The Northern border

While all of the attention of late has been on apprehensions of migrants at the southern border, the northern border made the news last week.

The U.S. Border Patrol issued a press release on Friday, Oct. 7, about an operation conducted last month near the Minnesota/Canadian border.

On Sept. 25, an agent from the patrol’s Warroad office checked out a report of two vehicles illegally crossing the border near Roseau, Minnesota. The agent located one vehicle at a gas station, and found one UK national and three Irish nationals. The other vehicle took off.

It was found the next day at a restaurant in Bemidji. Eight more illegal migrants were found, seven from the U.K. and one from Ireland.

Generally speaking, visitors from the U.K. and Ireland have little trouble entering the United States. Visitors from those nations can generally come to America and stay for up to 90 days with minimal paperwork involved. The big immigration problems with residents from the British Isles, to the extent there is one, are people overstaying their visas.

It’s not clear why this dozen went to such elaborate lengths to avoid customs and border patrol.

Curious. We’ll keep digging on this one.

More common, unfortunately, are events like the tragic case from earlier this year when a group of migrants from India froze to death attempting a winter crossing of the northern border.

Encounters at the northern border have spiked this year, according to Federal data,

However, those numbers are not being driven by the local Grand Forks sector (North Dakota and Minnesota). Encounters along that 800-mile frontier are still relatively rare, totaling only a few dozen per month.