DERBY, Vt. (WCAX) – Across more than 290 miles of international border with Canada, U.S. authorities say illegal crossings are happening at an unprecedented level. Some residents in Derby agree that the situation in their backyard is getting out of hand.
“It’s getting worse by the year,” said Alain De La Breure, who has lived in Derby for four years and whose property sits right on the Canadian border.
At all hours of the day, he sees people crossing through his backyard to get into the U.S. Video from De La Bruere’s home surveillance camera shows four people crossing through his backyard in the middle of the night, loading into a truck outside his home, and speeding away. One of many instances he’s experienced. “The border people told me not to interfere because they may have weapons. They want to get through, they’re going to have nobody stopping them,” he said.
“De La Bruere says even vehicles have crossed through his yard, some getting stuck on blocks he installed. Now, he’s taking it one step further. “I’ve taken these rail ties and put them up in front of the blocks — that’s going to give them a much harder chance to get through,” he said.
Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows a sharp rise in the number of encounters in recent years. Between October and June, there have been 12,860 encounters in the Swanton Sector alone. Apprehensions are higher than all those recorded in the area in the past 13 years combined. While July’s data is not out yet, officials say the total is much higher.
“I can say that we are currently over 15,000 thousand apprehensions for that period of time. That is something we’ve never seen before,” said USCBP’s Joshua Cozzens. He says while illegal entry is a crime itself, there are other concerns including drugs, guns, and human smuggling. Although they’ve added extra patrols along the Swanton Sector, he says nothing seems to be slowing the problem down.
Cozzens says many people they catch are given immigration documents and a court date. “We have to prioritize the folks that we’re going to hold, we have to prioritize the folks that we are going to seek prosecution on. But given the volume of folks we are dealing with, we can’t detain everybody for an extended period of time,” he said.
One way to help slow down the illegal crossings is to make the asylum-seeking process easier. CBS News reported on Tuesday that the Biden administration is implementing new policy changes to expedite processing for asylum seekers at the border. Those changes were expected to begin Wednesday but we were unable to confirm that.