The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has confirmed it is increasingly scooping up offenders for immigration detention as they walk out of Canadian jails, while new numbers show 857 non-Canadian inmates now sitting in federal prisons.

In a written response to Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner, CBSA reported it immediately detained 385 people released from federal or provincial correctional facilities in 2024-25 for immigration hearings or further detention. That’s up from just 112 detentions in 2020-21, a jump of about 240% in four years. Since 2019-20, CBSA has logged 1,673 such detentions.

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On the prison side, Correctional Service Canada (CSC) data show a rising number of foreign nationals in federal custody. At the end of 2024-25, there were:

• 857 non-Canadian offenders in custody, up from 727 in 2019-20 — about an 18% increase over five years.

• Non-Canadians made up roughly 6% of all federal inmates (857 out of 14,837).

New admissions are also trending up. In 2019-20, 217 non-Canadians were admitted to federal institutions on new sentences; by 2024-25, that number had climbed to 298, an increase of more than 37%. Non-citizens now account for about 6% of new federal admissions each year (298 out of 5,053 in 2024-25).

The offence breakdown undercuts any idea that these are all minor cases.

For 2024-25 alone, among non-Canadian offenders admitted on new sentences:

• 6 were convicted of first-degree murder (Murder I)

• 11 for second-degree murder (Murder II)

• 211 under Schedule I – which includes sexual offences and other violent crimes

• 44 under Schedule II – serious drug offences

• 26 for non-scheduled offences

Those numbers have climbed from 2019-20, when non-Canadian admissions included 4 first-degree murder convictions, 8 second-degree murder convictions and 136 Schedule I violent/sexual offences.

Yet despite all of this, the department in charge of immigration says it essentially has no file on these people.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) told Parliament it “does not collect or maintain detailed information pertaining to non-citizens or permanent residents incarcerated in federal facilities.” The department blamed “limitations imposed by Canada’s privacy legislation” on sharing personal information across departments and pointed to Public Safety Canada and CBSA as responsible for enforcement, detention and removal.

CSC, for its part, admitted that immigration status isn’t even stored in its Offender Management System. The agency only captures basic citizenship status. When Rempel Garner asked for the cost of mental-health services (assessments, medication and counselling) for these offenders, CSC said the information wasn’t centrally tracked and that producing it would require a manual deep dive so onerous it could lead to “incomplete and misleading” data.

So here’s the picture from Ottawa’s own numbers:

• More non-Canadians are being admitted to federal prisons.

• Hundreds are being detained by CBSA the moment they leave jail.

• Dozens are convicted of the most serious crimes, including murder and violent/sexual offences.

And yet the immigration department still insists it does not “collect or maintain” detailed information on foreign nationals in Canadian federal prisons even as taxpayers are footing the bill for their incarceration, mental health care and, in many cases, their eventual immigration detention and removal.