Border crossings from Canada into New York, Vermont and N.H. are up tenfold. Local cops want help.

2023/03/20 Leave a comment

More on the southern flow at the border:

On the snowy border between New York and Canada, the local sheriff’s office is calling for the U.S. Border Patrol to put more manpower behind what the locals call a growing crisis: The number of illegal border crossings in the area over the last five months is nearly 10 times what it was over the same time last year, and the border crossers are in danger of freezing to death.

From Oct. 1 to Feb. 28, about 2,000 migrants crossed the border between Canada and New Hampshire, Vermont and New York south through the forests, compared to just 200 crossings in the same period the previous year.

The migrants are mainly from Mexico, and they can travel to Canada without visas before they cross illegally into the U.S., often to reunite with their families.

Last weekend, Clinton County, New York, Sheriff David Favro’s team assisted Border Patrol in rescuing 39 migrants, some whose clothes had frozen to their bodies.

“We are seeing more and more people, and it can be a deadly terrain if you’re not familiar with it,” Favro said.

He said responding to rescues like that has taxed the resources of his department, already stretched thin to cover the residents of his rural county, population 80,000, which shares about 30 miles of border with the Canadian province of Quebec.

“The only way to really be able to cover and protect [the northern border] is boots on the ground,” Favro said.

Just last week, Customs and Border Protection added 25 agents to the area, the Swanton Sector, to deter migration. But Favro and other locals who spoke to NBC News in Mooers, New York, said that’s not enough.

Mooers Fire Chief Todd Gumlaw said he recently helped rescue two Mexican women stuck in an icy swamp in the middle of the night. Gumlaw, along with Border Patrol, local police and EMS workers, was able to render first aid and get the women to a hospital to be treated for frostbite and mild hypothermia after they lost their shoes in the swamp, he said. “Preservation of human life is first and foremost with my department. We put [immigration status] to the back of our mind,” Gumlaw said.

The Mooers/Champlain region is a clump of small blue-collar residences and farms, where, according to locals, “everyone knows everyone” and properties can be several blocks apart, adding a sense of unease among some of the locals witnessing the mass migration in the region.

According to local first responders, southbound migrants often seek shelter in empty sheds and barns to shield themselves from the cold.

April Barcomb, a Mooers resident, said she has had migrants show up at her doorstep and is now saving up for security cameras.

“It’s not something I would usually do,” she said. “But it makes me think twice. And with the kids and the family, I gotta install cameras.”

While most locals who spoke to NBC News said they understood that most migrants crossing the region aren’t threats, neighbors are keeping their eyes open for unusual activity.

“People are scared,” a Champlain County resident said. “It’s the fear of the unknown. They’re [neighbors] worried about their safety, because they don’t know these people.”

Most of the migrants are Mexicans, who are frequently blocked from crossing the southern U.S. border and believe they will have an easier time if they fly to Canada and then cross into the U.S. from the north.

According to a CBP spokesperson, the Swanton Sector has been the site of more than 67% of all migrant crossings at the northern border across all eight sectors through February.

Unlike the southern border, where over 16,000 Border Patrol agents are responsible for staffing roughly 2,000 miles, about 2,000 border agents patrol the 5,000-mile border between the U.S. and Canada, which includes Alaska’s land boundaries, making it the longest international land border in the world.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a letter Tuesday to step up enforcement along his state’s 51-mile border with Canada or allow his police forces more authority to do so.

“Over the last few months, the State of New Hampshire has attempted to assist the federal government in securing our northern border. These offers of assistance have been repeatedly rejected. The Biden administration has cut funding and hindered the state’s ability to assist in patrolling the northern border,” Sununu said.

A spokesperson for CBP said the additional agents who were just sent to the Swanton Sector will help deter migration.

Source: Border crossings from Canada into New York, Vermont and N.H. are up tenfold. Local cops want help.

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Irregular or illegal? The fight over what to call the thousands of migrants streaming into Canada

2018/07/12 Leave a comment

Nice summary. My mother was an “irregular” if not “illegal” when her mother spirited her and her siblings to Latvia when fleeing the Russian Revolution:

On Monday, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen publicly rebuked Ontario’s new government for using the term “illegal border crossers” in a press release.

“I’m very concerned by Premier (Doug) Ford and (provincial) minister (Lisa) MacLeod really making statements that are difficult to understand when it comes to how they’re describing asylum seekers,” Hussen told reporters in Halifax.

The minister was referring to a statement in which Ford blamed Ontario’s housing crisis on Liberal government policies that “encouraged illegal border crossers to come into our country.”

The spat speaks to an intractable political fight in Canada: Whether the approximately 50 people per day streaming into Canada over the U.S. border are “illegal” or “irregular” migrants.

The Immigration and Refugee Board uses the term “irregular” when referring to the more than 23,000 refugee claimants who have walked into Canada since January 2017 without first passing through an official port of entry. The RCMP, meanwhile, prefers the neutral term “interceptions.”

The official CBC language guide favours “illegal border crossers,” calling it “bureaucratic jargon” to use the term “irregular” favoured by Ottawa.

“Some refugee activists have insisted that expressions such as ‘illegal’ border crossings should be banned from our journalism. The modifier ‘illegal’ in this context is accurate and clear, and it instantly helps our audience understand the story,” reads the guide.

In the House of Commons, the use of the term “illegal border crosser” is strictly divided along partisan lines.

It has been uttered 67 times in parliamentary debates since the crisis began in January 2017. Of those, 65 came from the mouths of Conservatives, and the other two came exclusively from New Brunswick Liberal MP Serge Cormier.

“They are not “irregular” border crossers; they are illegal border crossers. Let us get this straight,” Conservative MP John Brassard said in April.

The NDP and Liberal benches, meanwhile, have repeatedly accused the Tories of scaremongering.

“The Conservatives have repeated ad nauseam that these people are crossing the border illegally, implying that they are criminals. However, they have been unable to name a single law broken by the immigrants crossing the border,” said the NDP’s Anne Minh-Thu Quach in April.

Crossing the Canadian border without passing through an official port of entry is indeed illegal. Most migrants illegally crossing the border, in fact, pass directly in front of a bilingual sign telling them that they are breaking the law.

“It is illegal to cross the border here or any place other than a Port of Entry. You will be arrested and detained if you cross here,” reads a sign placed near Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., a focal point for unauthorized border crossings.

However, the illegality ends up being moot since every border crosser immediately claims asylum after being met by an RCMP officer on the Canadian side.

By doing this, their crossing is still illegal, but Canadian law stops considering them a criminal the moment they claim to be a refugee.

Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (section 133, to be precise), a refugee claimant is explicitly “deferred” from prosecution for a variety of illegal measures that they may have used to enter Canada for claiming asylum.

This includes forging false papers, assuming a false identity and illegally crossing the border.

The measure is an acknowledgement that people fleeing political prosecution can’t always get to Canada without breaking a few laws.

One of the more dramatic examples would be Soviet chess grandmaster Igor Ivanov. On a flight back from Cuba in 1980, Ivanov fled his KGB handlers during an emergency refueling stop in Gander, N.L.

Jumping from an airliner onto an airport tarmac is illegal, but Ivanov was never prosecuted after being granted political asylum.

Immigration lawyer Russ Weninger said it’s a criminal law concept called the “defence of necessity.”

“A person can in some cases perform acts that would otherwise be considered criminal if they must perform those acts to avoid some significant harm,” he said. “For example, if you are fleeing an axe-wielding maniac, you can ‘trespass’ onto someone’s property in order to effect your escape.

It’s why, if a border crosser is a “bona fide refugee,” Weninger says she has a right to enter Canada “whether she waits politely at the border or parachutes onto Parliament Hill.”

It’s for that reason that Toronto immigration lawyer Matthew Jeffery describes the recent crossings as being “perfectly legal.”

He noted that Canada is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees “which legally obliges us to allow those entering the country as refugees to be admitted for a fair adjudication of their case.”

Prior to 2001, anybody on U.S. soil seeking asylum in Canada would have needed only to make their claim at a Canadian border station — no illegal entry necessary.

After the 9/11 attacks, however, the U.S. and Canada struck the Safe Third Country Agreement, a law which allows Canada to turn away refugee claimants from the U.S. on the basis that they are already in a “safe country” and are no longer in need of asylum.

By first crossing the Canadian border, however, asylum-seekers are effectively making an “inland” claim and are thus exempt from the provisions of the act.

Raj Sharma, a Calgary immigration lawyer, said “irregular” is the more accurate term given that an asylum seeker is technically still following Canadian law if they cross the border without authorization.

But the term “illegal” is still appropriate for anyone who is unlawfully crossing Canada’s border after already having been deported — or if they have no intention of making an asylum claim, Sharma said.

“It’s admittedly true that not all ‘irregular’ entries into Canada are legally justified,” said Weninger. “But for those people who are genuinely fleeing persecution, failure to wait in line at the border does not, and should not, preclude them from making successful refugee claims.”

Source: Irregular or illegal? The fight over what to call the thousands of migrants streaming into Canada

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