Background
Dianel May Campos, a 42-year-old Mexican national, and her two minor children, Sofia and Nicolas, arrived in Canada in December 2018 on visitor visas. After the family’s status lapsed in May 2022 and the principal applicant separated from her spouse amid domestic violence, the family sought shelter support. Their refugee claim was refused by the Refugee Protection Division in December 2022 on the basis that a viable internal flight alternative existed in Merida, Mexico, where they had previously lived without incident and where the principal applicant had family ties. Subsequent appeals and judicial review applications were not perfected and failed.
In February 2024, the applicants filed an application for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate (H&C) grounds. They also underwent a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment (PRRA), which was refused on April 9, 2025. The following day, the same officer denied the H&C application. The officer acknowledged evidence of gender-based violence in Mexico, the children’s establishment in Canada, and Sofia’s mental health counselling, but concluded that insufficient factors warranting “exceptional consideration” had been demonstrated.
The applicants sought judicial review before the Federal Court, arguing the officer had improperly required exceptional circumstances and had failed to meaningfully assess the best interests of the children — particularly Sofia, who had anxiety symptoms and had spent the vast majority of her life in Canada, and Nicolas, who arrived at age one and does not speak Spanish.
The Court’s Holding
Justice Ahmed held the officer’s decision unreasonable on three grounds and allowed the application for judicial review. First, the officer failed to conduct a genuine best-interests-of-the-child analysis. Rather than identifying, defining, and giving substantial weight to the children’s specific interests — including the impact on Sofia’s mental health, her gendered vulnerability as a girl in Mexico, and the children’s near-complete unfamiliarity with Mexican language and schooling — the officer assessed only whether Mexico could meet the children’s basic needs. The court emphasized that the children’s interests must be assessed separately from their parent’s, with attention to age, gender, and individual circumstance, and that the total absence of any weighing of those interests in the officer’s global analysis was independently sufficient to render the decision unreasonable.
Second, the officer applied an improperly elevated threshold by characterizing H&C relief as protection for those with “special circumstances” and requiring factors warranting “exceptional consideration.” The court reiterated that the correct standard — drawn from Kanthasamy v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2015 SCC 61 — is whether the applicant’s circumstances would move a reasonable person in a civilized community to wish to relieve their misfortune. The officer’s framing, and her dismissal of the principal applicant’s gendered risks by noting that all women everywhere face decisions about risk, implicitly required the applicant to demonstrate exceptional hardship relative to women globally, which is not the legal test.
Third, the officer improperly imported her PRRA findings — specifically the conclusion that a viable internal flight alternative existed in Merida — to dismiss the applicants’ H&C submissions about general country conditions, femicides, and gender-based violence in Mexico. The legal threshold for a viable IFA is distinct from the humanitarian assessment of conditions in a country of origin, and the officer’s failure to engage with that distinction further undermined the decision’s reasonableness. The matter was quashed and remitted to a different officer for redetermination.
Key Takeaways
- Officers deciding H&C applications must assess the best interests of children with specificity, accounting for each child’s age, gender, language, schooling, and mental health — not merely whether basic needs can be met in the country of return.
- Children’s interests must be assessed independently of their parent’s circumstances; hardship that does not warrant H&C relief for an adult may nonetheless warrant it for a child.
- H&C relief does not require “exceptional circumstances.” The test remains whether the applicant’s situation would move a reasonable person to wish to relieve the hardship — and framing the standard otherwise, including through unfavorable comparisons to others globally, is a reviewable error.
- PRRA findings — particularly IFA conclusions — cannot be directly imported into an H&C analysis without engaging with the different legal frameworks that govern each inquiry.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the Supreme Court of Canada’s mandate in Kanthasamy that best-interests-of-the-child analysis in immigration proceedings is not a box-ticking exercise. Practitioners can point to the court’s clear articulation that failing to weigh children’s interests in a global H&C assessment — even where some factual findings about children were made — is independently fatal to the decision. The ruling also serves as a warning against the persistent tendency of H&C officers to treat the relief as requiring proof of circumstances beyond the norm, a framing the Federal Court continues to reject.
The finding on PRRA importation is equally significant for practitioners handling concurrent proceedings. Where a client faces simultaneous PRRA and H&C determinations — particularly by the same officer — counsel should expressly flag the distinct legal frameworks and ensure the H&C record addresses country conditions as a humanitarian matter, not merely as a risk threshold question. The court’s willingness to order redetermination before a different officer also signals ongoing concern about institutional fairness where the same decision-maker handles related but legally distinct applications.