Just weeks ago, Dillon Nolan was envisioning a new chapter of his life in Canada.
He married his partner, Dylan Fox, on Valentine’s Day and was, by all accounts, excelling at his job as a social worker specializing in youth mental health at B.C. Children’s Hospital.
A couple of weeks later, he was arrested and handcuffed outside a music venue in Vancouver’s Gastown where he was about to perform, detained in an immigration holding centre and ordered to leave the country.
It all comes down to two key pieces of correspondence from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) that Nolan says he never received.
That’s a bit disingenuous. I’m not absolving our agencies of the responsibility to work on increasing the safety of those held in detention but 17 deaths over 26 years is not equivalent to what’s happening in the US where 23 people have died in ICE detention since October 2025 (source).