Biography
Joshua Key, born in Guthrie, Oklahoma in 1978, enlisted in the United States Army in 2002 and was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. He served eight months in Iraq in 2003 as a combat engineer, taking part in what he has described as some two hundred raids on civilian homes. Returning to the United States on leave in November 2003, he did not go back, and on March 8, 2005 he entered Canada at Toronto, filing an asylum claim three days later.
His refugee claim was rejected by the Immigration and Refugee Board on October 20, 2006. He won an appeal in the Federal Court on July 4, 2008, which required the claim to be reheard, but received a second negative decision on July 30, 2010. In 2016 he was granted temporary permission to work and to receive government health care while his case continued to be reviewed. With the Canadian author Lawrence Hill he wrote The Deserter's Tale, an account of his service in Iraq and his decision to leave. He has been publicly documented living in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Present residence and outstanding United States military status unverified: reporting through 2024 places him among the American war resisters still seeking the right to remain in Canada, but no recent official record has been found confirming his current residence or the status of any military case against him. He is recorded here as currently in exile on the assumption that he remains abroad.
The article discusses Canadian refuge and immigration proceedings involving American Iraq War resisters. Immigration appeals, a right to remain, or church sanctuary do not by themselves establish a new episode of imprisonment. Mountz, Micieli-Voutsinas and Mohan, Contrapuntal histories of war resistance, The Canadian Geographer 66(4), 2022, pp741–755, original PDF page 13. Source: https://www.newday.com/sites/default/files/resource_files/2022-12/2022%20Canadian%20Geographer.pdf#page=13
