He faces jail time in the U.S. after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Instead, he’s snowboarding in Canada

Later, as he casually describes searching the border via satellite images for an opening into Canada from the U.S., the voices of children and their parents on holiday at the B.C. resort where Vo is speaking from fill the phone.

“I found two or three roads that looked like they had a chance,” he said.

The first road was blocked off by a fence and a property line — “I had to turn around. I thought I was screwed.” Then, he tried the next road. Vo said he doesn’t remember if he crossed in from North Dakota or Montana, but says he was in both of those states.

“It just led me straight to Canada, like pretty unimpededly.”

So it was that Vo, who’s from Indiana, successfully left the country where he had been sentenced to nine months behind bars for joining Capitol rioters on Jan. 6, 2021.

He’s now awaiting a pardon from U.S. president-elect Donald Trump from the relative safety of Canada, in a case that’s likely to raise eyebrows.

Vo is one of more than 1,500 people who have been charged with federal crimes stemming from the riot that left more than 100 police officers injured and sent lawmakers running into hiding as they met to certify U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory four years ago. More than 1,000 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial for a slew of charges. Vo himself was convicted of four charges, including disorderly conduct in a Capitol building.

Trump, in a post to his Truth Social account back in March 2024, promised that one of his first acts returning to office would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!” He has, however, stopped short of promising a blanket pardon. 

“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump told CNN in May. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.”

How did Antony Vo get into Canada?

Vo, now 32, was arrested in July 2021, after an investigation by the FBI’s Capitol Violence task force. Court records show Vo, who attended the Jan. 6 riot with his mother, admitted that he had “stormed” the Capitol in two different exchanges on Instagram. In other conversations, according to court records, Vo said, “My mom and I helped stop the vote count for a bit” and “President (Trump) asked me to be here tomorrow so I am with my mom LOL.”

Speaking to the Star, he’s calm, never angry or despondent, as he describes how he found himself seeking political asylum in a foreign country — his recitation of his tale has been perfected, possibly through repetition over interviews with several other media outlets.

Vo said he has a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and had just finished school when he went to the Capitol.

According to a bipartisan Senate report, officers on the front lines of the riot that day suffered chemical burns, brain injuries and broken bones. Five people died during on Jan. 6, including a police officer and a rioter who was shot by a police officer.

Vo, for his part, insists the people around he and his mother were peaceful when he entered the Capitol and added that he treated officers with respect. 

When Vo entered the Capitol with his mom, police had retreated, he said, allowing him and others to freely enter the building, adding that he and his mother left promptly after an officer told them to go.

The week before he was supposed to report to federal prison, Vo had “obsessively called (and) emailed pretty much every reputable refugee lawyer in Canada that I could.” He also tried claiming asylum in Argentina, Mexico, El Salvador, Vietnam, Belarus and Russia via their embassies and consulates. Other countries either didn’t respond to his requests, or presented significant hurdles in Vo’s path to asylum, and he said Canada is a “bastion of freedom.”

Vo said he found a Saskatchewan-based immigration attorney to help process his asylum claim, and said in his application that he feared political persecution at the hands of his judge and President Joe Biden’s administration. He crossed irregularly into Saskatchewan, travelling to Regina, then to Edmonton, Alta. — where he says he took refuge at a Buddhist research institute and joined a tennis club — before heading to Whistler, where he’s hitting the slopes on his snowboard as he awaits the processing of his asylum claim.

Funding for his trip in Canada has come purely from his savings and investments, and he added that he sold one of his cars before he left for Canada.

“I’m pretty much 99 per cent sure,” Vo said confidently of his odds of being pardoned by Trump once he takes office on Jan. 20. “I really don’t have any reason to doubt it ... it’s definitely a priority for him.”

Who is allowed to claim refugee status?

Anyone can apply for refugee protection in Canada, regardless of what country they come from,” explained Sean Rehaag, director of York University’s Refugee Law Lab.

There aren’t many refugee applications coming from the U.S. — just 142 from January to September of last year (of 146,828 total claims from all countries), with none that were accepted during that time frame.

Vo is following the process that any other refugee claimant would make, Rehaag said, and the ball is now in the government’s court to determine his eligibility for refugee status. 

In normal circumstances, a case like Vo’s could take several years because of the backlog in refugee cases, but Rehaag suggests there would be an extradition request from the U.S. which would mean a faster process.

Because the U.S. is still a democracy, “albeit a fragile one,” that respects the rule of law, said Sharry Aiken, Vo’s claim will face an uphill battle proving political persecution with no means of redress in his home country.

To Aiken, a law professor at Queen’s University, Vo is “effectively a fugitive from justice.”

“He is fleeing the implementation of a criminal conviction that he received in a process meted out by an independent judiciary that respects the rule of law,” Aiken said. Combined with the general state of human rights protection in the U.S., that makes Vo’s case “very unlikely to be accepted” — but not impossible.

The whole case is “highly ironic” to Aiken, given Trump’s outspoken criticism of Canada’s handling of border security, over which he has threatened Canada with hefty tariffs.

Vo said he doesn’t plan on sticking around in Canada for long, and has been vocal about his location and his intention to return to the U.S. if and when he has been pardoned by Trump. In the meantime, Rehaag said, U.S. authorities will have to go through special processes to extradite him.

“For good reason, Canada has mechanisms that prevent removal of people without some kind of process where the person says, ‘I’m facing mistreatment in my home country, I’m a political dissident and I’m being subject to unlawful price persecution’,” he said. And those processes would definitely take longer than the few weeks left until Trump’s inauguration.

“There’s simply a reality that if we want to adhere to international law, and we want to make sure that we’re not returning people to countries where they face persecution or torture or risked their lives, we have to have a process in place and that process is going to take some time,” Rehaag added.

“I’m confident that the Canadian system will deal appropriately with Mr. Vo,” Aiken said, batting away ideas that Vo should be sent back summarily. “We’re a country that respects the rule of law. We have a legal process. He’s engaged in it. And he has the right to see that process through.”

With files from The Associated Press