New and old fears at a well-trodden Canada-U.S. border ahead of Trump’s inauguration

Standing in a neighbour’s driveway on Perry Mills Road in Champlain, N.Y., less than a kilometre from the border with Canada, Stephen Phaneuf points to fields and forest behind the small blue home. 

“They come out from the fields, out from everywhere,” says Phaneuf, 67, referring to migrants crossing from Canada into the United States, who have been doing so in increasing numbers since 2022.

Phaneuf’s property across the road sits on the banks the Chazy River. Last winter, he said he found a woman and her child sleeping with his pigs in small plastic huts near the road. 

“I felt so bad for them. Didn’t even have shoes on her feet,” Phaneuf said. 

When border patrol officers arrived, Phaneuf said the woman and her son attempted to flee but got caught in the electric fence meant to keep the animals in their pen. 

In December 2023, the body of another woman, 33-year-old Ana Karen Vasquez-Flores, was found in the Chazy River, days after she crossed on foot into the U.S.

“I lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen it as bad as this,” Phaneuf said.

Phaneuf is a registered Democrat, but voted Republican for the first time in 2024 in order to vote for Trump. He listed inflation and border security as the reasons why he made the switch. 

Nearby, at the end of a road similar to Roxham, leading straight to the Canadian border, Calvin Allen, 72, stood on his porch Friday afternoon and pointed to the woods where he saw a family step out two years ago. 

“A whole family. A bunch of kids, all frozen. The wind was howling and with the wind chill it was just about 35 below zero,” Allen said. 

Both Allen and Phaneuf said they didn’t like Trump’s threat of tariffs on Canada, but that they agreed with his demands for Ottawa do more to secure the 6,400-km border. 

Several residents in the area told CBC News on a visit to the border Friday that they are told by U.S. border patrol agents not to help migrants or let them into their homes. The residents said that while they worried for migrants’ well-being, they also believed some of them could be dangerous. 

Trump is once again threatening mass deportations, but the situation at the Canadian land border has changed since his last time in office.

In March 2023, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and current U.S. President Joe Biden signed a number of changes to the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA). The changes made it so migrants could only claim asylum once in the other country if they had a close family member living there or if they’d managed to go undetected for 14 days after crossing. 

The new agreement effectively closed the unofficial but popular border crossing known as Roxham Road, near Hemmingford, Que., which tens of thousands of asylum seekers had walked across every year since 2017. 

In September 2023, the temporary RCMP facilities at the crossing were taken down. 

“To me, the symbolism of that was unbelievable. That problem just got pushed down, pushed away,” said Frances Ravensbergen, a member of a group called Bridges Not Borders, created in 2017 after the first Trump inauguration, which months later saw thousands of people claiming asylum in Canada. 

After 2023, the number of people claiming asylum in Canada did not decrease, but instead shifted from a majority making their claims at land ports of entry to a majority making claims after having flown into the country by airplane. 

The STCA expansion coincided with a sharp rise in people heading the other way, though. Roughly 25,000 people were stopped by U.S. border officials heading south from Canada into the U.S. between the fall of 2023 and 2024. That number seems to have caught Trump’s attention and appears to be part of his justification for threatening a blanket 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods. 

Some asylum seekers have continued to show up at official border crossings near Lacolle, Que., about 30 km north of Plattsburgh, N.Y. 

Friday evening, at the Sunoco gas station where Greyhound buses stop on their way to and from New York City and Montreal, a woman stood crying, her two young daughters, dressed in matching pink jackets, at her side.

The woman had been turned away by Canadian border officials and was let onto the Greyhound at the border crossing — but was scrambling to get loved ones on the phone to buy bus tickets for the rest of the trip back to New York. A man from Montreal had lent her his phone and explained to two journalists that the woman had no money or phone on her.

Deportations threat still looms

The woman may have been an exception. Groups helping migrants, like Ravensbergen’s, say that despite anticipation of a surge in asylum seekers attempting to cross the northern United States border ahead of Trump’s second presidential inauguration, the only increase they’ve seen so far has been in police. 

“All we’re seeing is more police cars,” said Ravensbergen, who lives in Hemmingford.

In Clinton County, the area encompassing Plattsburgh and several other New York state border communities, the Department of Social Services has provided short-term assistance to some migrants who have found themselves stuck after being turned away by Canada. 

But the department’s commissioner, Christine Peters, said in an email this week that her teams have not yet observed any change at the border. 

“We really do not have a lot of information on the migrants currently and have seen very little traffic in our offices,” Peters said.

Groups like Bridges Not Borders warned migrants would not stop crossing on foot, but would take more dangerous means to find their way into Canada or the U.S. 

They say their concerns have been revived with Trump taking office a second time. 

“We actually had a little meeting of our group after Trump got elected because so many of us were just feeling so discouraged,” said Ravensbergen.

The more than dozen people who attended the meeting said they wanted to find a way to counter an emerging narrative that migrants are a threat to public security. 

“What we’re trying to promote is that we need to be afraid for asylum seekers, not of them,” she said. 

Chedly Belkhodja, a Concordia University professor researching immigration and the effects of right-wing populism on immigration, who was also at the meeting, said media reports ahead of Trump’s inauguration have been dominated by militarization efforts to appease his tariff threat.

“The whole question of migration as a security issue for the government of Canada, for its sovereignty and, ‘We need to beef up the border, we need to put more money in security,'” the professor said, “we completely miss out on something else, and that’s the human side of migrants themselves, the condition of migrants and also the voices of concerned citizens.”

On Wednesday, federal Public Procurement Minister Jean-Yves Duclos visited the Roxham Road land border with Estelle Muzzi, the mayor of Quebec border town St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, and Brenda Shanahan, the Liberal MP for the region. 

In an Instagram post with a photo of the visit, Duclos included an info-graphic displaying percentages and statistics purporting to show Canada’s intensified efforts at scrutinizing new arrivals, accepting fewer of them and apprehending more of them. 

“We have stepped up our efforts to protect the border with the United States, and the results are there for all to see,” Duclos wrote. 

Reached by phone Thursday, Muzzi said the visit to Roxham was an informal one prompted by Duclos’s curiosity. Muzzi said she’s been in touch with RCMP agents regularly in recent years and that they had not noticed an increase in migrant foot traffic since Trump was elected in November. 

She said there has been a large increase in RCMP patrols, including “ghost” vehicles. 

“But are migrants going to try to cross and is it around here that they will try to do it? That’s the big question, and we simply do not know,” Muzzi said.