Before dawn, we have been shocking for the border agents with his Canadian colleagues: a group of nine people, most of the children, was about to enter Canada on foot.
February 3 at 6:16, when the group was noticed, the border between Alberta and Montana was brutally uninteresting, covered with snow, dark with a temperature of 17 degrees Fahrenheit.
The grain pictures of the night vision taken by Canadian border cameras showed two girls in pink winter clothes holding women’s hand as they passed through the snow. More children followed in the line. Another adult withdrew two suitcases.
The rapid intervention of the royal Canadian police crew that found that the group was the result of the newly burned border across the border between the United States and Canada. At 5,525 miles, the limit is the longest in the world.
Until recently, the border of both countries described as “unclear”, the testament of their close friendship.
But with the return of President Trump to the White House, she became a flash in a relationship between two neighbors.
Even before his inauguration, Mr. Trump accused Canada of allowing a large number of unauthorized migrants to enter the United States. He stopped the key request because he threatened to impose a crippled tariff on Canadian exports to the United States.
After a one -month return, Mr. Trump says that the tariffs will take effect on Tuesday.
Canada mobilized. She has artped more staff and equipment along the border and tightened the rules of the visa, which critics say they did a stone to enter into the United States illegally.
The number of illegal transitions to the United States from Canada was relatively low to begin with, and now it has fallen, which indicates that the reaction of Canada to the pressure of Mr. Trump is acting.
But now a new dynamics on the border appears: Asylum seekers are fleeing north to Canada while Mr. Trump embarked on his plan to delete deportations.
Limit in focus
Any day, the border crossing of coutts-sweetgrass in Alberti is a neat sound of trucks, trains and civilian vehicles.
Communities on both sides are close in every sense. He hit the ball strongly enough on one of two baseball diamonds in Coututs, Alberta, and it is probably that he would land in Sweetgrass, Montana.
The border authorities of the two countries even divide the building.
“There is a close daily communication,” said Ryan Harrison, a sergeant of RCMP staff, who runs an integrated border team, said in bitterly cold February as he drove on the border, a pebble tape that broke through the plains that marked the border several miles. “These are the people we go to dinner with and attend their retired parties.”
But the criticism of Mr. Trump installed the atmosphere as well as the usual atmosphere on the border.
Mr. Trump is particularly upset by the jump of the number of unauthorized migrants who have entered the United States in the last three years.
The number of people arrested last year illegally moving from Canada to the United States was almost 200,000. (This is still fading compared to the crossings from Mexico: last year more than two million people were arrested on the US southern border, according to the US Government data.)
Canada has directed $ 1.3 billion in Canadian dollars ($ 900 million) to improve the safety of the border, adding two Black Hawk helicopters and 60 drones equipped with heat cameras.
He also tightened the requirements for temporary visas that some visitors legally arrived in Canada, but also illegally entered the United States.
The Canadian government says its recent measures drastically demolished the number of unauthorized move to the United States: about 5000 migrants were intercepted at the border in January, and a third of the figures in January 2024, according to US data.
“Whether any of the accusations of what is happening on the border are correct or not, or credible or not, I have no luxury not to take it seriously,” said Marc Miller, a Canadian Minister of Immigration, in an interview on Thursday.
He was in Washington, along with other high Canadian ministers who planned to meet with Trump’s administration officials in the last shot to prevent tariffs.
Mr. Miller said he would explain the measures that Canada had taken and how they work. But he also wanted to talk to US officials about the recent rise of people coming to Canada from the United States.
The opposite direction
The Canadian focus on the border, on the background of the domestic suppression of Mr. Trump on the migrants, which is why nine people who entered Albert on February 3rd raised alarms: it was unusual to see a group of this great transition on foot in the heart of winter. The presence of young children made more and more worrying.
Canadian authorities say that more people who come from the United States were intercepted, but because of the schedule that Canada follows in the data issue, another number is not available in weeks from Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January. But the editions of government news suggest that numbers are increasing.
In Alberti, preliminary budgets show that up to 20 people have so far illegally arrested a transition, including 2 years.
In contrast, only seven people were arrested illegally crossing the border in Alberti of all 2024.
Of the nine migrants found in Alberti on February 3, seven, including three children aged 13, 10 and 7, were Venezuelani, RCMP told the New York Times. Two others were children, 7 and 5 years old, from Colombia.
The sergeant of Harrison staff, who worked on the border for two years, said, “It’s the first time I’ve seen Venezuelan here.”
The Venezuelan, who flee to the Promised Government of Prime Minister Nicolás Madura, was offered protection around the world. Nearly eight million have escaped in the last decade, according to the United Nations, an extraordinary number for a nation that is not in war.
According to the Administration of Biden, 600,000 Venezuelanians who already live in the United States were given temporary protection and allowed them to live and work in the country. More managed to stay under smaller programs.
Trump’s administration has completed all protection for Venezuelana, and most of the programs will expel in the coming months.
The removal of the Venezuelanians has become a priority in pushing Mr. Trump’s deportation. The Venezuelani were described as criminals sent to the US facility in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, while others were deported back to Venezuela.
The Venecuelan government has recently begun to arrest not only political activists, but also passers -by in protests, and it is unclear how they will be treated with migrants returned.
As a result, Canada has a policy of not deporting the Venezuelanians.
Safe land?
Canadian border officials refused to talk about what they did with a group of nine migrants detained in Alberti, saying that they were protecting their privacy.
However, a spokesman for the US customs and border protection confirmed that the Canadian authorities had returned them to the United States, and were transferred to custody of immigration and customs. Their status is unknown.
Canada and the United States regularly return asylum seekers who are transitioning to the territory of each other, assuming that both countries are equally safe for asylum seekers to submit their claims and that they should do so in the first of the two countries where they arrive. Politics is formally known as an agreement on a safe third country.
However, the deportation drive of Trump’s administration and change in asylum policies call into question whether the United States is still a safe country for asylum seekers, experts and advocates say, and whether Canada should continue to send people back across the border.
“This is the latest sign that Canada sends people and families with their children back in the US with a complete knowledge that they are exposed to the great risk of being detained, and then they are back in danger,” said Ketty Nivyubandi, the Canadian chapter leader Amnesty International, referring to nine migrants of Canada.
“The Canadian government must not wait a little longer to withdraw from the Safe Third Land Agreement,” she added.
But such a move would probably encourage more people to look for refuge in Canada, creating new pressure on the already tense immigration system in the country.
“This would almost certainly lead to an increase in unauthorized border crossings,” said Phil Triadafilopoulos, a political science professor at the University of Toronto.
However, he added, continuing to return asylum seekers to the United States, Canada signals that “they will not receive people who have lost temporary protected status in the US as in the past.”
And as the migrants who passed in Albert were illustrated, he said, he said, “they can” involve young children into really difficult conditions, with a complete knowledge that the fate of these children and their families is very uncertain. “
Mr Miller, the Minister of Immigration, insisted that Canada believed that the United States remained a safe country for asylum seekers.
“We have to have a real, managed system on the border,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re naive or not watching events currently happening in the US”
Hamed Aleaziz contributing to Washington reporting and Julie Turkewitz from Methetí, Panama.
