Pennsylvania might have only about 42 miles of border with Canada in the middle of Lake Erie, but Rep. Mike Kelly traveled from the swing state to North Dakota earlier this year to build up criticism of Biden administration immigration policies beyond just the southern border.
Kelly, who last year helped form the Northern Border Security Caucus, is among a handful of Republicans who highlighted during the 2024 campaign season that the concerns among GOP voters about illegal border crossings from Mexico also apply to Canada.
“All of us should be just outraged at what’s happening in this country,” Kelly said at a congressional field hearing in Grand Forks, N.D., in May that focused on northern border security. “The fact that we’re so calm and so under control is what this administration wants you to believe.”
The relentless focus from Donald Trump and his Republican allies on the fallout of illegal immigration in the U.S. has given members of Congress from states along the northern border a chance during the election to focus on concerns about what’s happening in their communities as well.
“You can’t be farther away from the southern border than Grand Forks,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., said at the beginning of that House Judiciary panel hearing he had requested.
Last month, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose district shares a border with Canada and who has long been calling for increased scrutiny of the northern border, held an event in her district where law enforcement officers, emergency responders and residents detailed their frustrations with the surge of migrant crossings in the region.
“Enough is enough,” Stefanik said in a statement about the event that cast blame at Democratic office holders in the state. “Our rural communities are struggling due to the America Last policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Kathy Hochul, and Chuck Schumer.”
Illegal northern border crossings are at a high. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data for fiscal 2024 details close to 24,000 Title 8 U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions, up from just over 10,000 in fiscal 2023. But that figure is also dwarfed by the southern border, which saw more than 1.5 million such apprehensions.
The northern border crossings received some attention at the beginning of 2024 from Republican presidential candidates ranging from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to Trump himself, who called the situation at the northern border “not so hot either.”
But the Biden administration’s crackdown on southern border crossings has somewhat shifted the conversation northward as this election cycle ends, Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, said.
“While the southern border has gotten under some semblance of control in the last nine months, the northern border has now become another flashpoint,” Chishti said. “That gives more ammunition to senators in northern states to raise immigration as, once again, a calling card.”
Minnesota Republican Rep. Pete Stauber and six other lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in mid-October expressing concerns about the state of the northern border and Canada’s recent moves to limit its number of temporary residents.
The country announced earlier this year that it is seeking to reduce the number of temporary residents from 6.5 percent of Canada’s total population to 5 percent by 2026, though the full impact of that effort on the United States is still unclear.
The October letter called the situation a “crisis on the horizon that will overburden our ports of entry even further” and said U.S. border policies in the face of this potential influx of migrants could leave the country “more vulnerable than ever before.”
Nearly two dozen Republican lawmakers, mostly from northern states, in March sent a letter to Mayorkas expressing concern about the situation at the northern border, saying that they don’t want that border to become “another avenue for deadly, illegal drugs into our country and our communities.”
“While the crisis at the Southwest Border continues to intensify and unfold into an unprecedented disaster, local communities and Border Patrol agents along the Northern Border are feeling the strain as you continue to direct the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to abandon its duty of protecting our sovereign borders,” the lawmakers wrote.
Other Republicans have raised concerns about the border as well. As the war in Gaza continues to leave Palestinians under attack, with some fleeing to Canada in search of refuge, six senators in July sent a letter to Mayorkas expressing concern that Palestinians with “potential ties with terrorist groups” could enter the United States through the northern border.
Taking action
In March 2023, the U.S. and Canada expanded their bilateral asylum-sharing agreements to include migrants who crossed the countries’ shared border between ports of entry. And CBS News reported in August that the Biden administration planned to speed up the processing of asylum-seekers at the northern border because of increased migrant crossings in the region.
But actual legislative action on the matter has been limited.
Just a handful of bills have been introduced this year that have been explicitly targeted at the northern border, compared to the swaths of legislation targeted at the southern border or broader border policies.
North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer said in recent years he has seen resources diverted away from his state and the northern border. The situation on the northern border isn’t as extreme as the southern border, he said, but border operations like commerce efforts are being spread thin.
“It’s a symptom of the neglect that the northern border is getting as a result of all that attention on the southern border,” Cramer said in an interview.
To address some of those issues, Cramer collaborated with Sens. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., to introduce legislation that would require a threat analysis of the northern border, something he said hasn’t been done since 2017. Similar legislation was also introduced in the House in June by 44 Republicans and one Democrat.
Cramer hopes to see further action taken in the coming months to secure the northern border and said that concerns with the southern border “give us some leverage.”
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said that though attention on the northern border hasn’t been as intense as the scrutiny down south, border policy is still an issue that voters during this election cycle feel impacts them no matter where they live. That’s a result of the increasingly intense rhetoric surrounding border policy and immigrants, she said.
“Especially in red states, it doesn’t really matter anymore where you are in the country,” Beirich said. “Immigration is a big deal.”
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