“No one is going to attack my home and get away with it,” Tom Homan said.
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Those were the words of President-elect Donald Trump’s new border czar to his hometown TV station in Watertown, N.Y. He was talking about problems coming across the Canada-U.S. border and sending a warning and wake-up call to the Trudeau government.
Whether the Trudeau Liberals, who have campaigned against Trump for the last year, will listen remains to be seen.
Homan sees the border with Canada as a source of illegal immigrants, terrorists and drugs, and he wants to stop it. Canada is about to get a tonne of attention from the United States and to be honest, we won’t be liking it.
Over the period from October 2023 to the end of September 2024, border patrol agents apprehended close to 20,000 people crossing in the Swanton Sector – more than in the previous 17 years combined. That sector runs from the Quebec-New Hampshire border, across the Vermont-Quebec border and then over the top of New York State to where the St. Lawrence River meets Lake Ontario.
This is the area the new border czar comes from, and he’s certain that the people they are catching are just part of the problem. He noted the Biden administration moved agents from the Canada-U.S. border to the border with Mexico, starving the area of resources — something he said won’t happen under his watch.
“There’s very little river patrol or lake patrol or road patrol, and so they had been overrun, and the problem with the northern border is a huge national security issue,” Homan said.
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Homan noted the number of suspected terrorists coming across the Canada-U.S. border – more than 300 intercepted so far in 2024. In addition, he points to drug smuggling, sex trafficking and criminal activity coming across the border.
“President Trump has to work with Prime Minister Trudeau and say, ‘Look, you need to enforce whatever immigration laws you have,’” Homan said.
Canada’s broken immigration system may end up being fixed because the Americans are going to demand it.
The majority of people being apprehended illegally entering the United States from Canada are Indian nationals who came to Canada on visitor or student visas – most of them single adult males. The Trudeau government may need to begin imposing stricter visa rules on who can enter Canada, just to ensure that the Canada-U.S. border doesn’t become bogged down for both travel and trade.
“I expect there to be some tough conversations,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said to reporters Wednesday.
That’s an understatement.
Canada now faces a double whammy on immigration after the election of Donald Trump. There will be demands to stop the flow of illegal immigration and the daily drip of terrorist suspects and drug shipments from Canada into the United States. Then, there’s the flow that is expected to head north.
With Trump promising to enforce mass deportations of illegal immigrants, and Homan vowing to enforce that pledge, it’s expected that many people in the United States illegally will try to head north to enter Canada illegally.
In 2017, the Trudeau government literally put out the welcome mat at Roxham Rd., an illegal crossing between Quebec and New York State. Rather than discouraging people from crossing the border illegally, the Trudeau Liberals installed infrastructure to process what at times was more than 100 people per day crossing illegally.
At its height in 2022, more than 39,000 people crossed into Canada illegally at Roxham Rd and declared that they were refugees. Most were economic migrants trying to come to Canada without going through the onerous application system.
“We take the border very, very seriously,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Wednesday afternoon following a meeting of the Parliament Hill Canada-U.S. cabinet committee.
Beyond repeating that phrase several times and saying that border security was important for the security of Canadians, Freeland uttered little of substance. It would appear the Trump win has caught the Trudeau government off guard, and a week later, they still aren’t sure what comes next.
What will be needed on the border is action. So far, all they have are platitudes.