Around 100 protesters descended upon the offices of an architecture firm bidding to design a new immigration detention centre in Laval.

Lemay is one of several firms competing for two multi-million dollar contracts by the Canada Border Services Agency to design the holding facility, which is set to open by 2021.

The centre will house people who have been detained for immigration-related reasons, most of them because they do not have verifiable identity documents or are deemed flight risks. Over the past six years, close to 45,000 have been detained in Canada under such circumstances.

Plans for the centre were announced by the federal government in 2016, as a part of the Liberals' plans to create "a fairer and more humane immigration-detention system." Another new holding centre will be constructed in British Columbia.

The protesters, who marched from Place-Saint-Henri métro station to Lemay's head office on St. Jacques Street, carried signs with the names of people who have been deported from Canada in recent years, chanting slogans like "prisons are cages".

Despite Lemay's plans for the site being described as "aesthetically pleasing" and featuring extensive foliage, the demonstrators called it a prison.

“I think people are glued to their screens watching Trump fill up the migrant prisons there and they don’t realize that there’s a migrant prison in our backyard here,” organizer David Zinman said to CTV.