Canada's Courts Buckle Under a Record Tide of Migration Cases, As Deportation Prevention Filings Surge

Court flags 54 percent spike in urgent stay-of-removal motions — emergency applications filed by people facing imminent deportation.

OTTAWA — For a fifth consecutive record-breaking year, the number of new immigration cases pouring into Canada’s Federal Court has surged and may exceed 30,000 files in 2026 — nearly five times the volume handled before the pandemic. Among the steepest increases is one that exposes the systemic crisis and illuminates a legal backlash against border enforcement efforts.

Urgent motions to halt deportations have jumped 54 percent in a single year, the court says.

Filings are forecast to remain at what the court calls “unprecedented levels.” But it is the 54 percent spike in urgent stay-of-removal motions — emergency applications filed by people facing imminent deportation, often within hours — that captures the war of attrition now playing out in the courts. “If this trend continues,” the court cautions, “it will cause the backlog to grow exponentially.”

It is the same crisis, arriving at the opposite end of the system.

Under the Trudeau government, Canada threw open the gateway to entry — a refugee apparatus that, as The Bureau has documented, accepted tens of thousands of asylum claims on paper without questioning a single applicant, in an intake regime experts warned was wide open to forged documents and organized fraud. A historic flood followed.