After eight years of working, studying, and building relationships, the Kumar family was forced to leave Quebec and return to India. For the government, the story ended with a rejected asylum claim and the enforcement of an administrative order. But for Harish, his wife Sonika, and their two children, the decision meant being forcibly uprooted from an entire life they had built in Montreal.
The family arrived in Canada in April 2018 seeking protection. According to Harish, their ordeal began in Punjab in 2017, when he refused to give money to people associated with political groups. He says he was later arrested and mistreated by police, forcing him to move repeatedly, go into hiding, and eventually flee India with his family.
Essential During the Crisis, Deportable Afterwards
Harish did not wait for assistance. He began working as a truck driver in 2019 and continued transporting goods throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, when staying home was a privilege unavailable to essential workers. His work helped keep stores supplied and communities functioning. Sonika also worked to support the family, including at Village des Valeurs.
When the Canadian economy needed their labor, they were called “essential workers.” Once the crisis ended, however, years of work, taxes, and contributions to their community did not protect them from deportation. This is the cruelty at the heart of the immigration system: it benefits from migrant labor while treating migrants’ lives as temporary and disposable.
Two Children Uprooted From the Only Home They Know
The family’s children, Goulash and Japesh, are 14 and 12 years old. They spent most of their lives in Canada, attended its schools, learned French, and built their friendships and dreams here. Montreal was not a temporary stop for them; it was the home where they grew up and the community they knew.
One of the children told CTV News that he grew up here and had nothing in India. His younger brother faced starting his life again in a country he barely knew.
Yet the deportation system reduces years of childhood, education, language, and friendship to secondary details in a file. It forces two children to pay the price for a decision they did not make, as though tearing them away from their community were not itself a form of violence.
An Urgent Campaign to Keep the Family Together
As the September 7, 2026 departure deadline approached, the Immigrant Workers Centre launched an urgent campaign to stop the family’s deportation. The Centre published calls to action in French and English and urged people to telephone and email the immigration minister, the public safety minister, and the Canada Border Services Agency, demanding an urgent and humane review of the case.
The family’s supporters also launched a petition calling for the removal to be suspended and the case reconsidered in a way that protected family unity and the children’s best interests. The family’s story reached the media, while friends, neighbors, and activists mobilized to defend their right to remain.
This campaign was not charity performed on behalf of an isolated family. It was an effort to transform individual fear into collective resistance and break the silence on which the deportation machine depends.
Deportation Is Not an Individual Issue
The Kumar family’s story unfolded as Quebec was carrying out nearly 200 deportations every week. Behind every number is a worker, a parent, a child, or a family that built a life here—only to confront a state with the power to destroy everything they had created.
As the Immigrant Workers Centre’s booklet Montreal Rises Up Against Deportations explains, this machinery cannot be confronted individually. We need neighborhood committees, alert and support networks, documentation of CBSA interventions, and the mobilization of schools, unions, workplaces, and community organizations.
The campaign did not prevent the Kumar family from being uprooted, but that does not make it meaningless. It broke the family’s isolation, exposed the injustice of the decision, put names and faces behind the deportation statistics, and affirmed that every attempted deportation should face collective resistance.
The Kumar family did not fail to integrate into Canada. What failed was a system that consumed the parents’ labor, allowed their children to grow up here, and then decided that eight years of life were not enough to recognize their right to stay.
Stop deportations. Keep families together. Organize our neighbourhoods to resist the deportation machine.
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