The Northern Passage

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Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET on September 21, 2026

The message from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services arrived on August 7 as Jeanne was finishing up her shift at a restaurant in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina. Her legal status in the United States had been terminated. Her work permit was no longer valid. Jeanne immediately switched off the location-tracking on her phone. What if ICE was already looking for her? What if she was deported back to Haiti?

Five years in the United States had brought her physical safety but nagging stress. Jeanne, who asked me not to use her real name, arrived in the United States in July 2021 to visit family on a short-term visa. She had been mugged on the streets of Port-au-Prince a few months earlier, and gangs were taking over more of the city. The Biden administration had recently expanded Temporary Protected Status for Haitians—offering provisional residency, protection from deportation, and work permits—citing the country’s deteriorating security. Two days after Jeanne arrived, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom. Jeanne overstayed her visa, applied for TPS, and tried to begin a new life in North Carolina. But she could never really settle in, she told me.

As President Trump campaigned to return to the White House, he promised the largest immigration crackdown in history—and repeated false rumors about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating pets. Soon after he returned to office, he canceled TPS protections for Haiti, and Jeanne lost her job. She was scared to leave her home and had to drain her savings to pay bills. After a federal judge blocked Trump’s move in February 2026, effectively reinstating TPS, she got her job back. But in June, the Supreme Court sided with Trump, and when the ruling took effect last month, Jeanne was among the roughly 300,000 Haitians who could no longer work legally and faced possible arrest and deportation by ICE. Jeanne looked for advice online, finding mostly fear and despair. Her relatives urged her to head north and stay with her brother in Canada.

Canada’s asylum rules allow migrants with close family members to enter the country and seek protection, but Jeanne worried about making the 900-mile journey to the border. She had read that ICE officers and Border Patrol agents were checking buses and trains, asking for papers. A friend gave her the number of a driver, who charged $700 for the one-way trip. “I was praying, crying, anxious, stressed. I couldn’t eat or drink or anything,” she told me last week as we sat at a Tim Hortons doughnut shop in the Montreal suburb of Laval. Safely making it to Canada seemed like her only option. The violence in Haiti was unrelenting; her social-media feeds were filled with stories about two girls who had been kidnapped by an armed gang on their way to school.

The drive took nearly 22 hours. At the border, Canadian officers allowed her to cross into Quebec. She arrived with “almost nothing,” she told me, and she felt immediate relief. Her brother arrived an hour later to pick her up. She was lucky. For other Haitians fleeing ICE, the only route into Canada is a path through the woods.

I arrived in Montreal two days after President Trump published a cartoon image of himself holding a hockey stick over a cowering Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. It felt like a new low point, but a bilateral relationship between two countries that are so extensively intertwined has many ways to get worse. The 5,525-mile boundary they share—the longest international land border in the world—is an obvious place for friction. Long celebrated for its openness and permeability, it’s been tightening up from tariffs and declining cross-border tourism. Some prominent Republicans, including Ohio nominee for governor Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have previously called for the construction of a northern border wall to stop drugs and migrants from Canada. But Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is now sending some migrants, especially Haitians, in the opposite direction.

Read: The ‘big black scar’

The number of ICE arrests surged to 50,000 a month this summer, the highest level ever. ICE remains behind on the White House’s goal to deport 1 million immigrants a year, and MAGA hard-liners want Trump to further intensify the crackdown. Haitians who arrived during the Biden administration are an easy target. Some of the 300,000 who lost their TPS status were among the more than 200,000 who the Biden administration allowed to enter the United States between 2021 and 2024 using the president’s humanitarian parole authority, which the Trump administration revoked soon after he returned to office. ICE already has their addresses, phone numbers, and fingerprints and other biometric information in its files. They are much easier to find than someone who slipped across the border undetected and doesn’t show up in federal databases.

It’s difficult to predict how many Haitians may try crossing into Canada as ICE ramps up operations. Haitians without close family members in Canada who arrive at the land border are generally ineligible to seek asylum, and in August, Canadian authorities rejected 133 asylum seekers at official crossings from the United States, the highest one-month total this year, according to Canadian government data. Those who are deemed ineligible are turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and typically transferred to ICE.

Since August 20, when the United States resumed deportation flights to Haiti, ICE has sent five planeloads of deportees, totaling nearly 500 people. Security conditions in Haiti remain so poor that the Federal Aviation Administration has prohibited U.S. aircraft from landing in Port-au-Prince, the capital. ICE has been dropping off deportees in Cap-Haïtien, the country’s second-largest city, forcing those with homes or family in the capital to travel across the country through highway checkpoints controlled by gangs.

Canadian authorities declined to tell me how many Haitians they’ve intercepted trying to illegally cross the border since the TPS termination took effect. Haitians are already the leading group of asylum seekers in Canada, according to Canadian government data. Viles Dorsainvil, the director of the Haitian Support Center, an immigrant aid group in Springfield, Ohio, told me that most Haitians he’s spoken with who have lost their legal status are terrified of ICE but unsure of what to do next. About three dozen people he knows have already been taken into ICE custody and sent to detention centers, and many others have upcoming “check-in” appointments that require them to report to ICE offices. “Folks are stuck at home, not able to go to work, with their power service and water being shut off,” Dorsainvil told me. Some are thinking about leaving for Canada, he said, but aren’t sure how to get there safely.

Asylum rules along the U.S.-Canada border are governed by the “Safe Third Country” agreement between the two nations, first signed in 2002, which requires anyone seeking refuge to apply in the country where they first arrive. It prevents someone who fails to qualify in the United States from making a second attempt in Canada, and vice versa. The rules mean that asylum seekers interdicted along the U.S.-Canada border can be quickly sent back, without access to immigration courts.

During Trump’s first term, thousands of migrants who feared arrest in the United States crossed into Canada, often through an unofficial crossing point, Roxham Road, where Canadian border authorities had set up a makeshift processing station. Canada shut down the Roxham Road crossing in 2023 as a public backlash built. In March, the Canadian Parliament passed a bill that further restricted asylum eligibility, by effectively disqualifying anyone who enters illegally. Asylum claims have dropped 60 percent this year in comparison with the same period last year, according to the latest statistics from the Canada Border Services Agency. The tougher law reflects a sharp turn in Canadian public opinion against the country’s liberal immigration policies. About 23 percent of Canada’s population is foreign-born, according to the country’s most recent census data (versus about 14 percent of the U.S. population), and in a 2024 poll, nearly six in 10 Canadians said immigration levels were too high, citing housing costs and strains on the country’s public services.

Read: A reverse Ellis Island

Canada’s new rules left a loophole, however. Although migrants who are caught within 14 days of arrival can be sent back to the United States, those who can prove a longer presence in Canada—using receipts, a time-stamped photograph, or some other evidence—are allowed to remain. Canada does not send deportation flights to Haiti because it is too risky, so someone who crosses illegally and hides in a safehouse for two weeks can stay in the country and qualify for a work permit.

The system is Canada’s version of Temporary Protected Status, and is “probably preferable to being detained and deported to Haiti,” Jenn McIntyre, the clinic coordinator of the Canada-US Border Rights Clinic, an advocacy group in Canada, told me. But it’s not a path to legal residency, McIntyre cautioned, leaving asylum seekers in a state of long-term limbo, with a risk of deportation looming if Canada resumes deportation flights to Haiti or can find another country that will accept them. “A lot of people who say Let’s go to Canada! have no idea how hard it’s going to be,” she said.

At Poulet Royal, a chicken restaurant on the outskirts of Montreal, I met Albert, a 53-year-old Haitian who arrived in Canada this summer after living in the United States for two years. It was dark that night, and pouring rain, but Albert didn’t want to be picked up in front of the house nearby where he’d been staying.

Albert, who also asked me not to use his real name, told me that he crossed from New York into Canada illegally through the forest with his sons, ages 10 and 9, one night in late June. He had worked for more than 20 years as a police officer in Haiti, joining an anti-gang unit that received training from U.S., Canadian, and French instructors. He was based in a district outside Port-au-Prince, where he mostly worked as a shift commander at the station, rather than on the streets. But sometimes he was sent into the city’s most violent neighborhoods, which became more dangerous over time. After his best friend, a fellow officer, was killed by gunmen in 2022, Albert looked for a way out of Haiti. He had a side job providing private security for a U.S. missionary organization, which helped sponsor him. His two other children, both adults, were already living in the United States.

The Biden administration granted Albert humanitarian parole, and he arrived in New York City with his two younger boys in 2024. A friend persuaded him to move to Evansville, Indiana, and then to Columbus, Ohio, where Albert found work in the shipping department of a cosmetics company. The job lasted less than a year. Albert lost his work permit when Trump took office and canceled the parole program. Albert searched for odd jobs, finding little, and slowly sank into depression, he told me. His sons would come home from school asking why he wasn’t working and didn’t leave the house. Albert worried that ICE would pick him up and that he would have to take the boys back to Haiti. “My older children said that if we got sent back, their younger brothers would never forgive me,” he told me.

Read: A new kind of family-separation crisis

When his sons finished the school year, Albert hired a driver to take them from Columbus to the Canadian border. They arrived at night, joining a group of other Haitians, some of whom admonished Albert for bringing children into the woods. He told me that he has no idea where they crossed, but that his sons were brave and said they were fine leaving the United States if it meant their father could get a job and be happier.

After a short walk to the Canadian side, Albert said, the group got into a car that took them to Montreal. He and the boys spent two weeks in hiding, then submitted their immigration applications. The boys are now enrolled in local schools and adjusting quickly, he told me. “My future doesn’t really matter,” he said. “I just want them to have a better life and to live to my age.”

Albert told me that being in Haiti is “like living in a maze.” You never feel safe, he said. “You’re just trapped.” He said that he knew it might take months to receive a work permit in Canada, but that he wasn’t as anxious as he felt in Ohio. “Here, I can breathe,” he said. On his phone, he showed me pictures of his boys in matching soccer uniforms.

The farm roads of northern New York State cut through hay fields and groves of sugar maples, right up to the boundary with Canada. These roadways once ran straight through, but today they’re split by a ditch or a low-slung barrier to block vehicles. Most of the international boundary runs through thick forests, and the trees have been cut along a 20-foot-wide clearing to create a demarcation. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police call it “The Slash.”

I rode along the Slash in an eight-wheel all-terrain vehicle earlier this month with a Canadian border officer, Jonathan Maheu, an RCMP sergeant. It had rained heavily the day before, and the Slash was flooded with knee-deep puddles. Frogs jumped out of Maheu’s path through the bogs. Maple branches and thick brush lashed at the vehicle as it lurched and groaned over the rough terrain. The woods on either side were dark and gloomy, but all the sunlight that reaches into the Slash had caused an eruption of wildflowers that were shoulder-high by the end of summer: goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, and pink aster. We heard something crashing through the brush. “Fawn,” Maheu said.

The RCMP had arrested a group of 13 Haitians crossing illegally there a few days earlier, and handed them over to U.S. authorities. Maheu scanned for new footprints or paths. We didn’t see anyone.

RCMP officers patrol for illegal entries, relying on remote cameras and surveillance drones. But the police service does not have the personnel to put officers along the border the way U.S. agents are deployed. The rough terrain of the Slash is the main physical impediment along the border itself, and as Maheu drove, he pointed out the many trails and dirt tracks leading into Canada. There were any number of places to cross quickly, within a short walk of rural roads and highways.

Maheu told me the area is disorienting, inhospitable, and dangerous, especially in the winter. Smugglers sometimes provide little more than the GPS coordinates of designated pickup spots, but cellphone service is spotty, and migrants sometimes try to hide without enough food, water, or warmth. “One of my colleagues tracked a group for seven hours, and when he found them, they were nearly freezing to death. It was minus-30 degrees Celsius. The kids had tinfoil wrapped around their feet, trying to keep warm.”

At the edge of a field, we stopped to chat with Jerry Miller, a 69-year-old farmer on the New York side who has windmills towering over his property, which generate about $20,000 in rent per year from power companies. Miller told me that he has lived on the Canadian border all his life, and has never seen as many migrants heading north as he has since Trump took office last year. They generally keep to themselves but sometimes cause damage, he said, describing how a neighbor recently ran over a perfume bottle with his hay combine, spoiling several bales. Miller showed me a photo on his phone of an abandoned pickup truck someone tried to drive through the Slash that got stuck. Discarded water bottles and clothing are also a nuisance. “I don’t care if they’re coming or going, it ain’t right,” Miller told me. His stories reminded me of the many conversations I’ve had with ranchers along the U.S. southern border whose cattle escaped after smugglers cut their barbed-wire fences or left gates open.

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A few hundred yards away in the Slash, we found a pile of items that looked as if they’d been hastily discarded: a backpack, two jackets, a polka-dot shirt. They were soaked from the rain but appeared to have been recently abandoned. Maheu said smugglers tell migrants to change clothing in case they’ve been spotted on surveillance cameras. There were other scattered items: deodorant, lotion, a pen, a hair pick. A toad jumped out from under a pair of wet jeans.

Philippe Mélancon, an RCMP staff sergeant who works with Maheu, told me that Canadian officers are trying to target the criminal groups who “profit from migrants who feel helpless and want to get a better life for themselves.”

“They make a lot of money telling migrants they’re going to bring them across safely, and they won’t get caught, and it’s 100 percent guaranteed, which is not the truth,” Mélancon told me. “They put their lives in danger.” I didn’t doubt that smuggling organizations were making money from Haitians and others trying to flee to Canada. But having spent many years reporting on criminal organizations in Mexico, I found it hard to see the northern border as a similarly dangerous place. There are not widespread reports of killings, assaults, or rapes in the woods of Quebec. The attorneys and migrant advocates I’ve spoken with described the groups moving Haitians as mostly informal—more like old-school coyote guides than sinister cartel operatives. But maybe that’s where things will go if the money and the desperation increase.

Frantz André became a volunteer migrant advocate about a decade ago, after he retired from a career as a restaurant executive helping fast-food companies expand into Canada. Born in Haiti, he arrived in Canada in 1965, when he was 10, fleeing the dictatorship of “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his fearsome secret police, known as the Tonton Macoutes. He estimates that only about 800 Haitians lived in Montreal then.

Today that number has grown to about 80,000, making them Montreal’s largest immigrant group. Since the termination of TPS in the United States last month, André said, he’s been receiving about 30 calls a day from asylum seekers who have arrived in Canada or who want to cross. “Many of them will take the risk of going irregularly across the border. It’s not going to stop them,” he told me. “Being deported to Haiti is a greater risk than trying to enter here. They’ll take the last chance.”

André helps migrants fill out paperwork and refers them to legal-aid groups or attorneys who can represent them, but he isn’t a lawyer. At a time when few Canadian politicians seem eager to discuss immigration cooperation with the Trump administration, he has become a prominent critic of the country’s narrower asylum rules.

I asked André if he thought the Carney government could shift again and soften its stance toward Haitians fleeing Trump’s ICE crackdown, given how unpopular Trump is in Canada. Carney has gotten a popularity boost by defying Trump on trade and tariff issues, presenting himself as an “elbows-up” defender of Canadian dignity. (CBP officials I’ve spoken with told me that the tensions between Trump and Carney have had no bearing on long-running border security cooperation, and that U.S. agents remain in close contact with their RCMP counterparts.)

From the April issue: ‘America doesn’t want my children or grandchildren’

André told me no; Canada is eager to emphasize its immigration enforcement cooperation with the United States, because other elements of the bilateral relationship are strained. “With a lot of our immigration policies, we’re becoming more and more the 51st state,” André said. “It’s very hypocritical. We say: Okay, we’re not going to deport you to Haiti because we believe it’s not a safe country. But at the same time, at the border, they’re sending them right into that environment, knowing that people are being deported.”

André is helping Jeanne and Albert file claims for protection and obtain work permits. They’re safe for now, he said. But he’s not sure how the Canadian government will respond if more and more Haitians come through the woods.

This article originally misspelled the last name of the RCMP sergeant. He is Jonathan Maheu, not Jonathan Matheu.