As dangerously bitter cold settled over the Northeast on February 3, Robert Garcia, who heads the Swanton-based U.S. Border Patrol sector, posted a photo of people trudging through the woods carrying two small kids over the border from Canada into Vermont.
Garcia has been taking to Twitter to caution people against attempting to cross the border illegally in winter conditions. Fritznel Richard, a 44-year-old Haitian man who’d been living in Montréal, died of hypothermia near the border in Canada while trying to reach the U.S. in early January. Another would-be crosser was rescued by a Québec EMS team just north of Troy, Vt., on January 28. He was suffering from severe hypothermia.
“Undeterred by arctic chill,” Garcia warned in a February 7 post, accompanied by a photo of several people in snow-covered sneakers and jeans who he said were apprehended near Champlain, N.Y. Garcia said 105 migrants from eight countries were stopped trying to cross illegally one week in February when temperatures dropped as low as minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Don’t risk it!” Garcia tweeted.
Since October 1, the number of encounters and apprehensions in the Swanton Sector has surpassed the totals in 2021 and 2022 combined.
The increase in illicit crossings has been dramatic. In the Swanton Sector, a 295-mile swath of the border that includes all of New Hampshire and Vermont and part of New York, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 1,513 encounters and apprehensions between October 1 and the end of January, compared with 160 during the same period the year before. By comparison, about 1,000 people were apprehended in the sector after trying to cross illegally during the entire year of 2019.
Border-crossing attempts dropped nationwide in 2020, when pandemic-related travel restrictions took hold, but started climbing the following year and have been rising steadily ever since. Since October 1, the number of encounters and apprehensions in the Swanton Sector has surpassed the totals in 2021 and 2022 combined, Border Patrol said.
Nobody knows how many people are making it through to the U.S. But it’s clear that the surge is putting migrants’ lives at risk. It’s also placing a burden on agents in the Swanton Sector, Garcia said. The sector — which includes 78 miles in Vermont — leads the U.S. northern border in illicit crossings, he said.
Worldwide economic and political instability is fueling the highest levels of migration since World War II, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The reasons for the increase are complex, but U.S. policies for improving border security and aiding people who are fleeing crisis have been the target of fierce political battles.
In a December letter, nine U.S. senators from several states along the northern border asked President Joe Biden’s administration to improve border staffing. Signed by Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and some Republican colleagues, the letter noted that resources had been diverted to the southwestern border in recent years.
Documents filed in federal court suggest that some of the migrants crossing from Canada are receiving help from organized smuggling groups. In a federal complaint filed on October 17, agent Steve R. Marchessault, a supervisor at the Swanton Border Patrol station, wrote that he caught Patricia Ruano-Murcia — a legal U.S. resident from El Salvador who has a pending asylum claim — at the wheel of an SUV near Highgate Springs. She had allegedly picked up six undocumented migrants from Mexico and Guatemala who had walked into Vermont.
Ruano-Murcia told agents she expected to be paid $300 and was taking the six to Massachusetts, Marchessault wrote.
In another complaint, agent Jamie Montoya outlined how a U.S. agent watched a silver SUV with Texas plates near Highgate drive toward the Canadian border and return about 10 minutes later with five passengers. When stopped, all the occupants acknowledged that they weren’t authorized to be in the U.S., Montoya wrote in court papers. The migrants told authorities they paid thousands of dollars to guides they had met in Canada who promised to help them reach U.S. destinations such as New York City.
When it comes to the U.S. and Canada, the migration goes both ways. New York City, which has received thousands of migrants who crossed the southwestern border, has been buying bus tickets for Canada-bound migrants for months, the New York Times reported last week. Most disembark in Plattsburgh, N.Y., then board vans to Roxham Road in nearby Champlain, which has become an unofficial crossing spot for those entering Canada to request asylum. A woman who recently arrived in the U.S. from Venezuela told the newspaper that she was attracted to Canada because it grants work permits to asylum seekers more quickly than the U.S. does.
Most of the national attention is focused on the southwestern border with Mexico, where new arrivals from Central and South America arrive on foot and in vehicles. While migrant traffic slowed in 2020 to just 16,000 — the lowest number in 20 years — it has soared since then, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection reporting 717,000 encounters between September and December 2022.
“Everyone agrees that we are operating within a fundamentally broken immigration system,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a lengthy press release that repeatedly referred to immigration on the country’s southwestern border, not the northern one.
“The surge in global migration is testing many nations’ immigration systems, including that of the United States,” the department said.
So far, though, the impact on Vermont seems minimal. Many people who live and work in border towns say they haven’t seen any signs of an influx, or even heard conversations about it. Leaders at half a dozen nonprofit groups that work in Vermont with asylum seekers, refugees and other new arrivals said they weren’t aware of the increase at the border; all declined to speak on the record about the rise in border crossings.
“It is politically very sensitive.” Pablo Bose
Pablo Bose, a migration studies and urban geography professor at the University of Vermont, said illegal border crossing attempts between the U.S. and Canada constantly ebb and flow, both southbound and northbound. Bose added that the nonprofit groups he works with to aid newcomers have noticed an uptick in asylum claims lately. Kate Paarlberg-Kvam, executive director of Community Asylum Seekers Project in Brattleboro, concurred.
“The number of people served by our seven organizations is growing rapidly,” Paarlberg-Kvam said in an email. Her organization works with people all over Vermont. She said the seven allied organizations offer direct support to 116 people, three times more than two years ago.
Bose doesn’t know if that increase is connected to the spike in border activity in northern Vermont. But he said he understands why the groups are unwilling to discuss their work.
“It is politically very sensitive,” he said. “One of the biggest pitfalls of working in this area is, if you receive federal funds or state funds to support legal immigrants here and you talk about providing services for undocumented workers, you could lose your funding.”
Nobody expects the border traffic to ease anytime soon. The likely termination of Title 42, a public health policy that allows asylum seekers to be expelled without a hearing, could lead to an increase in the number of people trying to get into the country, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research organization at Syracuse University.
“If the current pace continues, the asylum backlog … would jump by a record-breaking number during FY 2023,” the organization said in a report, referring to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Some of the migrants from the south who have the means to buy a plane ticket might be betting on the northern border as an easier route into the U.S. Border Patrol statistics show that the number of Mexicans who attempted to enter at the Swanton Sector was 518 last year — nine times the number from the previous year.
A few Vermonters say they have noticed the spike in activity. Attorney George Spear of Swanton wrote to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) office to describe a group he saw on the Saturday after Thanksgiving when he was hunting with his sons on land he owns in New York. Spear and his two sons watched about 15 people in black walk through their property from the Canadian side. The walkers ignored the three hunters, to Spear’s surprise.
“These men — I presume they were all men — even though they were confronted with three angry, armed men, they just kept going,” Spear said.
There are plans to beef up security in the Swanton Sector, including nearly $169 million for a new port of entry at Highgate Springs, the busiest crossing between Vermont and Canada.
The Biden administration also proposed last year to increase security at rural border crossings, including Alburg Springs, Beebe Plain, Norton and Richford. And in December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection started soliciting bids to build 296 surveillance towers along the southwestern and northern borders and to upgrade 190 existing towers, according to Defense Daily, a publication that covers the military industry.
Correction, February 14, 2023: A previous version of this story misstated who was providing services to 116 people in Vermont.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Northern Exposure | Illegal crossings on the Vermont-Canadian border are soaring”
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2023.
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