Residents Near Northern Border Reveal Troubling Illegal Immigration Surge

While residents near America’s southern border have been forced to deal with the influx of migrants illegally crossing into the country from Mexico for years, the crisis exacerbated by President Joe Biden’s policies is now resulting in Americans living along the U.S.-Canada border to take similar precautions.

Customs and Border Protection reports indicate that there were 12,200 confirmed illegal entries along the northern border in 2023, which was 240% higher than the previous year. Nearly three-fourths of those border crossings occurred in the Swanton Sector, which stretches less than 300 miles along portions of New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

As southern states — most notably Texas — continue taking border security into their own hands, migrants and human smugglers have increasingly turned to the northern border as an alternative point of illegal entry into the U.S. 

One resident of Swanton, Vermont, recounted his experience in a recent interview with the New York Post, noting that he has called the U.S. Border Patrol so many times to report illegal crossings that the receptionists know him by name.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, hey Chris, how’s it going?’” said Chris Feeley. “And I’m like, ‘Hey I had some more just walk by my camera if you want to send the boys up here.’”

He went on to share some alarming advice agents gave him.

“The Border Patrol actually told us, ‘You guys might want to put a pistol in your backpack, because nine out of 10 of them are just here for a better life, but there’s that one guy that’s got a rap sheet,’” Feeley said.

Kaitlynn Pease, who lives in Alburgh, Vermont, shared a similar anecdote, noting that she has seen migrants navigating through the woods to a spot where they are picked up by vehicles with out-of-state tags.

“Once you see the New Jersey plates, you know they’re a getaway car,” she advised. “They’re tere early in the morning when there’s no traffic. It’s normally around 6 or 7 in the morning.

While an existing treaty between the U.S. and Canada requires asylum-seekers to make their claims in the nation where they initially arrive and federal law permits the detention of foreign nationals within a 100-mile range of a national boundary, such arrests require the presence of authorities — and as Pease explained: “Border Patrol’s not usually around.”