Roxham Road (June 2026) | Rachel Charney McKenzie / Image used courtesy of the author
On September 25, 2023, about 30 miles southeast of Montreal, a lime-green excavator advanced like a centipede over concrete and gravel. Its claw-like appendage tore at the gable roof of a long white rectangular building. The structure’s walls folded inward under the pressure, and the ghost of a dark blue door disappeared under rising clouds of dust. Left behind after the demolition was a rectangular imprint of darkened dirt scattered with splintered wooden panels.
The white building was located at the northern end of Roxham Road, a remote rural footpath and unofficial border crossing connecting upstate New York and Quebec. Between 2017 and 2023, hundreds of thousands of migrants used this route in order to claim refugee status in Canada, making Roxham the most frequently used irregular border crossing between the US and Canada and a metonym for the complications of Canada’s changing immigration policies. Built in 2017 to deal with heavy foot traffic, the white building was an onsite processing center, offering asylum seekers a place to safely begin the application process and receive required screenings.
Roxham Road’s path has existed for centuries as a migration trail, long predating the building’s construction and far predating modern Canada-US border relations. At its southern end, Roxham begins at a three-way intersection with North Star Road, which is said to have been used by Underground Railroad agents and earned its name among escaped enslaved people searching for the North Star in the night sky. Roxham was an uncontrolled crossing until 1976, when Canadian authorities barricaded the border between Quebec and New York in anticipation of the Montreal Summer Olympics. In the past decade, owing to growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the West and the resurgence of far-right populism that both preceded and was reinforced by President Donald Trump, Roxham Road became a political battleground.
The white building’s demolition was set into motion by a legal amendment five months earlier, when Canada and the US announced the expansion of the Safe Third Country Agreement across the entire international land border. The Agreement, a 2004 treaty codifying the countries’ increased coordination as part of the post-9/11 US-Canada Smart Border Action Plan, requires asylum seekers to request refugee protection in the first of the two countries, Canada or the US, that they step foot in. In this context, a “safe third country” refers to a country that is neither the home country of an asylum seeker nor the country in which they are currently seeking asylum but is considered safe for them to be returned to (e.g., the US or Canada), as it—ostensibly—provides adequate protection for refugees.
However, a loophole that applied the agreement only to official ports of entry had long allowed migrants to cross the border irregularly (i.e., not through a formal border crossing), many through Roxham Road, using the white building as a lighthouse to guide their path to safety.
From early 2023 onwards, though, no stretch of the Canadian border would be open to asylum seekers who had crossed through the US. The route through Roxham Road, for the first time in history, was completely shuttered.
The expansion of the Safe Third Country Agreement three years ago settled a longstanding debate in Canada surrounding the designation of the United States as a “safe third country” in the affirmative. The amended agreement, and the Supreme Court of Canada decision defending it, came in spite of the Court’s findings that the US automatically detains returnees, “especially statusless individuals” and that US immigrant detention centers subject detainees to “cold temperatures, deficiencies in medical care … and the violation of religious dietary restrictions” as well as maintaining a “discriminatory approach to gender-based claims.”
Fast forward to today. Three years after Roxham Road’s closure by amendment, Bill C-12, Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, was accelerated through Parliament in early March 2026. Bill C-12 passed with minimal amendments despite widespread opposition from over 300 civil liberties and human rights organizations. The act, along with its predecessor Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act, is being called the single greatest deportationmachine and attack on migrant rights in Canada’s legal history. The bill made it virtually impossible for most people entering Canada via the US to have their refugee claim reviewed by the Immigration and Refugee Board. It also expanded surveillance powers through information-sharing provisions, and increased governmental discretionary powers to reject, suspend, or otherwise delay asylum application processing.
According to asylum lawyer and former director of the Montreal-based legal aid clinic The Refugee Centre Pierre-Luc Bouchard, the 2026 adoption of Bill C-12 should be understood as a continuity of Roxham Road’s closure, and the pernicious political discourse in Canada that led to it. More importantly, he says, Canadians should not comfort themselves with the thought that what is happening in the US—Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, arbitrary detention and deportation, et cetera—could never happen in Canada, a country that has increasingly capitulated to anti-immigrant rhetoric, especially in recent years.
The attorney identified two watershed moments. The first: a November 2017 incident where Montreal’s Olympic Stadium was temporarily converted into a shelter for hundreds of Haitian asylum seekers crossing from the US into Canada, many through Roxham Road, fleeing deportation after Trump announced his administration would remove the protective status granted to nearly 60,000 Haitians living in the US after the 2010 earthquake. This incident led to a local rise in xenophobic hysteria, culminating in anti-immigration groups protesting near the border crossing.
Almost two years later, in April 2019, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau snuck in an omnibus bill to the Immigration and Refugee Act that stripped all migrants who had previously applied for asylum in the US of their residence status. According to the attorney Bouchard, who suspects Trudeau was trying to dispel rumors that he was soft on immigration and curry favor in advance of the upcoming election, The Refugee Centre is still to this day helping people who were disenfranchised through this backdoor bill.
One by one, the federal government has eliminated the few methods available to migrants claiming refugee status in Canada after crossing from the US: first through the treaty agreement in 2004, then by the omnibus law in 2019, before closing Roxham Road via amendment in 2023, and finally by passing Bill C-12 just last month, which eliminated any remaining narrow loopholes. All under the pretense that the United States is a “safe” country for asylum seekers who are trying, many desperately, many fearing for their safety, to leave.
Although Roxham’s closure was lauded by the executive branch as a migration deterrent, evidence on the ground tells a different story. In the months following the amendment, despite an immediate decline in interceptions at Roxham Road, the number of Canadian asylum claims and unofficial crossings into the US from Canada skyrocketed. During this same period, Bouchard recalls a consistent flow of irregular migrants from upstate New York who reported crossing “wherever they could” instead of through Roxham alone: in the woods, from one scattered hamlet to another, across farmland, or even by bicycle along the Champlain River.
Strict border policy rarely prevents refugees from crossing the border tout court. It does, however, force them away from official ports of entry, or reliable pathways formerly equipped with intake structures, such as Roxham Road, into the hands of smugglers and along more dangerous and remote crossing routes to avoid detection.
Tragically, on April 2, 2023, only a few weeks after the agreement was amended, eight members of two families and an abandoned boat were found on a marsh in the St. Lawrence Riverbank. The eight were killed crossing a common irregular smuggling route to enter the US from Canada. One of the deceased, Florine Iordache, a 28-year-old man of Romanian descent, had been recently denied asylum to Canada and was set to be deported soon after he left the country. Among the dead were also his wife, and 2- and 1-year-old children. Their story is one of many fragments of tragedy along this stretch of land.
To this end, this is a story about Canada’s complicity. Despite its leaders’ efforts to distance themselves from Trump’s anti-immigrant excesses, Canada is not the immigration utopia it purports to be. In fact, it never has been. As long as migrants have been leaving the US for Canada in hope of more humane treatment, they have been consistently disappointed to find themselves suspended, immobilized, and trapped by a broken immigration system that increasingly resembles that of its southern neighbor.
The white building’s demolition, then, was more than just a political spectacle. The liminal structure embodied the tension between the US-Canada border as a site of exclusion, abandonment, and erasure, on the one hand, and of extralegal alterity, on the other. The white building was a testament to Roxham Road’s storied history as a path of refuge—a safehouse for irregular migration protected by a legal loophole, not written into or addressed in federal immigration statutes, but permissively regarded by Canadian immigration authorities for years.
In late 2024, the expanse of southern Quebec where the white building once stood became fertile ground for border crossings once more. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration and the ICE raids carried out across the US, many of those who had lived undocumented and under the radar for decades made their way to Canada to seek asylum. Only the circumstances had changed: Pursuant to recent legal developments, their likelihood of being found ineligible and exposed to ICE had significantly increased. Even so, many felt they had no choice.
Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, an official port of entry only six miles from Roxham Road, counted 14,000 asylum claims in 2025; that’s double the 7,000 filed the year prior. Of these claimants, thousands were sent back to the US due to ineligibility under the Safe Third Country Agreement, and an unspecified number remain in US custody.
During this time period, Canadian federal police also confirmed a significant uptick in irregular crossings into southern Quebec, prompting the addition of more surveillance resources, including two Black Hawk helicopters, and increased collaboration with US authorities.
Since the Trump administration announced last November that it would end protective status for the 350,000 Haitian immigrants living in the US, over two dozen migrants of Haitian origin have been arrested in Quebec after crossing the border on foot, trying to evade border guards. Several required hospitalization for signs of hypothermia and frostbite after the frigid trek. Frantz André, Montreal-based coordinator for Action Committee for People Without Status, noted in early 2026 that he was in contact with Haitian clients who had recently sought asylum in Canada only to be handed to ICE and subsequently deported back to Haiti.
Bouchard says the increase in asylum seekers despite Roxham’s closure shows the desperation among migrants.
The number of enforced removals at the southern border spiked twice in recent years, once in 2023, the year Roxham Road was shuttered, and again in 2025, the year Bill C-12 was introduced. These patterns are not isolated from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s comments about “reining in immigration”; the Canadian government made a commitment to “lower the non-permanent resident population to less than 5 percent of Canada’s population by the end of 2027.” Canada’s “Border Plan,” a billion-dollar, multi-year undertaking, proposed increased police presence, surveillance, and arms at the US-Canada border. However obscured by its self-identification as a Western beacon of progressiveness welcome to all, the truth is that Canada’s border regime increasingly resembles that of the US. If you want to learn more about Canada’s stance on immigration today, do not look to its leaders’ efforts to distance themselves from Trump’s anti-migrant rhetoric in self-congratulatory speeches at Davos. Look only to the empty plot of dirt along Roxham Road where the white building once stood.
