BURLINGTON, Vt., March 11 — A group that has provided Pakistanis and others applying to enter Canada with housing and food says it is at its saturation point and will stop offering aid to new arrivals on Friday.
The group, Vermont Refugee Assistance, has asked the Canadian government to abolish a new immigration policy the group says has stretched its resources well beyond capacity.
The policy, enacted on Jan. 30, allows border officials to send refugees seeking asylum back to the United States with an appointment, usually about a month after the initial visit, for a hearing if the staff cannot handle the day's caseload.
The policy was enacted after the United States required Pakistanis and other foreigners to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service late last year. Asylum applications soared, especially among Pakistanis, one of Canada's largest immigrant groups.
Rene Mercier, a spokesman for the Canadian immigration agency, said there were no plans to change the policy.
Patrick Giantonio, the director of Vermont Refugee Assistance, says it has helped more than 200 people who have sought asylum at the Lacolle, Quebec, application office and were legally able to return to the United States. Mr. Giantonio said the group started the effort as a short-term response to help ease problems at shelters in Plattsburgh, N.Y., the closest American city to the border.
The organization has 85 asylum seekers in its network. Twenty are living at a temporary shelter at the Burlington Salvation Army, while the rest are living with host families in Vermont. While the number of asylum seekers at Lacolle has dropped to the normal level of 6 to 12 applications per day from a high of 56, appointments are backlogged until May. Because of this, Mr. Giantonio said, it is nearly impossible for him and the one other woman on his staff to take in any more people.
"We took this on as a short-term emergency response; it's not what we do," he said. "A couple of families a day is more than we can take on. We don't have the infrastructure to do this. We cobbled an infrastructure together for this short-term response."
The letter, addressed to Denis Coderre, the Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, said: "V.R.A. is neither a disaster relief organization nor a human service agency. We have no additional human or financial resources for this effort." The letter goes on to say the organization does not wish to "facilitate the ability of governments to implement policies and procedures we believe to be unjust and unnecessary."
Mr. Giantonio said he had not yet received a response to the letter, which was mailed last Friday.
Mr. Mercier said the government was trying to process immigrants at the border in the safest, most thorough way possible. Asylum seekers are asked to make an appointment for a number of reasons, including a backlog of people and a lack of interpreters.
"It's working," he said. "There are two goals. Number 1 is the safety of Canada and Number 2 is to maintain our humanitarian tradition. We're open to refugees. These people will be heard. They will have a date."
In the past, when Canada processed applicants in a day, it sought assurances that the United States would not detain immigrants waiting for asylum. But it is not doing so now because the processing takes longer.
United States officials would not say how many immigrants have been detained since Jan. 30, but Vermont Refugee Assistance puts the figure at 130. Michael Gilhooly, a spokesman for the United States Customs and Border Protection Department, said that a person would only be detained for cause.
"There would be a variety of reasons, but the overriding reasons would be if we arrested someone at the port of entry, essentially we're doing something we always do," he said. "If they're illegally present in the United States we will take the appropriate action for that individual case.
Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for refugees, said that both countries are "washing their hands" of the problem.
Mr. Giantonio said that the burden of helping the refugees would now be on service agencies in Plattsburgh. The Lacolle center immediately processed all of the claimants seeking asylum today, which Mr. Giantonio says is a step in the right direction. But, he said, things are uncertain after Friday.
"I don't know what's going to happen," he said.
