Encounters Of Illegal Migrants Crossing Northern Border More Than Double Compared To 2022

Encounters of illegal migrants crossing the northern border more than doubled in the first seven months of fiscal year 2023 compared to all of fiscal year 2022.

Border Patrol agents recorded 4,827 migrant encounters between October 2022 and April at the U.S.-Canadian border, which is the longest shared border in the world, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data updated on Wednesday. In all of fiscal year 2023, Border Patrol stationed along the northern border encountered 2,238 illegal migrants.

Of the migrants Border Patrol encountered crossing illegally between October and April, 2,458 were from Mexico. Mexicans are able to fly to Canada without having to obtain visas, only requiring what are known as electronic travel authorizations that can be obtained for the price of seven Canadian dollars.

“The northern border is less secure than it ever has been and the security speaks for itself. If we’re losing twelve times the amount of people just in this fiscal year alone than in the whole last year, the cartels and criminal organizations have taken advantage and exploited the border and this administration’s policies or lack of policies to address security,” Sean Walsh, National Border Patrol Council President for the Swanton sector in Vermont, New York and New Hampshire, previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brokered a “Safe Third Country” agreement March 24 to expel migrants who cross illegally to make their asylum claims in the first country of their arrival.

Northern border town residents are fearful of the surge, several of them told the DCNF in March.

“Everybody in this area is on edge,” said northern border resident Dan Cowan, who showed the DCNF his property along the New York-Canadian border in March. “We don’t have the holding capacity for Border Patrol or U.S. Customs. What are they gonna do with these people when they’re getting here? They’re not deporting them.”

Border Patrol in the area releases some migrants onto local streets, including a group of Romanians and Haitians the DCNF interviewed in March as they were trying to obtain bus tickets to travel further south.

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