From NY to Canada, COVID rules confuse
The closure of refugee crossing point continues to cause uncertainty
A couple with two small children, in the United States on visitors' visas, arrived at the Canadian border via Roxham Road in August. They expected the cul de sac flanked by farmland in northeastern New York to be the final physical hurdle in their journey, a few shrubs away from their destination — Canada.
A pair of federal police officers waited on the Canadian side of the crossing, emerging from a small office. They were flanked by a giant sign telling travelers in English and French to “STOP! It is illegal to cross.” Before March 2020, many migrants knew they were able to cross the rocky juncture anyway, face temporary ar
rest, and then claim asylum.
Now, reflecting a pandemic-era change, the same billboard bears a new warning pasted at the bottom: “You will be returned immediately to the U.S.” In spite of Canada’s recent announcements that vaccinated Americans and foreigners with visas can visit the country, the asylum system still hasn’t reverted to its pre-COVID norms.
Asylum seekers have varying reasons to go north. Some hope to join extended family, or feel they’ll have better luck with work, housing and health care. Others are more likely to qualify in Canada than in the U.S.
The parents, who spoke Turkish but little French or English, crossed Roxham Road regardless, their toddler and 5-year-old in tow. The officers drove them to the Canadian port of entry near Champlain, handing them over for processing.
But instead of allowing them to claim asylum immediately, Canadian officials held the family for hours, taking down their personal data before passing them off to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. They were then released. After a 25-minute cab ride to nearby Plattsburgh, a brother in Toronto helped them get a night in a hotel and contacted Plattsburgh Cares, a local humanitarian group.
A similar procedure of passing asylum seekers off to CBP can occur when migrants show up at official ports of entry, but these interactions can have even worse consequences: a rejection often diminishes crossers’ chances of claiming asylum in Canada in the future. This discrepancy is the result of a 19year-old treaty called the Safe Third Country Agreement, which the Trump administration tried to replicate with countries to the south.
The treaty was signed in 2002 in the wake of border trepidation following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and went into effect in December 2004. It blocks most migrants from claiming asylum in Canada if they first passed through the United States, and vice versa. But the restriction only applied in Canada if asylum seekers crossed the border through official ports of entry, language that made New York’s Roxham Road a popular option to bypass the rule.
Intense media coverage in 2017 focused on larger groups of legal U.S. residents from countries like Haiti who began to cross into Canada along Roxham Road, many of them afraid Trump would nix their Temporary Protected Status. Since then, the policy loophole has been a political flash point.
Misinformation on border status
With the pandemic bearing down, in March 2020 Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the isolated route to Canada would be suspended, and anyone walking in at irregular crossings would be handed over to U.S. border authorities.
“We recognize that these are exceptional times,” Trudeau told reporters that month, assuring the public that crossers would be “released almost immediately” after they were returned to American officials. While this was true for many individuals, the Times Union has interviewed several asylum seekers who were placed in federal immigration
detention by U.S. authorities.
At first, like other pandemic border changes between the two countries, the closure was temporary — just a month, a COVID-19 precaution. Then a month turned to two, and two to 17. And even with cross-border lawyers and volunteer networks sharing that Canada was still closed to most asylum seekers, traffic has never stopped.
“People have continued to come to the border, it's as simple as that,” said Wendy Ayotte, founder of Bridges Not Borders, a citizen’s group in southern Quebec that advocates for asylum seekers.
She and many New York counterparts — shelter personnel, lawyers, even taxi drivers — have been telling asylum seekers that they will almost certainly be sent back or imprisoned in New York if they try to claim asylum in Canada right now. Even so, the police have apprehended over 500 migrants entering at Roxham Road or similar irregular crossings since the emergency COVID-19 rule took effect, according to data from Canada’s Border Services Agency.
While this is a sharp decline from pre-pandemic numbers, the people who have crossed at Roxham Road since March 2020 — willingly walking into the custody of Canadian cops — have been returned to immigration authorities in northern New York. Ayotte’s Bridges Not Borders website, known as a reliable source for asylum rules, is now peppered with bolded red text sharing border status updates.
“The number of visits (to the site) shot up last year after the border closure. And they shot up again as soon as people started hearing Americans would be allowed to enter Canada,” Ayotte said.
The New York volunteer group Plattsburgh Cares has also seen a fresh surge of interest from people asking about crossing into Canada, after media outlets covered Canada’s Aug. 9 change that permitted entry for vaccinated American visitors, and its Sept. 7 opening to vaccinated visa holders worldwide. Neither update affected Roxham Road or the restrictions limiting most asylum seekers, but many refugees believe that they had.
“The misinformation concerns me,” said Janet McFetridge, a Champlainbased volunteer for Plattsburgh Cares. “People are going to spend a lot of money coming up here to find out that it's not open, and then they’re going to have to go back to somewhere else where they can be safe.”
McFetridge, a former school teacher, did not study immigration law. But she has become a practical expert in the human cost of the confusion in her last few years visiting Roxham Road and reviewing correspondence. She has emailed with hundreds of people fleeing danger in their home countries with a desire to settle in Canada.
Since the Sept. 7 policy change, McFetridge said emails from asylum seekers hoping they will now be free to cross are “going up by the day. So much misinformation,” she said. “People think ‘foreign nationals’ means anyone who isn’t Canadian can cross.”
As the area’s immigration coordinator at the Joint Council for Economic Opportunity, a position funded by New York through the Office of New Americans, Diane Noiseux meets many of them. She said there were about six families with over 20 people who came back to the area and tried to cross on
Sept. 7, thinking they would be able to claim asylum in Canada after the September update.
She added that as recently as last week, U.S. authorities were detaining some individuals for their attempts: a husband and wife tried to claim asylum by entering Canada via Roxham Road, and when they were directed back the woman was allowed to go free while the man was placed in custody.
Another recent detainee, a man originally from Nigeria, needed his family to pull together $10,000 to bail him out of New York’s Clinton County jail after he attempted to lodge his own asylum claim with Canadian border authorities in August. Once he was released, a local lawyer told the Times Union that the man said he’d tried to cross only because he’d seen on television news that Canada had reopened.
Some cab drivers, whose role was historically to
transport asylum seekers to Roxham Road or to the border crossing near Champlain, have served as allies to migrants by explaining to them that most asylum seekers are not currently getting through.
Amy Mountcastle, an anthropologist at SUNY Plattsburgh, has been working with her colleague Elizabeth Onasch on a long-term look at the border dynamic.
Mountcastle noticed that taxi drivers who shuttle asylum seekers have mostly been portrayed for price gouging. But while each driver is different, and some have likely been transporting people during the pandemic without telling them the news, she said others have been talking clients out of using their services when it’s clear they wouldn’t get through.
But sometimes, the warnings don’t work.
Mountcastle recently ran into a driver who was picking up three different parties at once from the Plattsburgh airport. They were all hoping to claim asylum in Canada.
“The driver said that he tells them what the deal is, but many just insist they want to try their luck,” she said.
The waiting game
While some asylum seekers have followed outdated information or decided to take a risk, many others have been looking for more accurate updates or listening to people like McFetridge, Ayotte, or the cab drivers. A number of these refugees, many of whom arrived in the U.S. explicitly to attempt a Canadian asylum case, are laying low while waiting for policies to change.
Jose, currently in Orlando, is one of them. The father of four from Venezuela spoke proudly of his teenage children, whom he left behind in May in the hopes of paving the family’s way to asylum in Canada.
“I miss them very much,” he said, tearing up. Jose, who asked that his last name be withheld for this story, explained that he has a cousin in Montreal who spoke to him when he was still in Venezuela in March, suggesting that he try to get asylum in Canada. He told the Times Union that he was only planning to be in the U.S. temporarily, until he could cross into Quebec through northern New York.
In May, Jose entered the U.S. on a preexisting tourist visa. He knew he’d have to wait before going north; he just hadn’t wanted to let the visa expire and “lose the opportunity to enter (the U.S.) through the front door,” he said.
A civil engineer, Jose had experience abroad before starting his first petroleum-related business in Venezuela in the 1980s. But after Hugo Chavez took power, it was expropriated by the government.
Jose said he had landed on the state enforcers’ blacklist for failing to fall in line, and that anything he did to make a living was destroyed or taken by the Venezuelan government.
In July, he reached out to McFetridge at Plattsburgh Cares to ask when he could travel.
“She told me to stay where I am, that the border is closed,” he said.
He has followed up again with her and with several lawyers since reading that “they opened the border” this week. But he’s frustrated his internet searches have been turning up old or potentially untrue news items.
“I can't gamble. It's not about me,” he said. “I can sleep under a bridge, but I can't do that to my kids.”
The civil engineer said he might apply for protection in the U.S. if he had no other option. He landed in the country four months ago, so he has time. But for anyone who arrived planning to enter via Roxham Road at the beginning of the pandemic, the U.S. clock will have already timed out.
“You only have a year to apply for asylum in the United States” from the time you arrive, said Bryan Overland, who until this month was legal services manager at a Buffalo shelter called Vive, run by Jericho Road Community Health Center.
Vive is one of several shelters where Plattsburgh organizers send asylum seekers who have been directed back. It has been at capacity for months with people affected by pandemic-era immigration changes, including those waiting for Canada's rules to shift.
“If you spend that entire year waiting for the Canadian
border to reopen, then you're in trouble: You lost your chance of submitting an application for asylum here,” Overland said.
But some shelter residents have held out hope, watching on the 21st of every month — the day Canada has been renewing its border restrictions — to see if the rules change and they can safely cross. Since mid-August, a few people who were returned to the U.S. from Roxham Road over a year ago have also begun getting calls from Canadian authorities about the “resumption of their claims.”
Thinned networks
Vive, along with Noiseux, Plattsburgh Cares volunteers and Wendy Ayotte’s Bridges Not Borders, are part of a tightknit cross-border network supporting the needs of asylum seekers at the northern border. The groups, many of which are based in northern and western New York, each have their own perspectives: Some consider themselves advocates, while others, including Plattsburgh Cares, clarify that they are “purely humanitarian.”
The network has been meeting virtually on a monthly basis this year, and has put out news releases to take on the information vacuum that has led to an influx of people stranded in New York’s rural regions.
One release from April 2021 is titled, “Don’t Seek Asylum in Canada Without FIRST Getting Legal Advice.” Months later, it still holds true.
Among the dozens of people stranded in Plattsburgh, JCEO's Noiseux said some had previously been in New York shelters but decided to try crossing at Roxham Road in order to get their information into the Canadian system, even while expecting to be sent back.
“Now they're trapped, they have nowhere to go. They leave the shelter, they lose their spot,” Noiseux said.
When an asylum claimant is directed back at the northern border, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers sometimes call the county social services’ offices after-hours hotline, or they may call Diana Wardell, a volunteer for Plattsburgh Cares who has been a point person for stranded migrants since 2017.
“We want to try to discourage people from coming up here and having to be turned away, unless they meet a Safe Third Country Agreement exception,” Wardell said.
While most asylum seekers have a plan for how to get to the border — whether to Roxham Road or a formal port of entry — few have a strategy for what to do if they’re sent back out into rugged and sparsely populated northern New York.
John Redden, who runs the Department of Social Services in Clinton County, said that when they get calls he works closely with JCEO to find temporary solutions for migrants who are stranded, and that Wardell and other volunteers with Plattsburgh Cares often “do the heavy lift.”
Direct-back cases used to be more rare. Now, Plattsburgh Cares has helped well over 150 people get food, shelter and transportation to their next safe place since the start of the pandemic. But the organization, set up as an apolitical nonprofit to help stranded refugees,is running out of cash.
“Plattsburgh is an extremely small city — we have no shelters, we have no public transportation in or out of our region right now,” Wardell said. “It's not like you can catch a bus back to New York City.”
We want to try to discourage people from coming up here and having to be turned away, unless they meet a Safe Third Country Agreement exception.”
— Diana Wardell