“Don’t bring me anyone tomorrow, the border closes tonight at midnight,” Sergio repeats for the umpteenth time. His phone is not ringing throughout the interview, conducted in this service station in Plattsburgh, the last stop before Roxham Road for many asylum seekers en route to Canada.
Still at the end of the day, the buffer was made only of paper and uncertainties south of the border, on the route most often taken by migrants. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in the process of confirming what had started to be rumored the day before: Ottawa and Washington had reached an agreement to make the 8900 kilometers between the two countries an official passage.
From midnight, border agents will therefore send back nationals who cross the border irregularly. No one yet knows how to deploy the 15,000 places that Canada has agreed to create “for humanitarian reasons”.
Will migrants have to submit a dossier from their country of origin? Or will they be able to do so at an official border post? And which “Western Hemisphere” countries will be included?
On the ground, the migrants and their taxi facilitators knew nothing about it. Word of the new deal was already circulating in migrant groups on social media as early as Friday morning, but few seemed to know the actual deadline.
Gradually, the consequences materialized all the same, relentlessly.
At Roxham Road, on the American side, while there are only a few hours left to apply for asylum by taking this irregular passage route, the Border Services Agency is busy installing new signs. The old version that said “Stop, stop, it is illegal to cross the border here or anywhere other than at an entry point” is replaced by a message that will be unveiled at the stroke of midnight.
A family from Nicaragua was crossing the border on Roxham Road, a four-year-old girl bundled up in her candy pink jumpsuit. “We hurried, because we knew it would close, but not as quickly as last night,” said the Duty his mother.
No crush
In Plattsburgh, a bus turns into the parking lot, the last on the schedule from New York City before the midnight deadline Friday night into Saturday. The next one should not arrive until 2 am, and the taxi drivers wonder what will happen to the passengers who will not be able to continue any further this time: “This place is closed at night. People won’t go to the border, they’re going to be arrested after midnight,” said Tom, another taxi driver, pointing his chin at the service station repairman.
He is another regular on this stretch of road, the last kilometers of a journey that has sometimes counted thousands through several countries on the continent. A man who claims to be from Afghanistan rushes into his car, an air between relief and nervousness.
A woman from Haiti is sitting close to her suitcase, a phone number on a piece of paper in one hand, her cell phone in the other.
Asylum seekers are trickling in today, notes the clerk, a little scowling.
Where they are destined, at the end of Roxham road, in this passage a few meters wide and long towards Canada, they were nevertheless nearly 9,400 in January and February of this year to request asylum and 39,000 l last year.
Most refuse to give their name, as do taxi drivers. Some fear that the publication will harm their immigration file, others want to avoid legal trouble, even if they are all working in the light of day.
“They have every right to move passengers,” says Amy Mountcastle, an anthropologist from the State University of New York (SUNY) who has spent dozens of hours in the field documenting the human face of this migration.
Back at the gas station between two trips, Sergio repeats between his many calls from New York, Virginia, Haiti and even Saudi Arabia: “I told them not to fly, to not to take the bus, not to move. They cannot pass. »
Bud, another driver passing by, rolls down his car window and ventures to ask if we know what’s going to happen. “I’m going to go ask the border patrol, they’ll tell me,” he says.
He remains a little, all the same, to say that he “feels badly for them”: “they are fleeing death, several have told me harsh things”, but they will not arrive at the desired destination.
“There is no reception structure here in Plattsburgh, so everyone is worried that they will be stranded […] like in abeyance here,” explains Professor Mountcastle, posted near the bus that has just arrived.
This fear of the lack of a reception structure has just changed sides of the border, she notes.
Warm inside as the temperature drops, a family from Ecuador searches for a way to get back to New York City instead. She has taken the opposite route: she is coming back from the North. “We were told to go to Canada, that we would find work. We spent two and a half months there and the work permit still didn’t come,” says Marcelo, the father of a 24-year-old man who identifies himself as Jefferson.
His 10-year-old brother, whose first name they even protect, buried his head in the back of his aunt Nancy, who accompanies them. They could not remain without money and without work, she explains in turn. “We came on foot from Ecuador, you can’t know what we went through,” she said. They are now trying to join another member of their family, but they only have money for passage to Albany. Do they regret having returned south of the border? “Canada doesn’t work for us,” she says.