In my last post, I reported that CBP had released its latest border and port encounter numbers for the month of July on August 16. While the agency is lauding the fact that Border Patrol’s Southwest border apprehension numbers declined last month, it failed to highlight a more disturbing fact: Encounters are surging at the Northern border, and DHS is struggling to keep up.
The Northern Border. While many in the public and in the media focus on the 1,954-mile Southwest border with Mexico, the 5,525-mile border between the United States and Canada — the “world’s longest undefended border” is becoming a bit of a mess.
In July, the handful of agents left defending that undefended border apprehended more than 3,000 illegal entrants there, more than in all of FY 2022 (2,238) or FY 2021 (916).
Northern border apprehensions through the first 10 months of FY 2024 have already exceeded 19,000, and agents are on pace to make nearly 23,400 apprehensions there this fiscal year.
To put these figures into context, consider the fact that Northern border apprehensions never exceeded 12,500 per year prior to the Biden-Harris administration.
Even that statistic is deceiving, because Northern border apprehensions never came close to 5,000 per annum between FY 2012 and FY 2020.
Unfortunately, CBP’s Office of Field Operations (OFO), with jurisdiction over the ports of entry, doesn’t keep quite as robust records as Border Patrol does, but OFO CBP officers have already stopped more than 143,000 inadmissible aliens at the Northern border ports in the first 10 months of FY 2024, and are on track for 172,000-plus encounters there this fiscal year.
That would be a slightly lower total than in FY 2023 (179,381 Northern border port encounters), but it would well exceed the totals for either FY 2022 (107,297) or FY 2021 (26,264).
“The Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement”. To be fair, at the turn of the 21st century — back in FY 2000 and FY 2001 — Border Patrol’s Northern border apprehensions exceeded 12,000 per year, a figure that dropped to just north of 10,000 in the next two fiscal years.
Apprehensions at the Northern border dropped precipitously thereafter, however, following the December 2004 implementation of what’s referred to in Ottawa as the “Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement” (STC).
Pursuant to that agreement, aliens present in the United States or Canada must first apply for asylum in that country before heading to the other one. U.S. nationals can still seek asylum in Canada, of course, and vice versa.
As originally implemented, STC only barred asylum claims made by aliens at the ports of entry, and thus didn’t apply to claims by aliens who had entered one or the other country illegally.
Thus, it wasn’t the agreement itself that drove down illegal entries so much as it was the uncertainty STC created and an increasing understanding among asylum claimants that they could seek protection in either of those two countries.
The STC traditionally favored Canada, which has a more stringent immigrant-entry scheme and natural advantages over the United States in enforcing its laws. Or, as the Council on Foreign Relations has put it:
Canada’s geography — bordered by three oceans and the United States, which is itself a magnet for immigrants — has helped Ottawa limit flows of undocumented people. Its highly regulated immigration system, including some of the world’s strictest visitor-visa requirements, is designed to further curb this phenomenon.
That illegal-entry exception to the third-country agreement, however, placed strains on the Canadian federal government, which increasingly saw a surge in asylum claimants once the Biden-Harris Southwest border crisis began.
To placate our neighbors to the north, our administration and the government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (L) decided in March 2023 to expand the safe-third agreement across the entire northern border, “including internal waterways”, to bar third-country asylum claimants coming illegally from one to the other.
Which makes the ongoing Northern border surge all the more puzzling, because there’s no real incentive for third-country aliens in Canada to cross our Northern border illegally anymore. Assuming, of course, that the administration is sending them all back to the other side of the line as it’s allowed to do.
“U.S. to Speed Up Asylum Processing at Northern Border”. Which brings me to an August 13 CBS News article headlined “U.S. to speed up asylum processing at northern border to deter migrant crossings”.
It explains that DHS is now changing the way it handles asylum claims made by illegal migrants who are encountered by CBP at the Northern border. As per the outlet, there will be two key modifications in how the department processes illegal entrants there.
First, migrants will be required to present their documents to “U.S. asylum officers” (presumably from USCIS) during the screening process to determine whether they are subject to the safe-third-country agreement.
Apparently, migrants could previously “postpone those screenings to gather documents that could prove they merit an exemption to the deal”.
Second, migrants will now only have four hours to consult with an attorney before their asylum claims are screened here, down from an apparent minimum 24-hour consultation period that had been enforced heretofore. AS CBS News explains: “That update matches an identical change made at the U.S.-Mexico border in June, in connection with President Biden's move to severely restrict asylum there.”
Both of those changes make sense, but respectfully both should have already been the rule at not only the Northern border, but the Southwestern one, as well.
To the degree there’s any logic in allowing illegal entrants to make asylum claims (a point I’d question if section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act didn’t expressly permit it), the argument is that those illegal entrants are fleeing from some specified danger that merits protection.
Given that — and regardless of whether they are coming from Mexico or Canada — migrants should be prepared to tell the first U.S. government officials they encounter, be it CBP officers at ports of entry or Border Patrol agents between those ports, exactly what the basis of that fear entails.
If someone is threatening to kill or torture you, you don’t need to talk with a lawyer before explaining that threat to a CBP officer or Border Patrol agent.
That’s especially true for third-country migrants coming from Canada, all of whom could consult with lawyers on the other side of the line and who could thus have their legal ducks in a row before ever setting foot in the United States.
Canada and the United States offer nearly identical asylum protections and utilize a similar Anglo-American system of justice, and so an immigration lawyer in Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver can tell you exactly what to expect when you head south. Any delay on this side of the line is pointless.
And, given the similarities between our two systems, the denial of protection in Canada should be a major red flag that there are serious deficiencies in your asylum claim.
Here’s the bottom line: Canada is as safe a place to make an asylum claim as the United States, as both nations have recognized the past 20 years. The sooner the administration clues into that fact and starts turning third-country migrants around, the sooner CBP can get back to dealing with just one migrant crisis — at the Southwest border — instead of the other one coming from the north, as well.