Has Your PRRA Been Rejected

If your pre removal risk assessment application has been rejected, the PRRA officer will give you a copy of the refusal decision and the reasons for rejection of the PRRA. The communication of the decision refusing your PRRA is normally done when you are called in for a PRRA interview. At the PRRA interview you will be hand-delivered the PRRA rejection decision and asked to confirm receipt of refusal decision by signing above or below the hard copy. Upon refusal of your PRRA application, your removal order comes into force again and you will generally receive a reasonable period of time after PRRA refusal to prepare for your deportation from Canada. Generally speaking, you will be given roughly 20 to 30 days after the PRRA rejection to prepare for deportation. You will also be instructed both orally and in writing on where and when to report for deportation in a document titled Direction to Report for Removal, in which the address of the border crossing, the airline, the date and further details of your departure are specified. You will normally be deported to the country from which you came to Canada.

In almost all cases, you will be asked whether you would like to purchase your own ticket or whether you would like to have the Canadian government pay for the airline ticket. If the Canadian government pays, you will have to repay the government back if and when you later come back to Canada. If you decide to purchase your own ticket, you will then be asked to submit a copy of the ticket and the itenarary to the Removal Officer in charge of your deportation. You will be given a strict date by which you will have to submit your ticket and in some cases you will be notified that the ticket must be non-refundable.   

What You Can Do if Your PRRA is Rejected or Refused
There are two general options available to you, in both of which you must act as quickly as possible. Time is of the essence and we cannot overemphasize the importance of timely action. In many instances, clients come to our office on the eve of their deportation or a week thereto and ask for help. Such untimely and late requests for help will inevitably make the matter a lot more complicated than it otherwise may have been.  

First, you can ask that the date of your removal be postponed to a later date so that you can have enough time, for example, to get rid of some of your assets, have your children complete their school year, undergo pending medical examination, or to prepare for other related matters. This is generally referred to as a “request to defer removal”. Your request for deferral of removal must be made in writing to the Removals Officer in charge of your deporation at the Removals Unit of the appropriate Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) office. Again, a timely request is of outmost importaance since, generally speaking, the Removals Unit take at least two weeks to process the request. If your request for deferral of removal is refused, you can appeal that rejection to the Federal Court.  

Your second option is to appeal to the Federal Court and ask the Federal Court to review the PRRA officer’s decision. You can find more information on this in the Appeals to the Federal Court section of our website. It is of crucial importance to note that any appeal to the Federal Court in this context must be made within 15 days of the date on which you received the refusal decision.

Upon appealing the refusal decision of the PRRA officer, your lawyer will then have to bring an emergency motion for stay of deportation in order to stop your removal. The Federal Court has the statutory jurisdiction to make an order stopping the deportation order or the removal order. The timing of the motion is critical in this context as all steps in filing the motion and the supporting documents must be taken in very short order within a matter of mere days. This is due to the fact that at the Federal Court, motions are only heard on ceratin days of the week depending on the location. For example, in Toronto, the Federal Court only hears motions on the days of its General Sittings on Mondays.

In order to have a motion heard on a given Monday, the material in support of the motion must be field by the Wednesday preceding the day of the hearing. It is therefore of crucial importance to contact a lawyer experienced in Federal Court litigation at the first available opportunity so that all steps, from the filing of the appeal to the timing of the motion can be taken in a timely manner. As you can imagine, motions before the Federal Court are subject to complex procedural and evidentiary rules that can only be trusted to an experienced litigator with specific expertise in stay motions.     

To obtain further information and to take advantage of our free half hour initial consultation, please contact our office at (416) 365-9473