“I was on track to represent Canada at the Olympics. Then the government tried to deport my family”
Tamarri Lindo was a track star in Kingston, Jamaica, until political violence forced his family to flee to Toronto. Faced with the threat of deportation, he raced to save his family’s new life
I grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, in a neighbourhood called the Spoilers—I guess what in Canada you would call a ghetto. My parents wouldn’t let me walk to school by myself. The neighbourhood was dangerous, and it was made even more so by political division. My grandmother was a member of Parliament for the left-leaning People’s National Party, and my dad organized for them as well. He often faced death threats and once an outright assassination attempt. During the 2012 election campaign, an assailant slashed his neck. My brother and I were in the crosshairs too. Once, we heard rumours that the opposing party was planning to shoot the car that took us to school, and we had to hide out at our grandmother’s for a while. Everyone in my family was on high alert. A family friend who was a member of the police force became our unofficial bodyguard.
Despite the danger that surrounded us, I thrived at school. Track and field is the most popular sport in Jamaica, and I went to one of the best high schools in the country for it. I competed in the 60- and 110-metre hurdles, and I often won. I dreamed of becoming a professional track athlete.
In 2018, my family and I visited some of our cousins in Brampton for the first time, and we did some sight-seeing in Toronto while staying with them. I fell in love with the city. Jamaica didn’t have anything like the giant glass high-rises downtown. We came back to visit Toronto again in 2019. The trip was a way to get out of Jamaica and take a breather. It was nice to not have to worry about being shot for a few weeks.
Related: A group of young Toronto athletes will train with Olympians this weekend
We were only supposed to visit for two months, but one month in, we got word that our family friend on the police force had been assassinated back in Jamaica. We panicked. My parents made a lot of frantic phone calls as they tried to figure out what to do. It became clear that, although most of our possessions were still back home, we could not go back. It was too dangerous.
We stayed with my cousins while we tried to figure out our options for remaining in Canada. At the time, applying for refugee status seemed like our best bet. The UN and the Canadian government define refugees as people who have “a well-founded fear of persecution” in their home country, and we thought that captured our situation pretty well. We didn’t know that we’d need lawyers. The danger that we faced back in Jamaica was so blatantly obvious that we couldn’t imagine anyone not believing us.
After a month of research, we submitted our refugee claim that May. In the meantime, my parents applied for work permits and found jobs. My dad operated a forklift for Walmart, and my mum was employed at both Walmart and Rogers. She had back-to-back shifts and barely slept. They worked hard and paid taxes. I enrolled in Grade 10 at Saint Mary’s Catholic School and started doing track again, and we got our own place in downtown Toronto so I could get to school more easily. My youngest sister, Tameliah, was born later that year. It felt like we were settling into our new country.
Yet our lives were punctuated by meetings with immigration officers, to whom we had to tell and retell our story. Some officers were quite sympathetic. But, when they finally forwarded our case to someone higher up the chain, that person denied our claim, and we had to reapply. After the first rejection, we got an immigration lawyer. We would end up spending most of our money—tens of thousands of dollars—on legal fees.
Then Covid hit and everything shut down. We moved to a new place on Kipling Avenue, and I stopped doing track and started just sitting around at home. When school finally reopened, I got back at it only to lose race after race. I sank into a deep depression and cried often. I knew that my family was going through a rough time, and I felt powerless. Before the pandemic, my successes on the field had offered me a glimmer of hope. Now I didn’t even have that. Six months later, our landlord sold the place we were living in, and we moved farther out, to Oakville.
I stopped attending track practice and spent most of my time playing video games and watching TV—especially Naruto, which drew me in immediately. Naruto is about someone who starts out as the worst and ends up becoming the best—a story I really needed to hear. I also resolved to get serious about God. I had always been Christian, but I had gotten lazy about my faith. I began reading my Bible more. I prayed, made myself fast and I wrote a letter to God. I told myself that, if I have faith, then good things will happen.
Slowly, things started to fall back into place. I began winning races again, which eventually led me to train with Canada’s national track-and-field team. I could never travel abroad with them to compete—I was too afraid of being refused entry back into Canada—but it was cool to know that I was running with some of the best athletes in the country.
At the end of high school, I received scholarship offers from several universities. I chose to enrol at York University, which gave me the most generous offer. I started practising with their track-and-field team four or five times a week at 9 a.m., which meant that I had to get up at 6 a.m. to commute two and a half hours from Oakville.
Around that time, one of the immigration officers who had interviewed my family took pity on us. Immigration officers aren’t supposed to advise applicants on how to stay in the country, but when she saw that I had all these scholarship offers, she told us to consider applying under humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Rather than trying to convince the authorities that we needed protection, she suggested, we could show them everything that I had achieved in Canada and how this country had become our home.
In the spring semester of my first year at York, the Canadian government threatened to deport us twice. Our refugee claim had already been rejected, and while we had applied to stay in the country under humanitarian grounds, that alone didn’t grant us permission to be here. But we appealed, and they extended our deadline by a few months. I kept up my training. Every time I ran, I thought of my family. I was convinced that, if I could show the government that I was talented and hard-working, they would let us stay.
In 2024, I qualified for the Canadian Olympic trials in Montreal, which were set to take place over the summer. The lead-up to the trials was harrowing. It was hard to focus on training while agonizing over whether I’d be forced to leave the country. I worried that our family would be separated. Who would look after my little sister? She was only three years old.
On June 28, 2024, the day before I was due to compete at the trials, an officer from the Canada Border Services Agency called. He informed us that we would be deported in a week, even though our application still hadn’t been processed. The next day, I raced with a heavy heart. At the trials, I came third in the 110-metre hurdles, which meant that I got to wave the Ontario flag on the podium but didn’t qualify for the Olympics. I was disappointed, but I didn’t have time to grieve—I had to figure out if there was any way we could defer our deportation.
At that crucial juncture, our community rallied around us. People I knew from my track-and-field career and migrant rights groups organized petitions on our behalf. York University wrote a letter in support. My third-place win at the Olympic trials also helped to draw the attention of the media. Before the week was up, the Canadian government granted us a temporary resident permit, giving us another year in the country. Right after that, at another competition, I happened to race the guy who had qualified for the Olympics—and I beat him.
The permit was a relief, but a short-lived one. Over the next year, I collected four gold and three silver medals, including one of each from the Canada Games. But, still, the CBSA called us this past summer and told us that removal proceedings would commence in September.
If this story is starting to sound repetitive, it’s because being trapped in immigration limbo is a vicious cycle. I felt like we’d been stuck in a loop for the past six years. I kept trying to prove my worth by winning races, only to face rejection over and over again. But what else could I do but keep trying?
Once again, our community came together. Petitions circulated. Protests were organized on our behalf. When I walked around campus, total strangers would come up to me and tell me they were on my side.
On September 18, 2025, my family got an email. We each read it over several times to make sure we had read correctly. We could barely believe it: we had been granted permanent residency status. An immigration officer called to congratulate us, and we lost it. We jumped up and down and screamed. It was almost impossible to fathom that, after living in precarity for six years, I could finally start planning my future with the certainty that I could call Canada home.
I hope to become a citizen as soon as possible so I can represent Canada at the next Olympics. I want to win gold in the 110-metre hurdles—an event Canada hasn’t won since 1992. I also want to explore my creative side. I’m a health studies major at York, but I’m minoring in film. I was in an Olympics commercial for Comcast last year, and I discovered that I quite enjoy being in front of the camera. Having permanent residency status means I’ll have more time to pursue my passions both on and off the track.
There’s a picture floating around the internet of me in my red York gear with my family huddled around me. I had just won my first race of the season at the York Open, on January 31, 2025. It was the first race my family had ever seen me compete in—before then, my parents had always been too busy working.
I’ve won a lot of races, but getting to share that particular win with them was indescribable. The highlight was bringing Tameliah onto the track and showing her the hurdles. I hope there will be more moments like this to come.
