A convicted human smuggler was granted a new Canadian passport despite having been ordered by courts to surrender his original passport as a condition of his release and forbidden to apply for new documents.
Thesingarasan Rasiah, who had pleaded guilty to breaching the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act by smuggling humans across the US/Canada border for profit, received the new passport from Service Canada on April 11, 2023, while under home confinement and electronic monitoring.
The RCMP discovered his new passport during a June 2023 search of Rasiah’s Montreal home, as part of an investigation into an international human smuggling network that he allegedly led.
Rasiah had been ordered to surrender his original passport in 2021 following his arrest in Cornwall, Ontario, for smuggling a Sri Lankan national into Canada. Rasiah was charged in April 2021 and later sentenced to 15 months in jail.
In May 2024, he was re-arrested on charges of leading a large-scale human smuggling operation that moved hundreds of individuals across the Canada-U.S. border.
The Conservative’s critic on the immigration, refugee and citizenship, MP Tom Kmiec, said he wants an emergency meeting to further investigate how this could have happened, as originally reported by the CBC.
