Community ‘grieving’ after Toronto pastor and 2 daughters ordered deported to Kenya

Despite prayers and impassioned pleas to government officials, a Toronto-based preacher and her two young daughters are being sent back to Kenya.

Early Wednesday morning, Rev. Rosalind Wanyeki and her two children, six-year-old Pearl and nine-year-old Joylene, attended an immigration hearing at the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) office at Mississauga’s International Centre, where a judge denied the woman’s request to defer their deportation order.

Wanyeki was seeking to push back her family’s deportation from Canada until a decision was reached on their application for permanent residency here along with a risk assessment, which to date have all been denied, but are being appealed.

The family was originally scheduled to be removed from the country earlier this year; however, a deferral was granted until June to allow the girls to finish the school year.

As a result of Wednesday’s hearing, an order was issued for their deportation on Thursday. Wanyeki and her children are being detained by CBSA until their departure.

Documents obtained by CTV News show tickets that have been booked for the family on Ethiopian Airlines. Their flight to Nairobi via Addis Ababa is scheduled to leave Pearson International Airport at 10:45 a.m.

CTV News Toronto briefly spoke to Wanyeki on the phone earlier today from inside the immigration detention centre near Rexdale Boulevard.

She said her children are frightened, scared, and don’t understand what is happening, adding that they also do not have any memories of life in Kenya, nor any connection to the East African nation.

“At first, (my daughters) started crying immediately. They don’t know why they have to leave the city so I had to calm them down,” she told CTV News Toronto’s John Musselman.

• ‘I don’t want to go back’: Toronto pastor and her 2 daughters face deportation to Kenya

Wanyeki, daughters came to Canada as refugees in 2020

Wanyeki, who is known to many in the community as Reverend Hadassah came to Canada, along with her two children – who were four and 8 months old at that time – in 2020 as refugees.

She said they were forced to flee Kenya as they faced persecution from a powerful church leader in Nairobi.

Over the past five years, the family has created a life in Toronto with Wanyeki founding and serving as the senior pastor of North York’s Prayer Reign International Church in Canada.

Pearl and Joylene, meanwhile, have settled in at West Hill Public School in Scarborough and are involved in basketball at West Hill Gospel Hall and participate in various church programs.

Supporter says deportation process ‘very unfair’

Speaking with CTV News Toronto outside the CBSA office prior to Wanyeki’s hearing, Diana Da Silva, an organizer with Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, said Canada’s deportation process is “very unfair.”

“Rosalind still has (immigration) applications going, but these applications that are currently in place do not stop a deportation. That is systematically designed, in a way, to kick out our people, our communities before justice is made,” she said, adding that Wanyeki is “feeling very anxious, scared, worried and uncertain” about her future.

“She is here, like many other refugees, because her life is being persecuted. She fled persecution because of a very powerful church leader back home. (Rosalind) is still very much at risk and it’s important that she be able to get safety and protection that Canada promised her.”

Da Silva said the community is “grieving” after learning that Wanyeki and her kids are being sent back to Kenya.

“We’re calling on the immigration minister and the public safety minister to step in. This is the only thing that can be done now,” she said.

CTV News Toronto reached out to both Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada as well as CBSA, however they both said they wouldn’t speak to specific cases citing privacy.

“We require written consent from individuals before we can disclose information about their cases to the media.”

In a statement, a CBSA spokesperson said it “carries out removals based on a risk-management regime.”

“There are multiple steps built into the process to ensure procedural fairness and the CBSA only actions a removal order once all legal avenues of recourse that can stay a removal have been exhausted,” they wrote in an email.

Eunice Mbugua, a community mobilizer, attended an emergency prayer service for Wanyeki and her children over the weekend in North York.

“So what is being taken away from the Kenyan and the broader African community at large is actually a support system that actually is very needed,” she said at that time.

Mbugua also came down to the CDSA office on Wednesday morning to support the family.

“They are not forgetting the trauma itself, what (Rosalind is) dealing with right now,” she said.

“The children, themselves, the trauma they’re dealing with right now and the fragility of their age as well that they have to kind of process this all by themselves. They don’t even know what’s going on but they knew they are at risk.”

According to data on the CBSA website, on average 45 people are deported daily from Canada.

With files from CTV News Toronto’s John Musselman and Rahim Ladhani