MONTREAL—Canada is not ready to handle a second wave of Latin American asylum seekers who may already be starting to flee the United States, says the head of Canada’s border-guard union.

The federal government revealed Tuesday that 5,712 refugee claimants had arrived in Canada in the month of August alone—an 82 per cent jump from July.

But Customs and Immigration Union president Jean-Pierre Fortin said there has been an ominous change in the demographics.

This summer, most of the asylum seekers who crossed the Canada-U.S. border were Haitian citizens alarmed about the looming expiration of their special immigration designation, known as the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.

In May, the Department of Homeland Security extended the TPS for Haitians for just six months and advised 58,000 Haitian citizens living and working in the U.S. to prepare to return home. Instead, thousands fled to Canada believing the country would be a safe haven from deportation.

That meant that, in August, the RCMP intercepted 5,530 people crossing illegally into Canada in the province of Quebec, while 102 people crossed into British Columbia and 80 entered in Manitoba. No other RCMP interceptions occurred in other Canadian provinces.

Those figures have pushed the total number of asylum seekers entering illegally into Canada in 2017 to 13,211.

The overwhelming majority—11,896 people—opted to enter Canada in the province of Quebec, via an easily accessible hole in the border along Roxham Rd.

In September, Fortin said, the flow of people crossing the Canada-U.S. border had slowed to about 90 people a day. He estimated that less than a quarter of those are Haitian nationals.

Instead, they are increasingly citizens of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua—three countries whose citizens are also eligible for Temporary Protected Status in the U.S., but who are equally concerned that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration will not renew their status when it expires between January and March 2018.

There are more than 250,000 Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and Hondurans with Temporary Protected Status.

“We don’t think the government is ready to face another crisis,” Fortin said. “I don’t think they’re going to be in a position to double the numbers that we had in August. Just think about us getting over 10,000 people coming in (each month).”

A spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency could not provide more precise details on the nationalities of asylum seekers.

Separately, the Quebec government provided an update Tuesday on the province’s immigration department website. It said that the majority of asylum seekers coming into Quebec are from Haiti, India, Mexico, Colombia and Turkey.

But the federal government has been proactively trying to head off a second wave of asylum seekers from El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dispatched Montreal Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez to Los Angeles earlier this month to meet with lawmakers, diplomats, immigration advocates and members of the Latino community and spread the message that Canada was no automatic safe haven for migrants.

Rodriguez himself was born in Argentina and came to Canada with his family as political refugees.

Last month, the Canada Border Services Agency started compiling a list of suppliers who might be able to provide winterized trailers for 200 people at the Lacolle border crossing, including dormitories, a cafeteria, bathroom facilities and a medical clinic, suggesting the agency is preparing for continued migration in the coming months.

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Fortin said union members who are complaining about being overworked and deprived of the necessary resources want to bring the RCMP, CBSA and Immigration officials together in a single location.

“We still strongly believe that we should go on a military base in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu. It would be way more convenient.”

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