Posted on 10/17/2007 11:37:33 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
More than 40 migrants from Colombia and Venezuela have been arrested in the past week for illegally crossing into Canada on unguarded roads on the Quebec-Vermont border, Canadian border officials and RCMP said.
Most of the migrants, who were detained in the town of Stanstead in Quebec's Eastern Townships, have been released and are now applying for refugee status in Canada.
Four of those arrested have been charged under Canada's Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, two of them with helping people enter Canada illegally, Dominique McNeely, a spokeswoman with the Canadian Border Services Agency, said Tuesday.
Lawyer Claire Desgens, a Sherbrooke lawyer who represents one of the people charged, said her client was not involved in organized smuggling. Instead, the Boston man was driving his cousin across the border.
"We're not talking about people that are organized," she told CBC News. "We're talking about members of families that just help."
Most of those arrested have no legal status in the U.S., although the Globe and Mail reports that one of the people charged is a U.S. citizen and another has permanent residency status.
Those arrested drove cars and vans across three unguarded roads that connect Orleans County in Vermont to Stanstead, which is about 160 kilometres southeast of Montreal. Many of the migrants had maps showing where to cross, officials said.
Stanstead resident Denise Eryou, who lives on one of the unguarded roads, said she's noticed more traffic than usual in front of her home recently. People are not legally allowed to use her road as a route into the U.S., even though it leads into the country without barriers or official crossings.
"Sunday night, during the night, I did see people coming and going at about 15-minute intervals," she told CBC News.
The arrests were made by the RCMP, Canadian border officials and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. The agencies work together as part of the International Border Enforcement Team.
Ping!
I thought this was going to be about politically and economically oppressed Canadians seeking refuge in the U.S.
LOL!
Ungaurded??? Unguarded? Naw, how can that be? Someone is mistaken....our borders are SLAMMED SHUT, TIGHT AS TIGHT CAN BE....unguarded??? NEVER. {sarcasm OFF}
We’d be all over this if someone in the Bush family had married a Canadian...
No doubt its because these migrants spoke French as opposed to English....
*rolls eyes*
That makes the Canadians racist, eh?
ping
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
This sure makes the WOT and “Homeland security” look like the biggest joke since the term WOT was coined.
BUMP
Could these people have been Mexican illegals trying to go all the way to Canada?
They’re Colombians and Venezuelans
Mexicans and Hatians go to Windsor in Ontario.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1905655/posts
Some of the boarder crossing there are such a joke that a couple years ago they had whole buses just roar past without stopping. There was nothing to stop them, the lone person on duty would just call the police and report it but they were at least 15 min away.
Well,it ain't California, but Maine is awash in illegal Mexicans, Colombians, and other short people whose forebears picked the fruit for Carmen Miranda's hats.
When they eventually intermarry with our ever-fertile polygamous, clitorectomist Somalis, voilá, you'll have the new homo neobritannicus, and the governor will still be a homo.
We are in FL and the Canadian government is running radio spots, in English, trying to discourage some fraudulent immigration to Canada. I wonder if they are running the same ads on Spanish stations.
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