EMERSON, Manitoba (CN) — In the Red River Valley on the U.S.-Canada border near Minnesota, the plains can seem as flat as a tabletop. There are few trees to stop the cold winds and almost no place to shelter. There’s also little in terms of landmarks, making it easy to get disoriented.
That’s likely what happened nearly two years ago, when a family from India died here while crossing on foot into the United States during a blizzard. Amid skyrocketing crossing numbers on the northern border — and with changes to US and Canadian law regarding asylum seekers — officials on both sides of this permeable boundary fear that it’s just a matter of time before another such tragedy happens.
“Winter is coming,” Cpl. James Buhler of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said as he showed Courthouse News around the Canadian side of the border in late November. “If we don’t find them and they are hiding, our biggest fear is that they will succumb to the temperatures.”
The United States in recent years has seen a surge of unauthorized crossings on its borders. Over the 2023 fiscal year, which ended on September 30, authorities caught around 3.2 million people trying to enter the United States without proper documentation, according to figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Much of those encounters happen on the United States’ southern border with Mexico — but while the proportion of undocumented migrants crossing from Canada is relatively small, the numbers here are skyrocketing, too. U.S. border authorities had 189,402 migrant encounters on the northern border in FY 2023. That’s a nearly sevenfold increase from 2021, when that figure was 27,180.
As winter descends, officials on both sides are warning of the extreme danger faced by those who cross during the freezing winter months.
The consequences can be deadly, as they were for the Patel family.
On a frigid afternoon in January 2022, authorities found the bodies of three people roughly six miles east of Emerson, on the north side of a berm that runs along the Canadian side of the border. A fourth body was found a short time later. They were later identified as Jagdishkumar Patel, 39; his wife, Vaishaliben Patel, 37; and their children, Vihangi Patel, 11, and Dharmik Patel, 3. Caught in a blizzard, all four died of exposure, Manitoba’s chief medical examiner confirmed.
“I spent ten years in homicide,” said Buhler, the RCMP corporal and one of the responders that day. “You numb yourself to it. But you never get used to children.”
David Marcus, a spokesperson for U.S. Border Patrol’s nearby Grand Forks Sector, said that on the day the Patels were found, temperatures reached -9 degrees Fahrenheit, with wind chills of almost -30 degrees. “You are not going to be able to survive very long outside in those types of temperatures,” he said as he showed Courthouse News around the southern side of the U.S.-Canada border.
“When it’s that cold and the wind is that strong, you are going to need shelter and a heat source if you want to survive out here,” Marcus added. Making the situation even worse for the Patel family, there was an ongoing blizzard at that time. “Visibility was very poor.”
In this remote stretch of the northern United States, unauthorized crossings happen in both directions. Like on the U.S.-Mexico border, many unauthorized crossers are desperate migrants in search of a better life. Few if any are Canadian or American.
In other ways, though, this border could not be more different than the southern border. While the U.S.-Mexico border is partially fenced and heavily militarized, much of the U.S.-Canada border is too remote to reliably surveil.