Good morning. Up against Pakistan’s mass deportations – and Canada’s convoluted immigration system – four young Afghan refugees managed to evade being sent back to the Taliban. More on that below, along with Texas’ redistricting standoff and Air Canada’s financial hit. But first:
Today’s headlinesOpen this photo in gallery:ImmigrationFinding home
In Islamabad, the knock on the door came late in the morning: five military police, sent to bring 23-year-old Wazhma Hamidi and her three teenage siblings to a detention camp on the outskirts of town. Since 2023, as part of its crackdown on Afghan migrants, Pakistan has expelled some one million people who fled to the country seeking refuge from poverty, repression and the Taliban. Hamidi and her siblings spent years evading this mass deportation campaign – but two months ago, they were herded onto a convoy of buses headed through the Khyber Pass to the Afghan border.
In Toronto, the text arrived at 3:42 a.m.: “We need your help, Doug, they identified us in the apartment.” In those predawn hours, Doug Saunders, The Globe and Mail’s international affairs columnist, immediately began working the phones, enlisting a vast network of diplomats, consular staff and concerned Canadians to help the young Hamidis get out in time.
Saunders and Hamidi recently wrote a remarkable account of those days in early June. I spoke with Saunders about what the siblings went through, why they were a target for the Taliban, and how – in its bid to rescue Afghans – Canada’s immigration system works to fracture families instead.
You met Wazhma Hamidi in January of 2024. What were your first impressions of her?
I spent that month reporting on Afghans hiding in Pakistan in collaboration with Pakistani journalist Zia Rehman. We wanted to talk to Afghans in northern cities who were planning to be smuggled across Iran and Turkey to get out. Zia had heard about Wazhma, a young woman who knew a lot of them and who was fluent in English and the major Afghan languages. Of course, she had this knowledge because she was an Afghan who’d fled in 2021.
Wazhma became one of the most surprising people I’ve met in my reporting. She was very young and very professional and confident, but she was carrying a lot of emotional weight, and it was immediately clear that she had a secret.
On our first day of reporting, Wazhma mentioned her relatives in Mississauga. That itself wasn’t surprising – you can go to the most remote corners of the Earth and someone will tell you about a cousin in the suburbs of Toronto. But after a couple days, she quietly revealed that those relatives were her only surviving parent and her older sister, and that she was the 21-year-old head of a household living underground in Islamabad, whose three other members were all teenagers. They were in considerable danger.
When I visited her and her siblings in the little Islamabad apartment they were hiding in, I was hugely impressed. I saw a very well-run household containing very young people who managed to protect each other, get educations, earn a living and prepare to become Canadians, all while being hunted by both the Pakistani military and Taliban-linked figures.
Why was her family a target for the Taliban?
The first big tragedy in Wazhma’s life was the death of her father to COVID-19 in 2020, in Kabul. They’d been very close, and she nursed him in his last days. Then a second tragedy happened: the Taliban takeover in the summer of 2021. Since all the males in the household were at that point under 18, the Taliban saw them as a family run by women – independent women who had jobs and had worked for Western organizations. That was intolerable to the Taliban.
On top of that, relatives of the Hamidi family who were loyal to the Taliban wanted to force Wazhma into marriage to one of their sons. They found out the Hamidi kids’ address in Islamabad, forcing the four of them to move to a new apartment in the summer of 2024.
Nafisa Hamidi, second from left, days before she departed alone for Canada to seek refugee status in 2023. Left to right: Wazhma, then 21; Mustafa, then 17; Nahid, then 12; and Mujtaba, then 15.Courtesy of family
Wazhma’s older sister and mother were both legal residents of Canada. Why couldn’t she and her siblings join them?
Canada’s immigration system is meant to put a premium on bringing over intact families rather than individuals – as it should, since families integrate better, start more businesses and have more successful outcomes. But there are strict limits on who is considered family. And there are big delays and disconnects in the system that mean many families end up separated for years, sometimes forever.
The first member of the Hamidi family to become Canadian was Wazhma’s older sister, Yalda, because she had married Phillip, a Canadian. Yalda brought their mom over in 2023, on a super visa that allows parents to come for five years. There’s no visa like that for siblings. So, the younger brothers and sisters had to stay behind.
Nafisa, the mother, filed a refugee claim upon landing, and it took two years to be approved, making her a permanent resident. Nafisa could have eventually sponsored her dependent children. But a dependent, in immigration rules, means under the age of 22. Wazhma would not qualify.
During 2024 and early 2025, we found a number of refugee routes for Wazhma to come to Canada. Most would have taken a couple years. None of them allowed a refugee to bring along siblings, even if they were children. And Wazhma wasn’t going to leave her siblings alone facing deportation in Pakistan.
So they faced a very dark paradox: With a lot of effort and years of waiting, they could get the three younger siblings to Canada but not Wazhma, or Wazhma but not the children.
Because of all that, it fell to well-connected Canadians to get the Hamidis out of Pakistan. Who intervened in this case?
Once I’d returned from Pakistan last year, I got to know Yalda, Phillip and Nafisa in Mississauga. I also turned to Canadians who’d helped get other endangered Afghans into Canada. The list includes my colleagues Mark MacKinnon and Janice Dickson; many people from organizations that help Afghans and journalists; lawyers who offered to launch court interventions; and Senator Ratna Omidvar, an immigration-policy expert and former refugee herself. Mellissa Fung, the CBC journalist and author, found a rare form of sponsorship that could get three of the four Hamidi kids out. Adeena Niazi, the head of the Afghan Women’s Organization, helped turn those three Hamidi kids into recognized refugees.
On June 3, after Wazhma texted to tell me she and her siblings were being brought to a mass-detention camp to be deported, another large group of people stepped in. Most decisive was Luke Myers, the acting head of the Canadian diplomatic mission in Islamabad, who immediately sent a large number of staff to the camp and to liaise with top officials in the Pakistani government.
When I got that text, I fully expected that they were going to be shipped through the Khyber Pass and back into Afghanistan. I knew that Canadian diplomats had rescued Afghans with Canadian files many times in recent years, but that usually happened only after they’d been deported into Afghanistan, which makes it much harder.
A lot of my conversations over those days were about Plan B. A lot of people, including Niazi, stepped forward with advice on how to ensure that the Hamidi kids went to a tent encampment immediately across the border and didn’t get sent onward to Kabul, and how to get them back into Pakistan once they were in that encampment. Would someone have to go to Afghanistan to file a case? Would I?
Mustafa, Mujtaba, Nahid and Wazhma Hamidi with Doug Saunders in Mississauga last month.Marta Iwanek/The Globe and Mail
Instead, Luke Myers at the High Commission persuaded Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister to remove the Hamidis from the deportation list so they could be flown to Toronto. There are so many Afghan families who aren’t as lucky. Can Canada do more to help them as Pakistan escalates its deportations?
A great many Afghans face imminent danger in Pakistan, many with Canadian connections and some with active Canadian refugee or immigration files that are dragging out for too long. Canadian officials are capable of going to extraordinary lengths to keep them out of danger, as we saw for Wazhma and her siblings. The problem isn’t the Canadian officials, who are mostly very talented and compassionate. It’s the conflicting rules and multiple siloes of Canada’s immigration and refugee systems, and the procedural delays that can drag on for years, even in urgent humanitarian cases. These gaps and flaws, which I wrote about recently in a major investigation, not only put families in danger, they prevent Canada’s immigration systems from meeting their policy objectives.
What do Wazhma and her siblings want to do next?
The Hamidi kids have gone almost overnight from being fugitives to being normal Canadian young people. After a heart-wrenching reunion with their mother, sister and brother-in-law, they’ve spent the summer going hiking, taking swimming lessons, and improving their English, which was already quite strong. Wazhma is applying to universities, and will almost certainly be in classes in September, after her education was delayed by four years. Her siblings will be in a Mississauga high school. They’re carrying a lot of grief and trauma on their shoulders, but they’re extremely close and supportive of one another.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Shot‘We do not expect the events to leave a lasting brand damage.’Open this photo in gallery:
An Air Canada flight attendant at Toronto Pearson Airport after the end of the strike.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
The Air Canada strike could end up costing the carrier $400-million this quarter alone – but analysts say the long-term financial damage will likely be contained. Read more about the hit to Air Canada here.
The WrapWhat else we’re following
Abroad: As Israel orders evacuations ahead of its plan to capture Gaza City, some 700,000 Palestinians have nowhere safe to go.
At home: In his first news conference since Monday’s by-election win, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre accused Prime Minister Mark Carney of misplacing his elbows on China and Donald Trump.
At war: Russia’s Foreign Minister said Moscow must be involved in any international talks on Ukraine’s security.
Out and about: Amid Texas’ bitter redistricting battle, state troopers follow Democrats everywhere – even the grocery store.
Summer: At Camp Maple Leaf in Kawartha Lakes, east of Toronto, being different is what helps these kids fit in.
Fall: It’ll be sweater weather before you know it, so here are 10 fashion trends to check out now.