Things to consider while applying for residency on humanitarian grounds

There are people who are physically or criminally ineligible to stay in Canada, yet Canada enables them to apply for refugee status on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Nonetheless, some cases are dismissed even within that category.

Today we discuss a federal case, Yu v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), in which the applicant challenges a decision made by a senior immigration officer to refuse her application for permanent residence on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

Ms. Yu, the Applicant, is a Chinese national. She moved to Canada as a minor, at the age of 17, to finish her final year of high school. She married a Canadian permanent resident in March 2018, and their daughter was born in September 2018. She submitted the H & C Application in January 2019. Ms. Yu was granted an exclusion order by the Immigration Division in April 2019 for falsely claiming to have finished her bachelor’s degree program in an application for a post-graduate work visa. She pled guilty to the felony charge of failing to respond honestly and was sentenced to 12 months probation and a conditional discharge. Following the issuing of the exclusion order, she submitted an amendment to her H & C Application. She would be ineligible to come to Canada for five years following her removal from Canada, according to the exclusion order. She requested that the Officer consider the fact that if her H & C Application was denied, she and her daughter, whom she was nursing at the time, would be separated from her husband for at least five years. Despite knowing all of the circumstances, the officer declined her application, and Ms. Yu believes that the officer’s decision is unreasonable and that he forgot to consider her young daughter and how she will be nurtured without a father, especially in her delicate years. She then requested a judicial review.

The purpose of granting residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds knows no limitations; it is the immigration officer’s responsibility to analyze all of the factors, evaluate them, and make the appropriate judgment. In this case, the officer failed to consider the kid and how the child would be cared for in the absence of a father, and so made a ruling against Ms. Yu. The court recognized this & issued a judgment in favor of Ms. Yu by granting the judicial review application and sending the case to a different officer for redetermination.