Border guards are seeing a 47% spike in people crossing into the US from Canada illegally, and only one in ten of those migrants is a Canadian citizen.
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics show that the first six months of the fiscal year to date saw a 47% increase in illegal border crossings in comparison to the year before.
Between Oct. 2021 and Mar. 2022, CBP officers encountered 625 people attempting to leave Canada illegally. Only 63 of those people held Canadian citizenships.
Meanwhile over the same period the previous year, 426 people illegally crossed the border and were met by border guards. Of those, 84 were Canadian citizens.
In March, a group of six Indian nationals were rescued after attempting to cross the St. Regis River from Canada into New York state.
US citizen Brian Lazore was arrested in what officials are calling a human smuggling operation.
A similar attempt to travel out of Canada in January ended in tragedy after a family of four Indian nationals died of exposure while trying to cross the Manitoba border on foot.
According to CBP Chief patrol Agent William Maddocks, US border guards have seen a “notable increase of foreign nationals with criminal history” leaving Canada.
Illegal crossings into the US are, however, dwarfed by illegal entries into Canada via Roxham Road and other unofficial border crossings.
Since the Canadian government began tracking the number of illegal border crossers entering Canada, the country has seen an intake of 60,544 people to date.
At its peak in July to September 2017, 8,559 asylum claimants entered Canada illegally.
Although the Covid pandemic led to significant drop in illegal border crossings into Canada, the easing of COVID-19 restrictions are seeing rates return to pre-pandemic levels. In October to December of 2021, a total of 785 people illegally crossed into the country – nearly double than what it was the three months before.
As reported by True North in March, taxpayers are being forced to pay the hotel bills for illegal Roxham Road crossers who don’t have a quarantine plan.
Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Catrina Tapley told the Commons immigration committee that rooms for the migrants are being billed to the Government of Canada.
