When U.S. prosecutors unsealed indictments against 37 people tied to India-based crime syndicates earlier this month, they exposed a distinctly Canadian vulnerability: nearly every accused Bishnoi gang foot soldier arrested here entered from Punjab on a study or temporary work permit—many, the indictments allege, obtained with fraudulent information. As Hub senior correspondent Graeme Gordon reported, the years-long Operation Hard Ball investigation traces how Canada’s immigration system became a recruitment pipeline for transnational organized crime—one running through what criminologist Kelly Sundberg calls “a broken, and in places effectively non-existent, security screening process.”
The math of Canada’s immigration enforcement no longer works—and organized crime knows it
