The system is also expensive, costing taxpayers more than $58 million a year, or roughly $250 per detainee, per day.

More than 100 of those currently detained for immigration purposes in Canada have spent at least three months behind bars and one-third of those have been detained for more than a year.

A Star investigation into immigration detention in Canada found a system that indefinitely warehouses non-citizens away from public scrutiny in conditions intended for a criminal population. The Canada Border Services Agency and the Immigration and Refugee Board, meanwhile, are routinely unable to solve long-term detentions, the Star found.

Nine people have been in detention for over three years

Some of the detainees are former permanent residents who committed crimes, served their sentences and now await deportation; others, like Toure, are failed refugee claimants or those who have otherwise been deemed inadmissible to Canada and whom the government considers a flight risk or a danger to the public.

Canada detained 6,596 people for immigration purposes in the 2015-16 fiscal year, including more than 201 children. Detainees are either kept in one of three medium-security detention centres or in maximum-security provincial jails.

Responding to widespread criticism from humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee in 2015, the Liberal government announced last summer its intention to create a “better” and “fairer” immigration detention system. But while Justin Trudeau’s government has detained fewer people than the Conservatives did under Stephen Harper, there has been no meaningful change in policy that would end a system criticized as inhumane, arbitrary and a violation of international law.

“I’m not a criminal, but I’ve been in jail four years,” Toure says. “That’s supposed to happen in other countries, not Canada.”

Meanwhile, Canada’s border police believe he is unlikely to appear for his removal if either country ever changes its mind. So he waits in jail, indefinitely.

Toure is not trying to stay in Canada. He says he was born in The Gambia and raised in Guinea, and he would happily return to either country, but neither will take him back because he lacks the paperwork to prove his citizenship.

“Lots of people in Canada, if they knew the extent of what’s going on, they would be upset,” says Macdonald Scott, an immigration consultant who has represented Toure and dozens of other detainees.

By the government’s own description, immigration detention is not supposed to be punitive; it is meant strictly as a means of facilitating deportation. For some detainees, that’s the case. The average length of detention last year was 23 days. But for many individuals, like Toure, who lack the right documentation or whose home country won’t take them back, detention becomes unpredictable and tortuous. The United Nations has called on Canada to set a “reasonable time limit” on immigration detention, as other countries have. The European Union, for instance, has a limit of 18 months, while several countries will release detainees if they can’t be deported within 90 days. Canada has no maximum length of detention.

“Every day is the same thing,” Toure says. “I don’t know what kind of time I’m doing.”

The CBSA, which refused to make any representative available for an interview, told the Star in writing that Toure is not co-operating with his removal, blaming him for the extended length of his detention because for nearly three years he claimed he was from Guinea and now says he is from The Gambia.

But Toure says he has always believed he is a rightful citizen of both countries and initially said he was from Guinea because that’s where he has the strongest ties and because he thought it would be his quickest route out of detention. He gave up on Guinea when it became clear they would not accept him. He says it’s unreasonable to think he would hold back any information that might help him get out of jail.

“He has given them all the information he has,” says Scott, his immigration consultant. “He just doesn’t have a lot of information.”

Toure says he was born at home in The Gambia, his father’s home country. He has no birth certificate to prove it. His father died when he was young and he moved with his mother to neighbouring Guinea, where she was born. That’s where he says he lived most of his life, subsisting off a small-scale farm, growing corn, peanuts and cassava.

North America was a beacon. He wanted a better life for himself. But he was unable to get a travel visa to Canada or the U.S. So he paid a cousin, a French citizen, €6,000 to use his passport to travel to the U.S. in 2002.

“I wanted to take a chance, make some money, get out of the life I had.”

Ebrahim Toure has been detained for four years at the Lindsay “superjail” because Canada's border services can't deport him. Photo by Anne-Marie Jackson

Toure eventually settled in Atlanta, where he worked at a clothing store and was paid cash under the table.

Toure had three run-ins with police over a short span of time while in Atlanta, all non-violent. He was arrested in 2004 for selling pirated CDs and DVDs, pleaded guilty and received two years probation. He says he was innocent of the charge but did not have a lawyer and pleaded guilty when the judge told him he would not go to jail.

In October of the same year he was charged with “reckless conduct” for leaving his friend’s children alone in a house when he was supposed to be babysitting. He was released on a $1,000 bond.

He also came to the police’s attention in 2005 when he was stopped at a Houston Airport with nearly $50,000 in cash. Toure says he was paid $1,000 to transport the cash to Arizona by a man who bought cars in the U.S. and sold them in West Africa. “I didn’t have a job,” he says. “I needed to pay rent.” He co-operated with police and was not charged with any offence.

Those offences were 12 years ago, and none of them led to jail time.

After the cash incident he returned to Guinea when his uncle, whom he considered like a father, was murdered. Convinced it was a botched robbery by a local gang, Toure said he started asking questions. Warned to keep quiet, he started fearing for his life and in 2011 — once again with the help of his cousin’s passport — he hatched a plan to apply for refugee status in Canada.

“I thought Canada was the best place in the world, that’s why I chose to come here.”

The first part of Toure’s plan worked. Travelling on his cousin’s passport — with the name Omar Toure — he flew to Montreal from Guinea and was allowed in as a visitor.

He immediately moved to Toronto and applied for refugee status under his actual name, admitting to immigration officials that he had fraudulently used his cousin’s passport. With his refugee application underway, Toure applied for and received a legitimate work permit in his own name and got a job collecting and sorting garbage for $11 an hour at Cascades Recovery, a private recycling company in Etobicoke.

Toure’s refugee proceedings are private, but eventually his claim was denied and he exhausted all of his subsequent appeals, so the government ordered his deportation, informing him by mail to appear for a removal appointment.

Toure, who had attended all his previous immigration appointments, says he never received the letter. He missed the appointment and CBSA issued a Canada-wide arrest warrant.

He was arrested Feb. 23, 2013 while waiting for a takeout pizza order, when a Toronto police officer, who saw him smoking on the sidewalk, randomly asked for his name and birth date.

That was his last free day.

Along with the indefinite nature of immigration detention, the use of criminal jails to house migrants has been a major target of criticism from humanitarian organizations.

Looking at one day in January as a snapshot, the Star found that more than two-thirds of immigration detainees, including almost all of the long-term detainees, were in maximum-security provincial jails. Canada’s three medium-security facilities dedicated to immigration detention — one each in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, which can hold 195, 109 and 24 people, respectively — were not full.

While immigration detainees are technically in federal custody, the federal government has a contract with the provinces to house what they call “high-risk” detainees — typically those with criminal records — as well as any detainee apprehended outside of Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver.

This is something the government itself has suggested is problematic. Last August, while announcing a $138-million expansion of the detention centres in Vancouver and Montreal, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the investment would “dramatically reduce” the use of provincial jails for immigration detention. Yet, the use of jails has continued much the same.

Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Ralph Goodale said the $138M investment in detention centres would reduce the number of detainees being held in jails — it hasn’t.

There is no legislation governing whether an immigration detainee is placed in a maximum-security jail rather than an immigration detention centre, and there are no means by which a detainee can appeal where they have been placed. In most cases, any past criminal convictions will land an immigration detainee in maximum security. But physical and mental-health concerns, including suicidal ideation, can also lead to a detainee’s transfer to a maximum-security facility, where, the government says, they will receive better treatment. But critics say moving such vulnerable detainees to a demonstrably more restrictive and violent environment will only exacerbate their health concerns.

Last May, a group of 130 healthcare providers wrote an open letter calling on Ontario to cancel its agreement with the federal government to house immigration detainees in provincial jails. “Simply put, prisons are not healthcare facilities,” the letter reads. “Ontario should not be accepting transfers to its prisons of persons detained by CBSA who require medical or mental-health intervention. The practice is profoundly inhumane and inconsistent with the values of Ontarians.”

CBSA says they have since “enhanced” access to medical services, including psychiatric counselling, at the Immigration Holding Centre in Toronto.

Toure would seem to be a good candidate for the less restrictive Immigration Holding Centre. He is detained only as a flight risk, not a danger to the public; he has no criminal record in Canada and has never been charged anywhere with a serious crime.

Pressed on this issue by the Star, Canada’s border police referred to Toure’s non-violent legal issues in Atlanta 12 years ago, saying he is a “higher risk” detainee because of “criminality” in the U.S.