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TOP STORY
Of the 410 terror suspects stopped at a U.S. land border crossing in the past year, 87 per cent came from Canada, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
And this figure has long been cited by U.S. politicians as justification to tighten security at the Canadian border — a cause now being championed by incoming U.S. president Donald Trump.
On Monday, Trump threatened 25 per cent tariffs against both Canada and Mexico if they didn’t tighten border security. “This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this invasion of our Country!” Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social.
The threat has already yielded an emergency meeting between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and provincial premiers. In addition, both Alberta and Ontario have pledged to independently start patrolling their own southern borders.
Nevertheless, one of the immediate reactions from Canadian politicians was to wonder why they’d gotten lumped in with Mexico. It was the Mexican border, after all, where U.S. authorities have recorded more than seven million illegal entries in just the last three years.
“To compare us to Mexico is the most insulting thing I have ever heard from our friends and closest allies, the United States of America,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said on Tuesday.
But U.S. politicians in northern states have been sounding the alarm on the Canadian border for some time.
In October 2023, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu created a Northern Border Alliance Task Force to step up patrols of their border with Quebec. In a statement, Sununu cited the rising numbers of suspected terrorists coming in from Canada. “Encounters with individuals on the terrorist watch list at the Land Border Ports of Entry along the northern border have doubled since 2017,” he said.
In June, New York Congressman Nick Langworthy tabled legislation to tighten security along the Canadian border, saying it “poses a major threat to our national security, with hundreds of thousands of unidentified individuals streaming into our communities every year.”
When Trump picked Tom Homan to be his “border czar,” Homan immediately pledged to address the “huge national security issue” of the U.S. northern border.
Homan grew up in West Carthage, N.Y., a community just 60 kilometres from the Ontario border. In a Nov. 11 interview with a West Carthage-area news outlet, Homan said Canada was a magnet for “special interest aliens.”
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It’s an official term used by U.S. Homeland Security, and it refers to someone who “potentially poses a national security risk to the United States.” The designation is based on travel patterns; whether the individual has a history of making visits to a “nexus to nefarious activity” or a “nexus to terrorism.”
Homan said if a terror group or criminal organization wants to slip someone illegally into the U.S., it’s worth paying a premium to do it from Canada, as there’s less chance they will be intercepted.
“They know there’s a lot fewer officers up here,” said Homan.
Terror suspects being attracted by the relative sparseness of the Canadian border is also something that’s been brought up by Pennylvania Congressman Mike Kelly. “Why would they come in through the northern border? Because it’s virtually unwatched, that’s why,” he said in a May interview.
The United States’ terror watchlist is officially known as the Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS). Although the U.S. does not disclose who is on it or how many names there are, it’s intended as a comprehensive list of “known or suspected terrorists.” As per an official definition, this runs the gamut from actual convicted terrorists, to someone believed to be acting “in furtherance of terrorism and/or terrorist activities.”
Notably, the TDSD isn’t quite as strict as the No Fly List, which bars individuals from boarding an aircraft. To get on the No Fly List, individuals usually have to be on record as having specifically made a terroristic threat.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection records extremely few instances of someone on the terror watchlist attempting to enter illegally from Canada. In the last eight years, border guards have intercepted just 10 illegal entries who turned out to be on the TDSD (as compared to 396 terror suspects caught illegally crossing over from Mexico in that same period).
Rather, virtually all of the “known or suspected” terrorists coming in from Canada are being intercepted at legal ports of entry.
In the last fiscal year, 358 individuals on the terror watchlist were stopped at a Canadian border crossing, as compared to 52 stopped at a Mexican border crossing.
And this has been the ratio for the entire post-COVID era.
In 2022, Canada yielded 82 per cent of the 380 terror suspects stopped at a U.S. land border crossing. In 2023, Canada yielded 86 per cent of the 564 total suspects stopped at a land border crossing.
In addition to yielding outsized rates of terror suspects, the Canadian border has also yielded unprecedented highs of illegal entries into the United States.
Although it’s still a fraction of the millions of illegal entries seen at the Mexican border, in the last fiscal year, U.S. border agents intercepted 198,929 illegal entries from Canada — an average of 550 per day. This is nearly double the 110,000 interceptions they recorded for 2022.
In just the Swanton Sector — a region comprising New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire — border agents recorded a 550 per cent increase in illegal entries over the 12 months starting in October 2022.
IN OTHER NEWS
One of the recent themes of Canadian politics is that nobody ever resigns – and certainly never on principle. Except in Kensington, P.E.I., where longtime mayor Rowan Caseley resigned in disgust over his council’s vote to build six pickleball courts. Caseley argued that the $20,000 for the courts should instead have been spent on more important things, such as waste treatment. “It just went totally against my principles,” he said.
This isn’t a political story at all, but the Edmonton area has yielded two freak incidents in just the last week where someone died or was fatally injured in front of an audience. The first was 59-year-old actor Julien Arnold, who died on stage during a performance of A Christmas Carol at the city’s Citadel Theatre. The second was Trokon Dousuah, 33, an amateur MMA fighter who sustained a ruptured kidney in his first fight, dying two days later.
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