Carlos Garcia, a refugee from Mexico who is fighting a deportation order, at his home in Hamilton, Ont.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
A Hamilton construction worker who fled Mexico six years ago, claiming he was being pursued by the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel, is fighting to remain in Canada after Ottawa rejected his bid for refugee status.
Carlos Garcia arrived in Canada in 2019 and sought asylum. He said he had endured years of escalating threats from members of the cartel, according to an affidavit filed in the Federal Court.
After a four-year wait, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada rejected Mr. Garcia’s claim in September, 2023.
In its decision, obtained by The Globe and Mail, the IRB acknowledged that Mr. Garcia was indeed being pursued by cartel members, and that he would be in danger if he returned to his hometown of Guadalajara, where the cartel is most active. However, the board concluded he could return to Mexico safety if he relocated to Merida, a town almost 2,000 kilometres away from Guadalajara.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico. Former leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, also known as “El Mencho,” was killed by Mexican special forces in February, setting off a series of violent events across the state of Jalisco, including in the tourist hub of Puerto Vallarta.
Mexican cartel leader ‘El Mencho’ killed in military operation
Ottawa officially designated the JNGC as a terrorist organization in February, 2025, after concluding that the group engaged in extreme violence and criminality across borders to facilitate its drug trafficking operations.
Mr. Garcia is seeking a judicial review of his case in the Federal Court, arguing that there is no place in Mexico that is safe for him given the reach of the cartel and its networks.
“I hope the government can understand that it is not safe for me to go back to my home country,” Mr. Garcia, a single father of three children, said in an interview.
“I fear that my children and I will be rendered unsafe if we return to Mexico.”
The federal Immigration Ministry has struggled to cope with a mounting backlog of applications in recent years, as has the IRB, which is tasked with ruling on refugee cases. Some claims are assessed without a hearing or in-person interviews – a process that was instituted in 2019 to manage backlogs, but has made little impact on the number of pending applications. There are approximately 300,000 pending claims.
In the years that Mr. Garcia waited for a decision about his case, he settled into his job and safety of his surroundings, and he grew to believe that he would be granted refugee status, prompting him to bring his children to Canada in late 2022.
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Mexico is also one of the largest source countries for refugee claims in Canada, alongside Nigeria, Ghana, Haiti and India. There were approximately 5,300 claims for refugee status from Mexico in 2025, according to data from the IRB – of those, about 56 per cent were issued a positive decision, meaning claimants were allowed to stay.
Among Mexican asylum seekers whose claims are denied, the justification the IRB used in Mr. Garcia’s case, called the Internal Flight Alternative (IFA), is not uncommon, according to Julia Kalinina, Mr. Garcia’s lawyer.
In a statement to The Globe, the IRB said it cannot comment on individual cases, and it does not compile statistics on internal flight alternatives. “Each refugee claim is decided on its own merits, based on the law and the evidence presented.”
In his affidavit, Mr. Garcia, now 39, says he spent much of his teenage years hanging out and “partying” with cartel members. When he was 18, he was assigned his first “job” by the cartel. It involved participating in a drug trafficking operation, to take a shipment of drugs across the U.S. border.
“I immediately told them that I did not want to be a part of it, that I just wanted to keep partying and no more,” Mr. Garcia wrote in the affidavit.
A member of the cartel, known as “La Rana,” began asking Mr. Garcia for money every few months between 2005 and 2017, threatening him with violent repercussions if the money was not handed over. Mr. Garcia said in his affidavit that he believed the cartel was retaliating against him for not participating in the trafficking.
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Mr. Garcia said he moved across Mexico three times, attempting to flee cartel members, to no avail. At one point, Mr. Garcia said he became an Uber driver, because cartel members kept finding him at physical office locations in previous jobs that he held.
Since arriving in Canada, Mr. Garcia, who holds a work permit that was granted to him as an asylum seeker, has been employed in a supervisory role at Paramount Landscaping Inc., a maintenance and construction company.
Paramount chief executive officer Doug Dolson has appealed to the government to allow Mr. Garcia to remain in the country, citing Canada’s commitment to protect families fleeing violence and persecution.
“As an employer of over 200 people across Canada and a significant taxpayer contributing heavily to this country’s economy, I find it unacceptable to see hard-working individuals like Carlos face deportation,” Mr. Dolson wrote in a letter to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency, which oversees deportation.
Ms. Kalinina estimated that it will take at least a year for Mr. Garcia to get a decision on the judicial review. He is scheduled to meet with the CBSA this month to receive a deportation date, which Ms. Kalinina said she plans to appeal.
For Mr. Garcia, however, the uncertainty is stressful for him and his children. “They are facing the prospect that they will have to uproot and go back to a part of Mexico they have never even been to. We want Canada to remain our home.”