Canada prepares border against potential migrant surge due to Trump’s deportation plans

It’s not just Mexico. The United States has another neighbor that is also bracing for the immigration policies that Donald Trump has promised to implement as soon as he takes office. Among these are the mass deportations of millions of people, something that Canada fears could end up pushing immigrants north to cross the 5,525-mile (8,891 km) border that separates the two countries. The longest non-militarized international boundary is not usually at the center of the American political debate on immigration, but everything points to it being so under the second Trump presidency: the president-elect himself made this clear on Monday, when he announced that he will subject his two North American neighbors to 25% tariffs from his first day back in power for as long as they do not clamp down on illegal immigration to the United States, among other reasons that he cited.

“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders. This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country! Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem,” Trump wrote on his Truth social media account Monday night.

The Canadian government has not responded to this latest threat from the Republican, but Ottawa has been preparing for weeks for Trump’s return to the presidency. Not wanting to deal with surprises from the White House’s change of tack, as happened in 2016, contacts between the Canadian authorities and the Republican team began even before Election Day on November 5, according to media reports. Issues such as trade and NATO are on the table, but the focus is also on immigration, as the bilateral situation on this matter has changed significantly in the last eight years.

In January 2017, after Trump signed an executive order early in his first term to suspend entry to the United States of refugees and citizens of certain Muslim countries, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted the following message on social media: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.” However, the message has since changed. On November 12, Marc Miller, the federal Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, declared that “not everyone is welcome here.”

In recent months, Ottawa has made several changes to its immigration policies in response to economic and infrastructure pressures. The country has significantly reduced the number of temporary foreign worker and student visas, as well as the quota for permanent residents. Now, the government is also drawing up plans to allocate new resources to the border before Trump arrives in the White House.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which polices the border, has indicated that it is on “alert” in response to the president-elect’s promises of mass deportations, and it is considering an increase in both personnel and material resources. Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s Minister of Public Safety, has reiterated that his country’s agencies have been working for a long time to prepare for various scenarios. LeBlanc has indicated that border surveillance work has improved thanks to growing investment, especially in technology, but that Ottawa could inject additional resources if necessary. In addition, Mélanie Joly, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, indicated on November 7 that her country will remain firm in its plan to reduce immigration targets. In this atmosphere of negotiations and probable scenarios, the leftist New Democratic Party is asking the Canadian government to prepare a roadmap with a humanitarian vision in view of a potential influx of thousands of people.

However, the official rhetoric from Ottawa increasingly seeks to convey a message of calm, stressing that cooperation with U.S. authorities will continue. “There is an alignment of interests to ensure that the border is secure,” said Minister Miller.

Meanwhile, members of the incoming Trump administration have already begun to sound the alarm about what they call an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants crossing from Canada into the United States, a number that has multiplied by six in the last four years. Although the president-elect has not outlined his plans to reduce immigration from Canada, his next “border czar,” Tom Homan, has already made it clear that controlling this route will be a priority for the Republican government.

In a recent interview with the local New York television station WWNY, the former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump’s first term said that the northern border constitutes “a huge national security issue” for the United States. Homan added that “special interest aliens” — the term the Department of Homeland Security uses to describe immigrants with possible criminal ties, including to terrorism — use Canada as a gateway to the United States because the border is much less heavily policed than the southern one. “It’s one of the things I’ll tackle when I’m in the White House,” he said.

Homan is originally from a small town in upstate New York near the Canadian border; New York is the northern state with the highest number of border crossings by far, so he has a personal interest in the region. “It’s my home, I’m not going to ignore my home,” he said in the same interview.

Border crossings into the US skyrocket

For several years, concern about irregular immigration at the US-Canada border focused primarily on people crossing into Canada to seek asylum due to changes in U.S. policy. The most significant route was the so-called Roxham Trail, a shallow ditch that divides Mooers, New York, from Hemmingford, in Quebec province. The Canadian government closed this route in 2023 after around 40,000 migrants — mostly from Latin America — crossed from the U.S. using this route in a single year.

But that trend has now reversed: Figures show that most crossings are from Canada into the United States. In fiscal year 2024, which ended in October, U.S. authorities apprehended 198,929 migrants at the Canadian border, compared with 32,376 in 2020, according to data from the Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP). Trump and his supporters blame the Biden administration for this, since the numbers were much lower during the Republican's first presidency.

Now, with the mass deportations that Trump intends to carry out, in addition to ending programs that protect certain groups of migrants who are already in the United States legally, such as TPS, parole or DACA, the reality on the ground may change again: more crossings into Canada and fewer into the United States.

Crossings into the United States are mainly carried out from Quebec province, which has received the largest number of asylum seekers from the United States via irregular routes. François Legault, Quebec’s provincial premier, declared on November 19: “We cannot afford a Roxham Road 2.0.” Legault said that the Ontario Provincial Police is also carrying out surveillance work on the border, in collaboration with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Although irregular crossings along the northern border are only a fraction of those on the U.S.-Mexico border, human smuggling activity from Canada has increased considerably in recent years, especially along the border between eastern Ontario, Quebec, New York and Vermont. In addition, authorities encounter many more terrorist suspects at the northern border than at the southern one. This is a reality that Homan mentioned in the television interview: “Canada must understand that it cannot be a gateway for terrorists into the United States.”

Homan has said he intends to deploy more immigration agents to the northern border and will encourage Trump to negotiate with Prime Minister Trudeau to increase enforcement on the Canadian side. Ottawa and Washington have had a two-decade-old “safe third country” agreement, a treaty under which asylum seekers are required to apply in the first country they reach, either Canada or the United States. So when asylum seekers travel from one country to the other, they can be turned back, with few exceptions.

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