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Arrests for illegal crossings from Canada spiked in the last fiscal year, but remain a fraction of the number of those from Mexico.
- Nov. 26, 2024, 5:06 p.m. ET
President-elect Donald Trump’s ire toward Mexico for the flow of migrants into the U.S. is nothing new. Now, he has added Canada as a target over the issue.
“As everyone is aware, thousands of people are pouring through Mexico and Canada, bringing Crime and Drugs at levels never seen before,” he asserted on the social media platform Truth Social on Monday. The post also laid out his planned course of action: a 25 percent tariff on all imports from both countries.
Here’s a look at what’s happening at the northern U.S. border.
Illegal crossings have risen sharply but remain far below those at the southern border.
From October 2023 through September, the 2024 fiscal year, more than 23,000 arrests involving illegal crossings were made at the northern border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That number has risen in recent years, from just over 2,000 in the 2022 fiscal year and around 10,000 in the 2023 fiscal year.
Most of the arrests took place in part of the northern border known as the Swanton Sector, an area between Quebec and Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York.
Robert Garcia, the head Border Patrol agent in the Swanton area, said in a post on X in early October that “more than 19,222 subjects from 97 different countries” had been arrested in the past year, which he said was “more than its last 17 fiscal years combined.”
By contrast, illegal crossings at the southern border hit record highs late last year when nearly 250,000 arrests were made in December alone. President Biden signed an order in June restricting asylum for those who crossed from Mexico, after which the numbers began to drop sharply. In October, border agents made some 56,000 arrests.
