You may recall a bizarre story last week about Jonathan Nicola, a 6-foot-10, 29-year-old refugee from Sudan who had been attending Grade 11 at Catholic Central High School in Windsor, Ont., and played on their basketball team.
Since April 15, Nicola has been detained by Canadian Border Services who discovered he was not, as his paperwork claimed, 17 years of age. He is still being held, considered a risk to flee the country, and did not speak at a hearing held Tuesday. However, Nicola did get a chance to tell part of his side of the story at another hearing on April 19, when he stated that he did not know his true age. The Star‘s immigration reporter, Nicholas Keung, obtained transcripts of the meeting:
[Nicola] said he did not know how old he really was because his mother kept telling him different ages.
“I aways keep asking what is the specific age that I was born, and she has told me that she could not remember,” he told the April 19 hearing.
“Over (in South Sudan) . . . not every year we study . . . we always keep moving to different schools, and over there, they do not ask your age. They do not ask you nothing,” Nicola said.
All he wanted, he told officials, was to get a good education in Canada so he could support his family back home.
“I am not a liar person. I am religious. I pray to God . . . If something bad happen to me here, I do not know what would happen to my mother back home because she is really sick. She has diabetes,” Nicola said.
“I did not came (sic) here to harm any people or do something bad. All my goal is to study and get the education, so I can go back home, I can help my mother, I can help all my rest of the family.”
According to a transcript of the April 19 hearing, Nicola arrived at Pearson International Airport last Nov. 23 on a student visa to attend Catholic Central Secondary School in Windsor on a full scholarship.
It is not known who provided the scholarship but a spokesperson for the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board confirmed it does not offer athletic scholarships.
It is also unclear how Nicola could have successfully gone through so many levels of screening — by immigration officials at the visa post that issued the student visa, border authorities at Pearson airport and the school board that enrolled him as a student.
To add to the confusion (or perhaps explain it), Nicola went on to claim that he had met a “Coach Steyn” in Sudan who promised to make the necessary arrangements to secure a basketball scholarship in North America, and that he would take care of the paperwork, including all personal information such as his date of birth.
“I told him, no, I was not born in 1998. I told him that I am too young for 1998. I’m not in 1998. Then he told me, ‘No, you go back ask my mother, ask my mother how old am I.’ And my mother she do not even remember. She told me 1993, 1990,” Nicola said at the earlier hearing.
“So I went back and this guy he just do me the paper . . . he did the whole papers. He did everything.”
It was not until December when Nicola applied for a U.S. visitor’s visa to play basketball with the school that Canada Border Services Agency was alerted by their American counterparts that his fingerprints matched a former failed refugee claimant with the same name but a different age.
His student visa application and passport to Canada said he was born on Nov. 25, 1998, but the records with U.S. authorities showed his date of birth as Nov. 1, 1986.
“The United States officials also advised that he had also applied for a United States visa in Nairobi that was refused in April 2015 . . . where he was applying to enter the U.S. as a student on a full scholarship,” said Kelly Cutting, counsel for the Canadian border enforcement agency.
Nicola apologized to Catholic Central basketball head coach Pete Cusumano, who he had been living with as part of a student refugee program, and asked to be sent back to Sudan if action were to be taken, yet as The Star reports:
Nicola’s plea for release was denied by adjudicator Valerie Currie, who said she believed he deliberately deceived officials so he could come to Canada to study and to support his family.
“I understand your desire to do that, but the way you have gone about doing that is frankly, quite illegal,” said Currie, according to the transcript.
While a 12-year age gap certainly makes this a particularly extraordinary case, it is fairly common for birth dates of African-born basketball prospects to be unclear, or under question. It’s a problem North American scouts deal with sometimes when trying to identify young talent in the continent— perhaps the best example is Toronto Raptors centre Bismack Biyombo, whose age is listed as 23 (and was drafted as an 18-year-old), and has become the butt of many jokes for seeming older.
Nicola’s next detention hearing is scheduled for May 24, though he could face an ‘admissibility hearing’ sooner, which could see him removed from Canada.
