US Says It's Getting Tough on Northern Border Security

The U.S. border with Canada is the longest undefended border in the world. Once upon a time, people went back and forth across that border like there wasn’t one. Until recently, to get through the country’s guarded ports of entry, all you had to do was show ID and announce your U.S. citizenship.

As of June 2009, you now need a passport.

The government next plans to bolster security along the vast unmanned border between those guarded entry points.

That’s no small task, considering most of the nearly 4,000-mile border runs through undeveloped wilderness. New Hampshire’s 58-mile portion of it is also the northern boundary of Pittsburg, a town with an average 3 residents per square mile. One of them agreed to take me there.

“This is the US Canadian border,” said Lisa Savard, a hunting and fishing guide who runs a guest lodge about 10 miles from the border. To get there from her place, we drove on open logging roads and hiked about 400 yards into the woods.

A shallow stream marks the border in some places, a rough clear cut in others. Along the way there are round cement markers the size of large pizzas embedded in the ground to show which country is where, and that’s it.

Besides the stream, some pricker bushes, and swarms of black flies, there’s nothing but international law to stop someone from simply walking into the U.S. Savard and I stood just inches from Canada, and from what I could tell, there was no one around for miles to watch us.

“There’s nothing to watch,” Savard said. “There was a turkey that flew by and he almost went to Canada, but not quite.”

It surprised Savard when I told her that the Border Patrol arrests thousands of people, from dozens of countries, for trying to cross from Canada each year.

Last year there were 1,275 arrests along just the 300-mile portion in New Hampshire, Vermont and eastern New York.

People who live up here, who know the most about what the unmanned border looks like, are the least worried about who might try to cross it.

“I don’t think people are even aware of it, that it’s that easy to cross over,” explains retired Pittsburg postmaster Paul Piwaranus. “They see the regular port of entries, but they have no clue how many miles of wilderness we have up here.”

Piwaranus wonders, short of building a big fence, how exactly a wilderness border can be secured. The U.S. government’s answer is modern technology.

“We’re being better outfitted with the right tools, and many tools, to do better job at securing the border between the ports of entry,” says Lloyd Easterling, of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The agency is installing acoustic ground sensors, and mounting motion-sensing cameras on 80-foot towers along the border; at some point unmanned aircraft might help patrol the border in the northeast; and there are plans to upgrade or replace at least 8 of the Border Patrol stations between this region’s guarded entry points.

The agency also increased the number of agents assigned to the entire U.S.-Canada border to 1500, a 25% increase over the past year.

“All of those things combine to form comprehensive border security solution,” Easterling says. “That shouldn’t be thought of as being right there on the line and that’s it.”

In other words, border security doesn’t stop at the border. Case in point – after visiting Pittsburg, while heading south I was stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 93. There were six large vehicles and five officers, and they were stopping every car.

The agent who approached my car told me that he and his fellow officers were conducting a routine spot checkpoint. He asked if I was a U.S. citizen, and took my word for it.

Checkpoints might be old school compared to cameras and sensors, but the Border Patrol says they’re key to its new security strategy for the northern border. Passing through one of them personally was the closest encounter I had with that strategy all day, and it was about 150 miles south of Canada.