Migrant Crossings into Canada Surge as US Deportation Threats Grow

Nestor and José had just stepped off the Greyhound bus from New York City, and like other migrants gathering at the Sunoco station just off Interstate 87 in Plattsburgh, the two Venezuelan friends were desperate for a taxi ride to Canada. They wore only thin jackets and no gloves or hats. Nestor’s hands were shaking after only a few minutes outside—at 3:30 in the afternoon, when it was still a relatively warm three degrees. Over the next two nights, the temperature would plunge to minus eleven and then to minus seventeen degrees. This would be no walk in the woods. But that was their plan. While other migrants at the Sunoco station were arranging rides to the official Canadian border crossing a half hour north on the highway, Nestor and José were ready to risk arrest, or worse, by hiking through backcountry in mid-January, just as the United States was about to tighten its net of immigration laws. “You can’t go,” I heard a bystander call out to them in the Sunoco parking lot. “You’ll die out there.” There was every reason to think they would not make it, just like the Mexican woman who drowned, the two Senegalese men who froze, or the others whose tragic endings have made the local news in recent years. As US president Donald Trump clamps down on America’s southern border and escalates his immigration crackdown into a campaign of threats and deportations, many asylum seekers are looking the other way—north, to Canada. Those who arrive in Plattsburgh on the last leg of their journey to the border will continue one of two ways: a taxi ride to the official border crossing, where legal restrictions make it difficult to enter the country, or the more dangerous route through frozen, forested terrain to sneak their way in, maybe with the services of a smuggler. The Sunoco station, with its long, well-stocked aisles of snack food and six stools at the window, is as good a place as any to think things through, or to wait for the next bus back to New York. Both in their early twenties, Nestor and José (I am only using their first names) didn’t want to turn back. “We’re from Venezuela, but because of the violence and crime there, we got special refugee status in Colombia,” Nestor said, communicating through a mobile translation app. “But at the moment, that part of Colombia that we left is at war.” They had thought they could enter Canada at Roxham Road, once known among international migrant routes as a kind of back door for refugee claimants, just nine kilometres from the official crossing at Lacolle, Quebec. Apparently, they didn’t know Roxham was closed by the Canadian government two years ago. Their Uber driver refused to let them in his car and drove off in a hurry. Inside the Sunoco, another man who had arrived on the same bus offered to get involved. “I’ll take them up to the woods,” he said to me. “I’m just waiting for my friend to pick me up.” He was in possession of a tabletop-sized slot machine. “I’ll do it for a hundred bucks each.” It was getting dark. The Venezuelans declined the ride and walked out the door.

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The first time Trump took office, in 2017, he contributed to a surge in asylum seekers looking to come to Canada—over 50,000, the highest level in decades. And a large portion were from the US. Canada began preparing earlier this year for another surge after Trump’s return to office. In Quebec, space for a new processing centre has been leased near Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, where hundreds of asylum seekers have been presenting themselves in recent weeks. And to catch anyone trying to cross illegally in the woods—and to respond to the US president’s complaints about the southbound flow of migrants and illegal drugs—Mounties have deployed more officers, surveillance drones, heat sensors, stationary cameras, and two Black Hawk helicopters. This was, after all, the busiest region for illegal crossings in both directions along the entire 8,891-kilometre border last year, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and US Customs and Border Protection. Plattsburgh, population 20,000, spills down from the suburban malls near the interstate, from the big Price Chopper grocery, the Walmart, the Splash Car Wash, the Five Guys, and nearly two dozen other fast-food outlets to an older downtown on the edge of Lake Champlain, where the sweeping views tell visitors exactly where they are: across the water from Vermont’s Green Mountains and up the shoreline from New York’s rugged Adirondacks. It’s a gateway to the great outdoors for cottagers, boaters, hikers, and skiers, an easy drive of an hour and fifteen minutes for the 4 million–plus Canadians in metropolitan Montreal. But away from the lake, on the lonely roads that wind through some of the poorer tracts of New York real estate, a darker story is playing out. These are the crossing fields, where migrants heading in both directions take their chances with the elements, with law enforcement, with the smugglers, and, if they make it that far, with finding a stable life at the end of their trail. The path through these North Country communities is well worn. Nearly two centuries ago, enslaved African Americans took cover in safe houses along the Underground Railroad, on their way to Quebec and Ontario. In the 1960s and ’70s, with Americans divided over the Vietnam War, Plattsburgh was a place for draft resisters to exhale and connect with others in the anti-war movement, before they crossed into Canada. Once again, the Plattsburgh area is at a migration crossroads. Anyone living near the border can attest to it. “Everybody, everybody’s found clothes. Everybody’s had a migrant in their barn or somewhere,” said Terrence Rowe, who lives about one and a half kilometres from the border, in Champlain, New York. “I believe they just want to put as many miles between you and them. I don’t think they want to hang around.” But Rowe also pointed to a clearing in the brush that runs past his house and straight to the border, leaving him and his partner exposed to a human byway. “It’s seventy feet from my bedroom window. Who knows who it is crossing here?” Rowe has recorded dozens of migrants passing in both directions, day and night, on his motion-activated video cameras. In January, he witnessed an incident in real time: in his driveway, a swarm of US Border Patrol officers arrested a migrant who had arrived by Uber. The car had been called to Rowe’s driveway in broad daylight—not a usual sight in a world where everyone tries to stay hidden. “I think migration is often invisible,” said Janet McFetridge, the Champlain village mayor, “because they’re on the run for whatever reason and they don’t necessarily want to be seen.” “I’m sure there’s something right now that’s going on around us,” McFetridge added on a recent afternoon, in between serving the regulars at her cafe and bookshop on Main Street. “There’s movement somewhere back in the border half a mile there.” McFetridge, a retired schoolteacher, works in the village office in the morning and runs the cafe most afternoons and Saturdays, providing a gathering place for villagers in a two-storey building from the 1870s that she and her late husband brought back to life. She often donates her tips and any profits to charitable causes. In the winter, she keeps a collection of hats and mittens in the trunk of her car should anyone, including a passing migrant, be in need. For years, McFetridge gave out mittens, hats, and words of encouragement to migrants as they were about to cross into Canada at Roxham Road. She posted herself there six days a week, sometimes along with others from Plattsburgh Cares, a coalition providing advocacy and support to migrants. They greeted migrants as they climbed out of the taxis that had picked them up in Plattsburgh. Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers would arrest the asylum seekers on the spot but then escort them into the system for processing. Eventually, many of those refugee claims would be taken up. Roxham became a byword throughout the migration routes in the Americas and beyond. Migrants would arrive by bus or train to Plattsburgh, then take a taxi to Roxham, and walk the last few metres along a dirt path, dragging their suitcases. Between 2017 and 2023, nearly 100,000 asylum seekers crossed into Canada at unofficial entry points like Roxham Road—bypassing formal border crossings and, with them, the Safe Third Country Agreement. That pact between Canada and the US bars most asylum seekers from making a refugee claim at official ports of entry, since each country considers the other a “safe” place to make such claims. When Canada closed the pathway in March 2023, migrants showed up unaware at Roxham and were turned away. With no place else to go, they turned to the county department of social services, local churches, and migrant support groups like Plattsburgh Cares for emergency food and shelter. Since then, more migrants seeking asylum have arrived in Canada by plane—a total of 23,020 in Quebec last year, nearly double the 11,655 in 2022, the last full year that Roxham was open. While Plattsburgh Cares lent support on the New York side of Roxham, they were often joined there by the Quebec group Bridges Not Borders. Standing on the New York side, the Quebec group would monitor interactions between the migrants and the Mounties. Both support groups, along with immigration experts, raised concerns that closing Roxham would force migrants to take more dangerous routes into Canada and rely more on smugglers. “It’s gone so much underground, and that was our big concern when Roxham was closed,” said Frances Ravensbergen, a spokesperson for Bridges Not Borders. “There was a humane approach when people were coming through Roxham and they could get support on both sides.” “Now people are crossing just all over the place,” Ravensbergen said. “We know there’s two-way traffic going on. There’s certainly indications of smuggling but nobody, nobody, knows the full extent of what’s going on.” The final hours of the life of Ana Karen Vasquez-Flores show how quickly things can go wrong when a migrant turns to a human smuggler for help. According to a criminal complaint filed by US Border Patrol, Vasquez-Flores was last seen on a security camera on December 11, 2023, at an Esso station in Lacolle, around six kilometres from the US border. She and her alleged smuggler waited in his car at the gas station until her husband, Miguel Mojarro-Magana, sent a photo of a bank deposit of $2,500 (US) as proof of payment. The deposit was made at a Chase branch on Junction Boulevard in Queens, New York. Three minutes later, at 2:38 p.m., her handler wheeled out of the Esso parking lot and drove them down Highway 15, toward the border. The two would stay in touch through messages on WhatsApp while she walked alone through the woods, near Champlain, to a designated pickup spot. Vasquez-Flores, who was five months pregnant, would be wading through a river in the dark along the way. The winds were starting to pick up in the late afternoon, to nineteen kilometres an hour, and the temperature dropped to two degrees by sundown. Shortly after 6:15 p.m., she took her first steps into the Great Chazy River, according to messages later obtained by US Border Patrol. She was never heard from again. Vasquez-Flores, a Mexican in her thirties, had arrived in Montreal with her husband just ten days earlier, on December 1. Mojarro-Magana had a US visa; his wife didn’t, according to news reports. The plan was for him to go ahead to the US without her and for her to cross illegally to meet him. On December 7, four days before his wife’s crossing, according to the criminal complaint, Mojarro-Magana responded to a TikTok video allegedly posted by Jhader Augusto Uribe-Tobar, a Colombian national living in Montreal. They exchanged the following messages (translated from Spanish by a Border Patrol agent): Uribe-Tobar: It costs $2500 American, It is worked through Montreal and they are left in the City of Plattsburgh, NY. Mojarro-Magana: How much do they walk bro And is it safe? Uribe-Tobar: 2 hours and half. 3 hours friend depends how you walk Mojarro-Magana: Is it with a guide or with GPS Uribe-Tobar: Well, look, truth is, the only certain thing in life is death, but we are effective Mojarro-Magana: Yes that is Uribe-Tobar: We do not use a guide, friend, we work in another way. On December 11, the day of the crossing, text messages were exchanged between Vasquez-Flores, her husband, and Uribe-Tobar. Vasquez-Flores had this final text exchange with Uribe-Tobar as she was approaching the river: 6:15 p.m., Uribe-Tobar: Get off further ahead 6:15 p.m., Vasquez-Flores: More 6:16 p.m., Uribe-Tobar: Because there are low marks 6:16 p.m., Uribe-Tobar: At your right hand side 6:16 p.m., Uribe-Tobar: There is a wall that slows down the river. 6:16 p.m., Vasquez-Flores: Okay 6:17 p.m., Uribe-Tobar: Come on 6:17 p.m., Uribe-Tobar: Come on 6:17 p.m., Uribe-Tobar: Karen The Border Patrol officer who filed the criminal complaint against Uribe-Tobar wrote: “Based on my training, experience, and knowledge of the investigation, in this exchange [Uribe-Tobar] directed Vasquez-Flores on where to go and how to cross the river. The last message that said ‘Karen’ showed that it was sent at 6:17 p.m. and it shows that it was never delivered; it is suspected this is when she was swept away by the river.” The next day, Mojarro-Magana spoke to a Border Patrol officer at the McDonald’s in Champlain. He reported his wife missing and shared a screenshot of the last location that she sent him. It was just south of the intersection of Perry Mills Road and Missile Base Road. Search teams found footprints in the snow leading into the river. The river flows east from there on its way to Lake Champlain, passing just across the road from Rowe’s house, before it winds through the village of Champlain, where Vasquez-Flores’s body was recovered three days after she went missing. Villagers haven’t forgotten. McFetridge and others in the county planted a cross in memory of Vasquez-Flores last July, at the river’s edge. Also mentioned at the ceremony, the mayor said, were the deaths of two Senegalese men, Abdoulaye Ndoye and Ndongo Sarry, both twenty-five, whose bodies were found covered in snow in March last year, about fifteen kilometres outside the village. The border is never far from the mind. At McFetridge’s cafe and bookshop, neighbours will swap stories about the articles of clothing they found on their property, the sighting of a stranger wheeling a suitcase through the village, or the rescue of a group of six Haitians in the woods just west of the village in mid-January this year. But they won’t talk about US immigration policy at the cafe—not in a close-knit town of 5,605 which narrowly went for Trump in the 2024 presidential vote. “Trumpers and non-Trumpers do not speak to each other about this issue at all. At all, no,” said Cathie Davenport, who lives in Mooers, just west of the village. “We’ll talk about other things. Yeah, about a lot of other things, but not this.” Davenport has been involved in Plattsburgh Cares. She said in an interview that she objects to Trump’s deportation roundups. “I’m worried about people who are legally here and have become citizens being picked up and deported. That’s what I’m worried about.” Rowe might have other ideas, but “when I go to [McFetridge’s] little coffee shop down here, I don’t talk politics at all,” he said, adding: “My golf partners are for Democrats too, but we don’t talk about it. We golf.” Any talk of American politics would be foreign to Rolana, a sixty-two-year-old teacher from Haiti, a country overrun by street gangs. On Christmas Eve, she arrived at the Sunoco station in Plattsburgh with two large suitcases on wheels and a hand-held bag. She had hopes for a new start in Quebec, where she imagined living and working in her native language. “I want to enter Canada,” she said in French before climbing into her Uber at sundown. “I am an immigrant because Haiti is very difficult.” The school she ran in a suburb of Port-au-Prince was broken into. After that, she left for the US in 2023 and stayed with relatives in several cities before deciding to head north. “I know that maybe I’ll be more at ease in Canada with my French. All my life, I’ve been a teacher,” she said. “I’ll listen to my cousin who advised me to settle in Canada.” She had another reason for trying to leave the US for Canada in December—the worsening political climate. As a Haitian, she was admitted to the US in 2023 under the Temporary Protected Status—TPS—program, which allows individuals from designated countries facing conflict or crisis to remain temporarily and apply for permission to work. But Trump campaigned for the White House on an anti-immigration platform, promising “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” to rid the US of undocumented immigrants, many of whom he claimed were “murderers and rapists.” He also promised to scale back the TPS. The campaign reached a low point in September, when Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were targeted by false rumours that they abducted and ate family pets—claims Trump repeated in a presidential debate with Kamala Harris. Of course, Rolana and her relatives took note. They worried that after Trump took office on January 20, he could revoke the TPS at any time and leave her subject to deportation. “Nobody wants to be undocumented or illegal under that regime—and you can call it that,” said Naomie, a niece, who spoke by phone from her home in Washington, DC. She asked that her real name not be published. “I’m a [naturalized] US citizen, thankfully, but not even thankfully, because I don’t even know if that protects me in any way, shape, or form.” Anyone who lands in Quebec and files a claim for asylum will have to wait three years and nine months for a decision, according to the latest estimate from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada—if they are deemed eligible for consideration at all. Rolana was denied entry on the spot. On Christmas Eve, she got a ride to the border at Lacolle and exited her Uber within a half kilometre of the border agents’ booths, pulling her suitcases across the plaza to present herself to officials. After interviewing Rolana, they offered her a meal and a shower, she said, but then sent her back to the US on Christmas Day. She was denied entry to Canada because, as someone who had been living in the US, she didn’t qualify under the Safe Third Country Agreement. Rolana took a bus to New York and made her way to Washington to live with her niece. She spent months looking for work, even trying for shift work at Walmart or a supermarket and wondering how long she would be able to stay in the country. She eventually got fed up living as a migrant in Trump’s America. Turned away by Canada and unwelcome in the US, in March, she moved back to the one place she could still call home: Haiti, a country under siege by rival gangs, the land she fled nearly two years ago after her school was broken into and robbed of its generator. Her big challenge now is to keep her school running. “I try to hold on. I try to find the means at hand to continue the school,” she said. “I can’t let these children down.” She insists she feels safe, despite a report from a United Nations representative that says Haiti is near “total chaos.” Her experience in the US left her feeling disappointed. “I can’t stand Donald Trump because of the way he’s treating immigrants,” Rolana said in a phone interview from Pétion-Ville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. “I am not a thief. I am not a criminal.” In recent months, the Trump administration has started ratcheting up pressure on migrants by moving up the deadlines for those in the TPS program to leave the US. But apparently, that hasn’t forced more migrants to cross through the woods to Canada, according to Corporal Érique Gasse, a spokesman for the RCMP. To be sure, the Mounties don’t catch every migrant, but Gasse said they are confident that, with their surveillance technology, they are aware of almost every migrant who is crossing. Then it’s a question of getting a patrol car dispatched in time to make an arrest, either by the RCMP or the Sûreté du Québec provincial police. “When we see someone on the way, we hear someone, feel someone is passing, we will dispatch patrols, and again, most of the time, they will find them,” Gasse said. The RCMP intercepted sixty-three migrants in March in Quebec, down from the ninety caught in March of last year. It’s unclear how many might have eluded the Mounties altogether. The biggest activity now at Quebec’s doorstep is not in a desolate area of the woods but at the main border crossing at Lacolle. The number of asylum seekers in Quebec is down overall from a year ago, but they have been spiking at Lacolle since the Department of Homeland Security started warning Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans in a temporary-stay program called CHNV to leave the country immediately (these warnings have since escalated to actual termination notices). The number of migrants jumped from 755 in February to 1,356 in March, then up to 2,733 in April, which is four times the figure for April 2024, according to the Canadian Border Services Agency. Those headed for the Lacolle crossing are facing their own risks too. In the past, when migrants were turned away by Canadian border agents, US Border Patrol would receive them but usually let them go. But thanks to an executive order signed by Trump in January, Border Patrol is required to take the rejected asylum seekers from Canadian authorities and turn them over to officers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, for detention and deportation. “It happened before, but it seems to be more common now,” said Ottawa-based immigration lawyer Heather Neufeld. These developments on both sides of the border left the Venezuelan friends Nestor and José with few options after spending that first night at a hotel in Plattsburgh. But Nestor remained hopeful. When told in a text message from The Walrus in February that Venezuelans were at risk of losing their TPS protections, he wrote: “I don’t think this will spread, or maybe there will be an order for an amnesty for all those people who are in danger in their country of origin. Now for the moment, just pray and ask God that everything goes well.” He declined to reveal his whereabouts. For some migrants, the fear of being caught and detained in the US is enough to force them to take drastic measures, said Neufeld, even if that means risking their safety in a clandestine hike with a smuggler. “People who are fearing for their lives will find ways to come to Canada,” she said. If Neufeld is correct, Trump’s immigration policies could encourage more migrants to take their chances crossing Rowe’s property in Champlain next winter. Over the winter, his cameras caught four adults—one of them holding a baby—walking through deep snow in a blowing storm. A short while later, three of the adults, with the baby, turned back. The fourth person disappeared into the distance on their way to the Canadian border. https://walrus-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/img/migrantsRowe2-1.mp4(Video courtesy of Terrence Rowe)The post Migrant Crossings into Canada Surge as US Deportation Threats Grow first appeared on The Walrus.