expenses by keeping the migrants in detention.

The Immigration Review Board said the CBSA is being charged more than $88,000 a day — about $200 per migrant — for a total of more than $3 million for their 34 days of incarceration so far.

Four of the migrants — a mother and her three children — have been given conditional release.

Four other women and five children were about to be released when the federal government filed to block their release, CBC reports.