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Dr. Efrat Arbel, KC, is an Associate Professor at the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. Efrat’s research focuses on the law and policy of immigration detention, refugee protection, and border governance in Canada. She is also engaged in applied legal work and undertakes pro bono litigation in her fields of research, including as intervener co-counsel before the Supreme Court of Canada in Canadian Council for Refugees v Canada. She has served as an expert witness in judicial proceedings and consulted with various government bodies. She served as a member of the Executive Committee for UBC’s Centre for Migration Studies for several years and is on the editorial board of Oxford University’s Border Criminologies. In addition to publishing widely in academic outlets, Efrat is a frequent media commentator in outlets such as The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the New York Times. Efrat is also the creator of Detention Stories.
To start, can you share a bit about who or what has most shaped your interests in immigration detention, and what motivated you to create Detention Stories?
My work has focused on immigration detention for well over a decade, and I continue to encounter the same persistent problems. Immigration detention remains a site of some of the most egregious human rights violations in this country, yet it operates largely out of public view, with few people fully understanding how the system operates in practice. My goal in creating Detention Stories was to open a window into the inner workings of immigration detention and to create a forum for people who have experienced detention to tell their stories.
Your research examines extremely timely and polarizing topics. What do you feel is missing in larger public discussions and political debates on immigration detention?
That’s a great question. I think more than anything, what is missing from public discussion and political debates is an understanding of the lived experiences of immigration detention, that is, how detention is experienced day to day, minute by minute. Currently, public discussion and political debate tend to operate at a high level of abstraction and to focus quite narrowly on law and policy, rather than on lived experience. As a result, the human reality of detention rarely forms part of the conversation – for example, the uncertainty and psychological toll of being detained without knowing when you will be released, the strain of separation from family and loved ones, and the fact that even short periods of detention can have lasting impacts on the human psyche. What’s missing from the discussion is the human perspective, the human stories.
Can you say a bit more about your current project on immigrant detention in Canada? What spurred the project, and how was it carried out?
My answer to this question builds on your previous question – I was growing increasingly frustrated by the fact that the public and policy discussions about immigration detention did not focus on lived experience. The Detention Stories project was created as a space for people who have experienced immigration detention to tell their own stories in their own words. Detention Stories grew out of my prior, long-standing relationships with people who have experienced immigration detention and collaboration with local artists. Together, we developed participatory co-creation methods to tell lived experience stories with care and integrity. More than anything, our methods were designed to honour both the stories and the people who tell them.
The project presents findings through a combination of a policy report, a graphic novel, a film, and even a virtual reality component. Can you explain the decision to combine so many different outputs and say a bit about what you gain from doing so?
In my legal work, I take a systemic approach to analyzing Canada’s immigration detention system, recognizing that all the pieces of the puzzle matter and must be assembled to understand how the system operates. That same commitment shaped this project. Immigration detention is complex and multi-dimensional, and understanding it requires more than one form of engagement.
Different mediums make it possible to engage with the system in different ways. The policy report you mentioned engages with the legal structure of immigration detention – it communicates legal analysis, presents the results of qualitative interviews, and identifies patterns. The other initiatives – the graphic novel, film, and virtual reality – communicate the emotional, sensory, and human dimensions of immigration detention in ways that legal analysis alone cannot. By bringing these together, Detention Stories creates multiple entry points for different audiences and invites people to connect with immigration detention in ways that seek to do justice to the complexity of its lived experience.
What impacts do you hope these storytelling initiatives will have on public perception or policymaking around immigration and enforcement?
I hope that these storytelling initiatives shift how people understand immigration detention in Canada and make it easier for people to think about it not only as a legal structure but also as a human reality more meaningfully. I hope that Detention Stories provides an entry point for others to understand the scale and seriousness of what is at stake.
For law and policymakers, the aim is not only to inform but to sharpen the terms of the conversation. I am a firm believer that lived experience brings invaluable clarity to understanding how law and policy operate. Lived-experience stories can convey the human toll of immigration detention and highlight forms of harm that are often invisible in law and policy debates. My hope is that Detention Stories helps ground ongoing law and policy debates more firmly in the reality of immigration detention and drive towards more accurate, more accountable conversations.
What advice would you give to graduate students researching topics of migration and enforcement who seek to centre migrants’ voices and lived experiences in their work as scholars or practitioners?
Graduate students working on migration and enforcement have an important responsibility to approach their research with care and humility. Centring migrants’ voices begins with recognizing that relationships are at the core of meaningful and responsible work. It is important to invest time in building genuine, trust-based relationships. This means engaging beyond one-time interviews or data collection, being transparent about your intentions, and respecting people’s time, knowledge, and boundaries. Lived experience is not simply a source of data; it reflects expertise that should shape how research questions are framed, how findings are interpreted, and how knowledge is shared. Wherever possible, create space for collaboration and co-creation.
Ultimately, I think, centring migrants’ voices is about recognizing people as partners in knowledge creation. And about recognizing – and celebrating– the resilience of the human spirit, and the immense possibility that comes from simply seeing one another as human beings.
