Border community reeve worries about another surge in illegal crossings after 6 men caught

January 23, 2025 Canuck

The reeve of a Manitoba border community says he hopes the recent apprehension of six people who tried to sneak into Canada from the United States is not a sign of things to come.

Last week, the RCMP took six people into custody after they walked across the U.S. border into Canada. The incident happened just six days before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as U.S. president on Monday.

Dave Carlson, reeve for the RM of Emerson-Franklin south of Winnipeg, told CBC News on Thursday he’s concerned about a potential repeat of Trump’s first term, as experts warns the U.S. president’s pledge to carry out mass deportations might lead to another surge in the number of people attempting to cross the border on foot.

“There’s definitely going to be people that are more desperate,” Carlson said. “They’re probably going to head for whatever safety they think they can find,” including Canada.

A spike in the number of people crossing the border on foot overwhelmed emergency services in Emerson during Trump’s first four years in office.

“It’s definitely concerning. We don’t want to see the kind of surge that we did back in 2017 into 2018,” Carlson said.

The migrants were arrested in the same area where six other border-crossers were apprehended in November, the RCMP said last week.

Black Hawk helicopters begin patrols

Three were from Sudan, the others from Mauritania, Chad and Jordan, police said. Four were returned to the U.S. last Thursday, while two others were still waiting to be processed by the Canada Border Services Agency to see whether they have legitimate asylum claims.

Five fled into a wooded area before police deployed aircraft and heat-detection technology to capture them.

Last week, the federal government said it would be providing officers tasked with protecting the Canadian border more resources, including drones and drug-detection technology, part of a $1.3 billion strategy. Black Hawk helicopters leased by the government as part of the plan began patrolling the Manitoba-U.S. border on Sunday.

“The RCMP has a very large presence,” Carlson said.

“Our hopes are that … if there are folks crossing, that they will be intercepted and not get themselves into situations that could turn fatal,” he added, referring to the 2022 deaths of a family of four from India — Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife, Vaishali, 37, their daughter Vihangi, 11, and their three-year-old son, Dharmik — as they attempted to cross into Minnesota from Canada.

“The beefed-up border … is welcome so we’re hoping that we don’t have a repeat of what we had before.”

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