Scott Wheeler remembers when all you had to do to cross the U.S.-Canada border was say that you were headed to the hockey game.
In some ways, it was just a strange technicality of life in Newport: The high school’s home rink was a short drive north in Stanstead, Quebec. Every night there was a game, locals traveled back and forth across the border, likely thinking little of it.
But Wheeler, who now lives in nearby Derby, said that experience decades ago stands in stark contrast to what it’s like crossing the U.S.-Canada border today.
“Everybody would be showing ID,” he said. “A good proportion of them would be popping their trunk.”
In the 20 years since the attacks on 9/11, security along Vermont’s northern border has tightened, often bringing lifestyle changes for the people who live nearby.
The physical changes are most obvious in border towns like Derby. Barriers have gone up. Officer patrols have increased. The use of surveillance technology has grown.
Earlier this month, officials touted roughly $285 million in planned upgrades to five of the state’s land border crossings. One focus of these upgrades, they said, is security.
And U.S. Customs and Border Protection detailed plans in February to build a line of video surveillance towers along Vermont’s northern border. The plans have been controversial, raising questions about the balance between security and privacy.
“I always used to say, ‘It’s the longest undefended border in the world,’” said Jeffrey Ayres, who teaches international relations at St. Michael’s College. “And it’s not anymore. It’s quite defended.”
The attacks spurred collaboration between the two countries, but also have driven them apart over the past two decades, Ayres said. For instance, he noted, passenger land traffic across the border has never returned to its pre-9/11 levels.
And this division has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, he said.
“We have seen a double whammy in 20 years,” Ayres said. “The sense of closeness between the two countries has been hurt further by Covid.”
Growing pains
On 9/11, the U.S. government effectively sealed off its northern border about an hour after the second airplane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City.
“It was not communicated to us that, ‘We are about to close your border.’ It was, ‘We’ve closed your border,’” Michael Kergin, who was Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. at the time, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last year.
Over the next several days, wait times to cross the border soared nationwide. By Sept. 14, some American automakers closed their factories. It wasn’t until about a week later that the wait times were close to normal again.
Multiple border security agreements between the U.S. and Canada grew out of 9/11 — the first being a “Smart Border Declaration” signed in December 2001. Under that accord, both countries began to further differentiate between essential cross-border travel, such as cargo trucks, and what they considered nonessential travel.
The governments also began to share additional information about travelers, Ayres said. Starting in June 2009, federally approved identification was required for U.S.-Canada travel.
Crossing the border “became increasingly difficult for the average person — a tourist, a day-tripper or people with families that lived on either side,” Ayres said.
Locally, Wheeler said there have been growing pains along the border since 9/11.
At first, some customs officers struggled to treat locals they had known for decades with greater scrutiny. And, he said the influx of law enforcement personnel under federal security programs such as Operation Stonegarden has frustrated residents.
He recalled one local woman saying that local people were so upset years ago, “if they’d seen Osama bin Laden crossing the border, they wouldn’t have reported it.”
In recent years, some Vermonters who live along the border have further criticized new security measures. But overall, Wheeler says the relationship between locals and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers has improved.
That relationship is important, he said, since buildings such as the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Derby straddle both countries.
“It’s the local people who live along the border,” Wheeler said, “who are the true eyes and ears.”
Changing threats
There has not been a terrorist attack as large as 9/11 in the U.S. in the 20 years since. And now, officials are increasingly highlighting threats posed by domestic terrorism.
Since 9/11, a “jihadist foreign terrorist organization” has directed just one deadly attack in the U.S., according to a report by the think tank New America. That was in December 2019, when a man killed three people at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida
And far-right extremists have killed more people (114) in the U.S. over the past 20 years than American-based “jihadists” have (107), the report found.
New America defines far-right terrorism as “anti-government, militia, white supremacist, and anti-abortion violence,” and defines “jihadists” as people who are motivated by versions of Osama bin Laden’s “global ideology.”
“There’s been very, very few examples to my knowledge of any known terrorists coming in from Canada,” Ayres said.
To be sure, he said, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol also spends resources on efforts to curb drug trafficking and illegal border crossings. The agency’s Buffalo Field Office said in 2020 it recorded a 1,000% increase in drugs seized along the northern border that year.
And the Associated Press reported last year that the number of people apprehended for illegally crossing from Canada into the U.S. had nearly tripled from the previous three years.
Border patrol agents have occasionally set up citizenship checkpoints on Vermont roads, including several last year in Franklin County, which borders Canada.
At the time, some said the federal agency’s expanded presence was an important measure for securing the border and assisting local law enforcement in stopping drug smuggling. But others raised civil rights concerns over the practice.
Under current law, the agency has expanded powers to conduct searches within 100 miles of U.S. borders, including ocean borders.
While the policy existed before 9/11, Ayres said, it’s yet another example of how border security in Vermont has continued to expand.
“The border,” he said, “has sort of moved away from the legal border.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to make someone available for an interview for this story, and did not respond to VTDigger’s emailed questions.
