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“Canada won’t give everyone permission to stay here?” asked Marie, surprised. “Will Canada send people back to Haiti?”

The same questions, or similar, are being asked by thousands of other asylum seekers who have fled across the border into Canada from the United States in recent weeks.

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In Cornwall, Ont., where a rapidly built tent city is ready to house 500 people, many of the roughly 300 asylum seekers staying at the NAV Centre say the same thing: U.S. President Donald Trump may not want them anymore, but Canada surely does. Canada is welcoming, friendly, a good home.

But, despite their certainty, they now find themselves in a community and a country that aren’t quite so certain about them.

Nearly 10,000 people have been apprehended at the border since the start of the year as they’ve sought to enter Canada in order to claim refugee status — almost equivalent to the total number of claims filed for all of 2013. Of those who have arrived this year, nearly 7,000 have arrived just since July, the vast majority at an unofficial crossing point between Quebec and New York.