A new challenge up north

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday the 13th of June, 2024. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. First up: Protecting the northern border of the United States. The federal government’s been focused lately on the immigration crisis on the southern border. But some lawmakers are raising concerns about the other border.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports that encounters at the U.S.-Canada border doubled from about 100,000 two years ago… to nearly 200,000 last year. Those numbers are expected to climb.

BROWN: Illegal crossings in the north are only in the thousands as compared to the millions pouring across the southern border. But some worry that problem is only going to get worse. WORLD Radio’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: Luke Dyer is the town manager for Van Buren, Maine, a community that borders New Brunswick, Canada.

LUKE DYER: It's a very difficult border to protect because it's so vast and we're so remote—we’re very remote here.

Dyer used to be a law enforcement officer in Van Buren and says he saw smugglers shift from running cigarettes over the border to drugs, and now to trafficking people.

Add to that the problem of illegal immigration as people cross the border on their way to cities like Boston or New York City.

DYER: If they cross the border and just stayed here, it would not take very long for the locals to notify the U.S. Border Patrol and they would be picked up.

There are more border patrol stations near Van Buren than some other towns along the border, but Border Patrol’s resources are still stretched thin. The nearest station to Van Buren monitors about 130 miles of border.

DYER: You have 25 employees at a border station, and only so many of them on the road at a time. And covering that land mass is very difficult.

Congress has tried to address the issue over the last few years.

Last year, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing pointing to a worsening smuggling problem at the northern border.

Committee Chairman Dan Bishop.

DAN BISHOP: Due to the crisis at the southwest border Secretary Mayorkas surged resources away from other areas critical to homeland security including the northern border. There are now fewer than 2,000 border patrol agents to cover the 3,145 mile land border.

Earlier this year, Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Troy Miller did tell Congress in a budget hearing that this year, border control has hired people directly for the northern border for the first time.

But lawmakers and border towns say there’s still a growing problem.

Montana lawmakers signed a letter last month calling for more resources for the northern border. Meanwhile, a House Judiciary Subcommittee held a hearing in North Dakota. Law enforcement officers and the state attorney general testified to a lack of resources for the nation’s longest land border.

ROGER HUTCHINSON: When I first became sheriff, I do not recall a day that went by that I did not see a patrol agent patrolling.

Roger Hutchinson is the sheriff of the border county, Renville in North Dakota. He testified at the hearing last month.

HUTCHINSON: At one time we had four patrol agents that lived within our county. Now we have one resident agent in our county who works out of Portal Station.

Portal Station is about an hour outside of Renville County.

Hutchinson says since he has a small force, they rely on Border Patrol to help process any people who illegally cross, and if there aren’t enough agents, it’s up to the county to deal with apprehensions, detainment, or damage to property.

HUTCHINSON: We have a wide open, vast border with no natural physical barriers and very few man-made ones.

So who are the people crossing and where are they coming from?

LAURIE TROUTMAN: I think some of the main culprits are a somewhat like reverberation from what we're seeing on the southern border.

Laurie Trautman is the director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University. She says one reason for the surge is that pandemic lockdowns created a backlog for asylum seekers at the northern and southern border. But that’s not all. Back in 2016, Canada removed its visa requirement for Mexican nationals to enter the country.

TRAUTMAN: So there's sort of two things happening. One is, is that more asylum claims being made in Canada, and then people are sort of using Canada as a transit point to come to the U.S., which is, I would say, probably a fairly new trend.

In response to rising numbers of asylum claims, Canadian lawmakers reinstated some visa requirements earlier this year.

Customs and Border protections reports a significant number of people from South America coming across the northern border, but also some from places like China and Ukraine.

Trautman says one key difference between the borders is that if people come from Canada and don’t have a place to go, there isn’t much infrastructure to help them.

TAUTMAN: If you're in a rural community, you don't have the facilities to provide any services. So a lot of times in this community, rely on churches, actually, who will pick them up and give them a ride, or, like, there's no hotels, like there's no accommodation.

I called several churches in Trautman’s part of Northwest Washington State, and some other border towns to ask about this, but they didn’t want to comment on any services they may be providing.

Trautman met with a charity and border patrol a few months ago to try to figure out how to help people coming over the border, but since they’re not refugees, it’s a sticky situation and the charity said they couldn’t help.

TRAUTMAN: The border patrol officer, it was like, ‘Yeah, it'd be three in the morning, and it's like, 30 degrees outside, and there's this family, and they show up in this tiny, little town called Blaine, and, like, there's not even a hotel to put them in.’

The numbers are still small when spread out across communities like Trautman’s, but the running total of border encounters in 2024 is about to pass the 2022 total of nearly 110,000, so she says something needs to change.

TRAUTMAN: It's not a challenge that we've had to deal with. So it's a new challenge, and also one that I think people aren't prepared for.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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