Toronto man, who paid $10K to build ‘wall’ tunnel from Canada to US to protest border wall, goes back to court

A Toronto man, who paid $10,000 to build a “resistance tunnel” to the U.S. border to protest the border wall, is set to return to court in a continuing feud against the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency.

The exchange between Oscar Perea and the CBP and government lawyers involved only a short space of time, reported NBC. Perea, who ran unsuccessfully in May for the Toronto City Council, had been arrested and jailed in September after he was caught attempting to cross the border between Canada and the U.S.

Perea claimed to have trespassed into a large tunnel, which he had paid around $10,000 to build for the purpose of sending a message to CBP officers, according to NBC.

“It’s been four days of pain and pain for me, and to try to express myself and give people a glimpse of what is going on right across the border is wrong,” Perea, who came from Venezuela and later became an English professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, told the media at the time.

He also said he organized protests across the U.S. and in Mexico, the report stated.

Perea was released without bail and made his way across the border in a tunnel on a mission to “expel the border,” according to his argument to police, which was contained in a statement released the night of his arrest.

His intended message, he alleged, was to “disdain and despise their tactics.”

When the wall first went up on the Mexican border, it did not take long for construction to be slowed due to “coyotes” crossing the border for people trying to work on the wall, he added.

When Perea’s tunnel went up, however, “the coyotes have found a new way of dealing with them. They have taken the tunnel technology and turned it around and are mining this tunnel for health effects. They are getting tunnel drugs from here, so they are quite serious about not letting anyone go through this tunnel,” he told reporters.

Perea is set to return to court to continue a case in Canada.

The CBP has a wide array of legal options and authorities there are “open to working” with Perea, NBC reported.

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