A Trump voter and his cab is the escape route to Canada

Cab driver Curtis Seymour got the call at 3:30 a.m. to pick up a passenger at the Greyhound bus station in Plattsburgh, New York, about 25 miles (40 km) south of the Canadian border.

An older Haitian woman wearing a purple and yellow headwrap, mauve lipstick and big gold earrings descended from the bus with two handbags, a backpack and a suitcase. Seymour placed her luggage in the car, and asked where she was headed.

“Canada,” the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Cilotte, said in broken English. “No police,” she added. Seymour, 62, who has driven the same streets in upstate New York for more than a decade, voted for Donald Trump in the Nov. 8 presidential election, partly because of his tough stance on immigration.

“I would vote for him all over again,” Seymour said. “But it’s more complicated than that.” Since Trump was elected, Seymour has had a front seat view of the other side of the immigration debate, ferrying some of the roughly 2,000 people who have crossed illegally into Canada this year.

Trump’s tough talk on illegal immigration has spurred a wave of asylum seekers to leave for Canada, whose government they view as more welcoming to migrants.

Once registered as a Republican but now an independent, Seymour said Trump’s rhetoric made many of his border-bound patrons fearful. He said that while some asylum seekers were a crime risk, most of his passengers would be “assets to this country.”

“Trump’s immigration policies are strong. They are one of the reasons why I voted for him. But these people are human beings no matter where they came from,” Seymour said. “It’s not like they’re aliens from another world or something.”

‘NOT ALIENS’