Immigrant advocates protest reality-show cameras along for CBSA migrant-worker raids

I'll admit up front that I sometimes like to watch COPS. It's a guilty pleasure.

I recognize the goofs and losers in that pioneering reality show are real people who may have put themselves in bad situations.

I also know that they've signed release forms giving the show permission to broadcast what for most of us would be an embarrassing or shameful encounter we'd want buried deep out of sight.

Which brings me to BORDER SECURITY: Canada's Front Line, a reality show that debuted this past fall on the National Geographic Channel.

The series, produced by Force Four Entertainment, purports to give viewers a peek into the "highly classified world of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)."

A glance at the synopses of various episodes gives some idea of what to expect. Most of the incidents involve people being caught out at the airport or a border point, the teasers indicate.

"A parcel from China contains a shocking surprise," says one. "A man arrives from Hong Kong with a suitcase full of meat — and something much more dangerous," says another. "A California woman hides her 'medicine' in her child's stroller."

You get the idea.

But immigration activists think the CBSA has gone too far by allowing the show to record a at least one sweep to catch possibly illegal foreign workers at a Vancouver construction site.

[ Related: Reality show filmed immigration raids, B.C. advocates say ]

Witnesses told CBC News Thursday that border agents in black SUVs who descended on an east Vancouver condo building site looking for undocumented workers were accompanied by video cameras that recorded up to a dozen arrests.

"It doesn't seem very Canadian," Mindy Shepard, who was working across the street, told CBC News. "It's very sensationalized. I don't like it. It's just very creepy."

Honduran workers detained during the raid Wednesday were asked to sign release forms agreeing to be filmed, the Canadian wife of one of the arrested men told the Vancouver Sun.

The raid was one of several that reportedly took place in Vancouver on Wednesday, the Sun said.

Neither the CBC nor the Sun were able to get a CBSA response to questions about the reality-show cameras accompanying the raid.

The immigrant-advoacy group No One Is Illegal staged a demonstration outside Citizenship and Immigration offices in downtown Vancouver at noon Thursday to protest the raids, which spokeswoman Harsha Wallia likened to the sweeps conducted in the United States.

“I think the fact that, you know, the sheer scale of this raid, the fact that it was coordinated, the fact that it’s coupled with a reality show is extremely disturbing," she told News1130.

Vancouver New Democrat MP Libby Davies said the federal government should explain why it's allowing a reality show inside CBSA operations.

“To actually have the gall to ask people to sign waivers when they are in a precarious legal situation — and they probably need a lawyer — and to stick that in front of them, I mean I just find it outrageous,” she told News1130.

[ Related: Vancouver International Airport tops in seizures of smuggled cash ]

“I just think this whole [raid] is out of character for this country," said Diana Thompson, who is married to detainee Tulio Renan Aviles Hernandez. "It makes me wonder if this was all done just for the TV show.”

Thompson told the Sun she was in the process of obtaining sponsorship for her husband to work in British Columbia, adding he refused to sign the TV show's release form.

Force Four Entertainment spokeswoman Laurie Case would not tell the Sun if camera crews had accompanied CBSA agents on their raids Wednesday but said the show was shooting in the Vancouver area.

Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, suggested there was a political motivation behind the reality show. She had received complaints of migrant-worker arrests being recorded in Montreal, only to see detainees released after the cameras stopped rolling.

"They’re trying to impress Canadians while making [migrant workers] scared,” she said. “It’s just a show of enforcement, and there’s big concern about how it portrays the individual."

The show also worries Jason McMichael, first vice-president of the Customs and Immigration Union, which represents border agents. He told the Sun the presence of cameras puts officers at risk of identification and retaliation by organized crime.

McMichael said he's never heard of the CBSA taking its own cameras to record raids but added the reality-show footage he's seen before it goes to air shows officers displaying nothing but "exceptional professional behaviour."