A Nigerian man who plead guilty for peddling child pornography in the United States is being held in Canada after he managed to escape into Quebec through Roxham Road.
51-year-old Adesanya Prince has been in Canada for 19 months and is fighting the Canadian government so that he doesn’t have to be extradited to Texas where he will serve a sentence for his crime.
Prince’s lawyer, Marie-Hélène Giroux, is arguing that his extradition order should be thrown out because he could be deported back to Nigeria if returned to U.S. custody and he would have to face poor conditions in a Texas prison.
According to court documents, while Prince worked as a security guard in January 2017 he sent a female co-worker bestiality videos and a film of a two to four year old girl being raped.
Despite being considered a danger to Canada, Prince was released from custody by a Quebec court for three days and allowed to roam freely in Montreal. He was returned to custody after the U.S. filed a request demanding his arrest.
Only days after pleading guilty to the child pornography charge, Prince walked across the U.S. – Canada border through Roxham Road. Only after screening by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) did Prince’s charges become aware to border officials.
Over the past two years, approximately 50,000 people have been able to stroll into Canada and claim asylum through the illegal border crossing point. Traffic through the area is so regular that American taxi companies are offering specific rates from nearby cities in the U.S. to shuttle illegal border crossers to the area so they can enter Canada.
While Prince was able to be identified as a sex offender and immediately detained, illegal migrants, including those with criminal records have been known to disappear after entering the country.
Background checks and initial security screenings done by the RCMP and CBSA can take less than two hours depending on how much information is available about the individuals. RCMP records also show that a number of people with an “unknown nationality” are being processed by the federal police force and the CBSA.
Currently, Prince is being held in a CBSA detention centre north of Montreal.
