A Refused Risk Assessment and the Race to Delay Diego's Removal

The situation

By the time Diego came to our office, he had already tried to handle the pre-removal risk assessment on his own, filling out the forms using a template he found online and writing, in his own words, an account of why he believed returning to his home country would put him in danger. The assessment was refused. The officer's decision, when it came back, focused heavily on gaps and inconsistencies in what Diego had submitted, dates that did not quite line up, an account that read, in places, as vague where it should have been specific, and concluded that he had not established the risk he described.

Diego worked as a veterinary technician at a clinic in St. Catharines, and his wife Oksana worked as a bookkeeper for a small accounting practice. Between them they had built a modest but stable household, and they had set aside savings specifically in case Diego's immigration matters required legal fees down the road, which by the time they came to see us, they clearly did. The couple did not have deep experience navigating immigration paperwork, and Diego had assumed, filling out the risk assessment himself, that simply describing what had happened to him would be enough. It was not, and the refusal came with a further consequence attached: once the assessment was refused, the department set a date for Diego's removal.

Diego and Oksana did what many people in their position do, they filed an application asking a court to review whether the refusal had been decided properly, a process that can take many months to resolve. But filing that application did not, on its own, stop the removal date from standing. Diego was still expected to leave the country on the date set, regardless of whether the court review of the refusal was still pending, unless someone specifically asked for that date to be pushed back.

That was the situation when the couple called us: a removal date bearing down, a court review that would not be decided in time to affect it, and a risk assessment refusal that, on paper, read as though Diego had simply failed to make his case. Oksana did most of the talking on that first call, explaining that Diego had gone quiet since the refusal arrived, and that the two of them had spent the past weeks assuming there was little left to do beyond waiting for the court review to eventually be decided, however long that took.

Why this was harder than it looked

On first read, Diego's file looked like a difficult one to rescue. The officer's refusal had specifically pointed to inconsistencies in the account Diego had submitted, and inconsistencies in a risk-based claim tend to carry a lot of weight, because credibility is often the central question in these assessments. When we first went through the refusal decision, before we had reviewed anything else, it read as a reasonably supported conclusion, not an obviously wrong one.

What changed our view was going back to the underlying facts rather than the version of them Diego had managed to put into an online form under pressure and without guidance. Diego's account rested substantially on events involving his sister, Iryna, who still lived in their home country and who had experienced threats connected to the same situation Diego said put him at risk. Diego had described some of what Iryna had told him, secondhand and from memory, but he had not obtained anything directly from her, no written statement, no supporting documentation of the threats she had described, nothing that let an officer weigh her experience as evidence in its own right rather than as Diego's recollection of a conversation.

The apparent inconsistencies the officer had flagged were mostly a product of that gap. Diego had described events out of order in places, mixed up which threat had happened before which departure, and generally told a version of a complicated, frightening set of events the way most people do when recalling something stressful without the structure a proper statement provides. None of it, once we sat with him and built a careful timeline, actually conflicted. It had simply never been organized in a way that let an officer see that it did not conflict.

This is why the file was harder than it looked at the outset. We were not dealing with a case where the facts were weak. We were dealing with a case where the facts were reasonably strong but had been presented in a way that read as weak, against a legal test that puts real weight on exactly the kind of surface-level consistency Diego's self-filed account had failed to demonstrate. Rebuilding the substance would take time we did not fully have, given the removal date already on the calendar. It also meant we could not simply resubmit a cleaner version of what Diego had already filed once and lost on; we needed genuinely new, independently sourced material, because an officer revisiting a file already marked by credibility concerns is unlikely to be persuaded by the same story told more tidily the second time.

What we did

1. Reviewed the refusal decision line by line. Before deciding on a strategy, we needed to know exactly which inconsistencies the officer had relied on and why, rather than treating the refusal as a single blunt rejection, because the specific reasons given would determine what kind of new evidence could actually address the officer's stated concerns rather than simply repeating what had already been rejected.
2. Rebuilt Diego's timeline from scratch. We sat with Diego over several sessions and reconstructed the sequence of events in detail, cross-checking dates against anything documentary he had, like travel records and old messages, so the account going forward would be internally consistent rather than relying on memory alone under pressure, which was largely what had produced the inconsistencies in the first place.
3. Obtained a direct statement from Iryna. Rather than leave Diego's sister's experience as secondhand recollection, we arranged for Iryna to provide her own written account of what had happened to her, translated and properly prepared, which let her experience stand as independent evidence in its own right rather than as something filtered a second time through Diego's memory of a stressful phone call made under difficult circumstances.
4. Sought corroborating documentation. We worked with Diego and Iryna to identify any supporting records that existed, correspondence, any official reports Iryna had filed with authorities in their home country, anything that could independently support the timeline, understanding that risk claims are strengthened considerably by documentation that does not depend entirely on the applicant's own word, and weakened when none exists to check it against.
5. Filed a request to defer the removal date. Because the court review of the original refusal was still pending and would not be decided before the scheduled removal, we filed a request asking the department to push the removal date back until that review concluded, arguing that removing Diego before the court had ruled on whether the refusal itself was properly decided would make the review meaningless in practice.
6. Supported the deferral request with the reorganized evidence. Rather than simply asking for more time, we attached the rebuilt timeline and Iryna's statement to the deferral request, showing the officer deciding on deferral that the underlying claim was substantive enough to be worth the court's continued attention, not merely a delay tactic filed to buy Diego a few more weeks in the country.
7. Kept Oksana informed at every stage. Because the couple's savings were funding the legal work and because Oksana's own stability depended heavily on the outcome, we made sure she understood, honestly, what a deferral could and could not achieve, it would buy time for the court review, not guarantee its outcome, so the family could plan around a realistic picture rather than false reassurance.

The outcome

The deferral was granted. Diego's removal date was pushed back until the court's review of the original risk assessment refusal was decided, which meant he was not removed from the country while that review remained open. That was the outcome we were seeking and the most realistic one available at that stage, given that a deferral request does not reopen or reverse the refusal itself, only the timing of removal.

The underlying refusal was not overturned as part of this process. The court review remained a separate matter with its own timeline, and we were candid with Diego and Oksana throughout that a favourable deferral decision said nothing about how that review would ultimately come out. The family's relief at the deferral was real, but we made sure it was not mistaken for a resolution of the actual risk assessment question, which was still unresolved when our work on the deferral concluded.

For Diego and Oksana, the practical result was that a bad situation was contained rather than allowed to become worse while other processes ran their course. Diego kept his job at the clinic, the household kept its stability, and the family avoided the outcome they had feared most in the near term. It came at a cost, the savings they had set aside for exactly this kind of legal work were substantially spent, and the underlying uncertainty about the risk assessment itself remained.

Looking back, both Diego and Oksana said the hardest lesson was realizing that a self-filed account, however honest, is not the same as a properly built one, and that the gap between the two had very nearly cost Diego his ability to stay in the country while a legitimate legal question about his safety was still being decided. Oksana said afterward that the deferral, while not the final answer they wanted, was the first point in months where the pressure of an approaching date finally lifted enough for the family to think clearly about what came next.

What you can learn from this