‘God help us if this all starts happening in January’: A Trump-induced border crisis is coming

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Donald Trump pitched a hard curveball into trade relations this week, proposing a 25-per-cent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico until the flow of illegal drugs and migrants into America is staunched. Coming on the heels of his campaign promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants, border issues will be arguably the most consequential file for his second presidency.

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While trade negotiators scramble to design a plan to respond to Trump’s tariff threat, I reached out to Richard Huntley — a onetime senior Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) official in Calgary who knows this stuff inside and out — to learn how Canada is positioned to handle a surge of people fleeing Trump’s anticipated deportation orders.

“I understand Trump is already talking about building — basically concentration camps and huge detention centres,” Richard reports. “And people are just going to run. They’re just going to run,” he predicts.

“Look at the movies … where do the bad guys go when they’re trying to get away?” Richard asks. “They come to either Mexico or Canada.”

He should know: Richard, now 68, spent 33 years enforcing Canada’s border security and immigration rules, including two decades in charge of CBSA’s inland immigration enforcement in southern Alberta.

Canada’s border with the United States is the longest undefended border in the world. Richard isn’t confident our nation’s federal border security apparatus (the RCMP and CBSA, supported by Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) is prepared for a deluge of asylum seekers from the U.S.

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Ten thousand illegals showing up at our borders “would throw our system completely off kilter,” he warns. CBSA is still dealing with the aftermath of 492 Sri Lankan Tamils arriving in British Columbia on a Thai cargo ship in 2010, he groans.

The Trudeau government touts itself as a global leader in refugee resettlement and immigration, only recently scaling back its ambitious plan to welcome 500,000 immigrants each year by 2025. And while Immigration Minister Marc Miller cautions “not everyone is welcome here” — and promises he’ll enforce the rules — it’s difficult to paint over Canada’s well-established reputation as a country that rolls out the red carpet to asylum seekers. Each year, thousands of migrants enter Canada, without authorization, between official ports of entry.

“So this immigration minister is saying not everybody’s welcome but you know we’ve clearly got a reputation as being soft, and different than the United States,” Richard suggests. We have a reputation for being very generous. “Let’s put it that way,” Richard chuckles, “very, very generous.” And, he expects, “that’s going to be a problem.”

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These people fleeing deportation are desperate, Richard says. “I mean, some of them have come all the way from Africa, from Central America, walked into the States, all the way to Canada.” Their lives have been uprooted, and if you put yourself in their shoes for five minutes, he says, it’s impossible not to be sympathetic. “I always treated everybody with respect and I didn’t blame anybody for trying to come into this country, because this is a great country,” Richard reflects. I can hear the emotion in his voice. “Why wouldn’t you try?” he asks.

“Coyotes, or smugglers, are going to be in big demand,” Richard predicts. “All organized crime knows that there’s big money to be made — even with less chance of being caught than doing drugs or smuggling diamonds or pornography, or whatever. There’s big money in it and it’s very seldom you catch the coyote. Because they’re just coming up to the border and pointing the people in the direction of Canada and saying, ‘That’s where you’re going.’”

He also predicts undocumented immigrants trying to evade Trump’s deportation order will be tempted to jump the border at some place between official ports of entry. “And God help us if this all starts happening in January and February,” he swears, “because we’re not the nicest country for climate in those days.” Richard has seen people lose limbs and almost freeze to death in these border crossings. The recent trial of two men in Minnesota — found guilty of smuggling 11 Indian nationals across the border from Emerson, Man., in a blizzard in 2022 (including the Patel family of four, who died of hypothermia) drives Richard’s point home.

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“My wife is from Cornwall,” Richard continues, “which is a border city, between almost three borders: Quebec, Ontario, and the United States. When you see the St. Lawrence, basically, that’s the river and that’s the border. People go back and forth like you wouldn’t believe.” It’s a little more difficult on the prairies, he says, but people get to know the access points between official ports of entry. There’s one in southern Alberta called “Immigrant Gap,” he adds.

The U.S. border patrol has drones, armed vehicles. On our side of the border, Richard laments, “we’re got one or two Mounties roaming around every so often, especially out West here. They’re totally ineffective to stop something like this.” It’s worth noting; in response to Trump’s recent tariff threat, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc offered assurances Ottawa is evaluating supplying the RCMP and CBSA with more resources — including people, drones and helicopters.

In his time, Richard reports, the provinces would hold immigration detainees while they went through the refugee process. But now, he says, we’ve got nowhere to put detainees; the only places that have immigration detention centres are Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. And if the people who jump the border aren’t found to be refugees, Canada can’t just send them back to the U.S. Instead, Richard says, we’re obligated to return them to their country of origin, which can be expensive. “Very occasionally, we’d have to charter a plane because somebody would be too dangerous to fly on a commercial flight,” he recalls.

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Once in Canada, Richard explains, some illegals can end up in limbo. “Like Cubans, for example,” he says. “Cuba refuses to take any Cubans back. So they’re all here. They’re just roaming around. They don’t have any status … But we can’t remove them because the home country won’t take them back.”

And, he continues, “a refugee system where you can’t deal with someone’s claim in an expeditious manner just leads to problems down the road. Huge problems, because they become your neighbours, they have kids, they get married, do you know what I mean? It’s impossible to deal with people that have been here for five years or more.”

You need to deal with these people within months, Richard suggests, and that means Ottawa needs to hire far more immigration judges to process asylum claims. The system is overloaded now, Richard says; God help us if the numbers grow.

“I’d say 10,000 people would throw us into a super huge mess,” he concludes.

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