OTTAWA — Mohammed Al Hindi is a Palestinian refugee claimant whose application is now at risk because of Ottawa’s new border law, C-12.

Before fleeing the Gaza Strip with his family to escape the Israel-Hamas war, he visited Canada for about seven weeks in the summer of 2023 to donate a kidney to his sister, a Canadian citizen.

C-12 states that refugee claims made on or after June 3, 2025 won’t be referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board if they were made more than a year after the applicant’s first entry to Canada. That one-year rule is retroactive to first entry dates on or after June 24, 2020.

“I was here in Canada to save a life, to save a Canadian life. I did a humanitarian act. I didn’t want to stay in Canada in 2023 because there was no reason to stay in Canada,” Al Hindi told The Canadian Press from London, Ont.

“I had a job in my country, I had my family, I had a car, I had a home. I had everything there.”

Al Hindi said he first came to Canada on Aug. 9, 2023 to prepare for the kidney donation surgery. He said the surgery took place about a month later and he left Canada for Egypt on Sept. 23 before returning to his home in Gaza on Oct. 2, 2023.

Hamas attacked Israel five days later, triggering the war that forced Al Hindi and his family to flee for their lives.

Al Hindi said he and his family were able to get to Egypt in spring 2024 after paying a company US$17,500 to get them out of the war zone.

Al Hindi, his wife and three children were able to come to Canada through a special program offering temporary work and study visas for family members of Canadian citizens. He said he returned to Canada in February 2025 and the rest of his family arrived that May.

He filed a refugee claim on Sept. 4, 2025, according to a procedural fairness letter he received on April 2, 2026 from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

The letter notes he first entered Canada on Aug. 9, 2023. It asks him to provide additional information about his circumstances by April 23 — and warns that he may be deemed ineligible for referral to the Refugee Protection Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board, the main decision-making body for refugee claims.

The five-paragraph letter says only evidence about the circumstances of his entry to Canada and how it relates to certain parts of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act would be considered.

Al Hindi is not alone in this situation.

An Iranian woman living in Toronto, who The Canadian Press has agreed not to name because of the risks to her family members still in Iran, said she first came to Canada in December 2022 to help support her son, who was studying here.

Speaking through a Farsi interpreter, she said she began to work on a political podcast under a pseudonym for a media organization she said was criminalized by the Iranian regime.

She said that the media organization’s website was hacked in July 2025, one month after the refugee rules in C-12 retroactively took effect, and her real name was leaked. She said her husband, who is still in Iran, has been interrogated about when she will return.

She filed a refugee claim on Oct. 1, 2025 because she knew she wouldn’t be able to go home.

Canada has a list of countries going through humanitarian crises to which it will not send failed refugee applicants. Iran, recently targeted for airstrikes by the United States and Israel, is on that list — which means that if the woman’s refugee application is deemed ineligible, she will be trapped in legal limbo.

She said her legal plight is particularly alarming because it’s happening as her husband remains trapped in Iran, and after her recent lymphoma diagnosis.

She said she is doing her best to remain resilient and not lose hope.

The immigration department estimates about 30,000 refugee claimants will be receiving one of these procedural fairness letters. That’s a preliminary figure and is subject to change.

In a written statement, an IRCC spokesperson stressed that these letters are not deportation orders and are meant to outline next steps in determining if a refugee claimant is still eligible.

If a claim is deemed ineligible, a claimant can still get a pre-removal risk assessment. This process is meant to assess whether a claimant would face torture, a threat of persecution, a threat to their life or cruel and unusual treatment or punishment if they were deported.

Jouman El-Asmar, an Edmonton-based immigration lawyer, said the pre-removal risk assessment process has a far lower approval rate than a traditional Immigration and Refugee Board hearing.

El-Asmar said a claimant going before the Immigration and Refugee Board can bring a lawyer and witnesses, and can present evidence.

The pre-removal risk assessment, on the other hand, is primarily a paper-based process that can lead to an in-person interview if an immigration officer requests one.

“So you have to provide all the evidence. And the lawyers have to basically write out all their submissions and lay out why this person’s case meets the requirements of Section 96 and Section 97 of (the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act) and the Refugee Convention, which ends up being like 40 to 50 pages of legal argumentation,” she said.

“You’re not just presenting the client’s case. You also have to talk about all of the country conditions. You cannot assume that they know the country conditions, unlike in the Immigration Refugee Board, where you’re going before a tribunal member. Usually that person is assigned to a specific country.”

El-Asmar said that in a pre-removal risk assessment interview, an immigration lawyer is not allowed to intervene on behalf of their client. That’s not the case in Immigrant and Refugee Board hearings.

El-Asmar said several of her clients have also received procedural fairness letters. She said they include three people from Mauritania in northwest Africa — one is fleeing family violence and a forced marriage, while the other two are political activists.

El-Asmar said that all three clients have arrest warrants against them and judgments issued in absentia. If they should be sent back, she said, they’d be going to their deaths.

“They would be caught by the military, which is the government basically, and they would be found as soon as they enter the country,” she said. “Especially if you’re talking about removal, which before Canada officially removes or deport someone to a country, they communicate with that country.”

For now, all people in Al-Hindi’s situation can do is submit any evidence they have to support their claims and wait to hear back from IRCC.

Al-Hindi said that, in the meantime, he and his wife — whose refugee claim is not affected by C-12 — will continue going to work and send their kids to school.

If Al Hindi’s claim is deemed ineligible, he’ll also fall into legal limbo; Ottawa is not currently removing people to the Gaza Strip. This means he would not even be eligible for a pre-removal risk assessment until conditions in Gaza change.

“I’m not sure where I can go. There is no status,” he said.

“I have one kidney. There is no hospital, there is no clean water there. There is no anything in Gaza.”

Immigration Minister Lena Diab told a Senate committee in February that these new refugee rules are due to an increase in people staying “a number of years” in Canada before making a claim.

“What we are trying to do, frankly, with these changes is to deter misuse and to prevent people from using the system so that people who really need its protection can get it and get it faster. That is not happening,” Diab told the committee on Feb. 12.

Her department’s backlog of refugee claims topped 300,000 as of the end of 2025. The Immigration and Refugee Board has the capacity to make 80,000 to 90,000 decisions annually — resulting in a three-year wait time for decisions, according to immigration officials who testified at the committee hearing.

El-Asmar, who closely followed the bill’s process through Parliament, believes the legislation clearly was designed to send the message that Canada is no longer a welcoming place for refugees.

“The point of Bill C-12 was really to reduce newcomers to Canada, to reduce asylum claimants, to reduce the number of refugees, to basically create this image and this environment and get the word out among asylum seekers that Canada is no longer the safe place you think it is, so stop coming here in droves,” she said.

“That was the goal of that, and they’ve achieved it.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 12, 2026.

David Baxter, The Canadian Press