From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

Under the Biden administration, the greatest number of illegal border crossers at the U.S.-Canada border were reported in U.S. history, breaking records nearly every month for four years, The Center Square first reported.

While record high numbers dropped under the Trump administration, illegal entries still remain high in northern border states, with some states reporting more apprehensions in 2025 than during the Biden years.

Fourteen U.S. states share the longest international border in the world with Canada, totaling 5,525 miles across land and water.

The majority of illegal border crossers were apprehended and encountered in five northern border states, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data analyzed by The Center Square. Nearly half were reported in New York. Washington, Vermont, Maine and Montana recorded the next greatest numbers.

The majority of northern border states reported the greatest number of illegal entries in U.S. history in 2024, the last year of the Biden administration, according to CBP data. At the height of the border crisis, illegal entries reached nearly 200,000 at the northern border in 2024 and in 2023, first reported by The Center Square.

For fiscal years 2022 through 2025, 754,928 illegal border crossers were reported in 14 northern border states, according to the latest available CBP data.

From west to east, illegal entries at the northern border totaled:

• Alaska: 7,380

• Washington: 135,116

• Idaho: 620

• Montana: 32,036

• North Dakota: 14,818

• Minnesota: 8,315

• Wisconsin: 118

• Michigan: 50,321

• Ohio: 1,546

• Pennsylvania: 19,145

• New York: 363,910

• Vermont: 61,790

• New Hampshire: 82

• Maine: 59,731

Notably, Alaska, Idaho, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin reported record high illegal crossings in 2023. Although Montana and North Dakota saw a drop in 2025 from record highs in 2024, the number of illegal border crossers apprehended in the two states in 2025 were greater than they were in 2022; in Montana they were more than double.

The data only includes nine months of the Trump administration. The CBP fiscal year goes from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30. Biden administration data includes the first three months of fiscal 2025, nine months of fiscal 2021, and all of fiscal years 2022, 2023 and 2024. Combined, illegal northern border crosser apprehensions totaled roughly one million under the Biden administration, according to CBP data.

The data excludes “gotaways,” the official term used by CBP to describe foreign nationals who illegally enter between ports of entry to evade capture, don’t make immigration claims and don’t return to their country of origin. CBP does not publicly report gotaway data. The Center Square exclusively obtained it from Border Patrol agents. More than two million gotaways were identified by Border Patrol agents under the Biden administration, although the figure is expected to be much higher, The Center Square first reported.

For decades, the northern border has been largely unmanned and unprotected with increased threats of terrorism and lack of operational control, The Center Square reported.

Unlike the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border, there is no border wall, significantly less technological equipment exists and far fewer agents are stationed there.

Officials have explained that the data represents a fraction of illegal border crossers – it remains unclear how many really came through largely remote areas where one Border Patrol agent may be responsible for patrolling several hundred miles, The Center Square has reported.

Despite being understaffed and having far less resources, Border Patrol and CBP agents at the U.S.-Canada border apprehended the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists (KSTs) in U.S. history during the Biden administration – 1,216, or 64% of the KSTs apprehended nationwide, The Center Square exclusively reported.

In February, President Donald Trump for the first time in U.S. history declared a national emergency at the northern border, also ordering the U.S. military to implement border security measures there. After shutting down illegal entries at the southwest border, the administration acknowledged the majority of fentanyl and KSTs were coming through the northern border, The Center Square reported.

The Trump administration has also prioritized increased funding, recruitment and hiring and investment in technological capabilities at the northern border.

From Energy Now

By Stewart Muir

For years, a conservation NGO supported by major foreign foundations has taken on the guise of Indigenous governance authority on British Columbia’s north coast. Meanwhile, rights-holding First Nations with an economic agenda are reshaping the region, yet their equal weight is overlooked. A clash of values has resulted.

For more than a decade, British Columbians have been told — mostly by well-meaning journalists and various pressure groups — that an organization called Coastal First Nations speaks with authority for the entire coast. The name sounds official. It sounds governmental. It sounds like a coalition of Indigenous governments with jurisdiction over marine waters.

It isn’t any of those things.

Coastal First Nations (CFN) is a non-governmental organization, incorporated under the BC Societies Act as The Great Bear Initiative Society. It doesn’t hold Indigenous rights or title. It has no legislated role to provide benefits or services to First Nations members. It has no jurisdiction over shipping, marine safety, forestry, fisheries, energy development, or environmental regulation. Yet its statements are frequently treated as if they carry the weight of sovereign authority.

It’s time to say out loud what many leaders — municipal, Indigenous, and industry — already know: CFN is an advocacy group, not a government. Case in point, a recent news story with the following lede: “B.C.’s Coastal First Nations say they will use ‘every tool in their toolbox’ to keep oil tankers out of the northern coastal waters.” A spokesperson claimed to represent “the Rights and Title Holders of the Central and North Coast and Haida Gwaii,” yet notwithstanding the rights of any individual First Nation, CFN does not hold any formal authority.

Here’s why this matters. The truth is, Alberta has already struck its grand bargain with the rest of Canada. Now it’s time to confront the uncomfortable truth that the country is still one bargain short of a functioning national deal.

In 2026, with Canadians increasingly alert to who is shaping national conversations, there is a reasonable expectation that debates affecting our economic future should be led and conducted by Canadians — not by foreign foundations, not by out-of-country campaign strategists, and not by NGOs built to advance someone else’s policy objectives.

Where the confusion came from

CFN’s rise in public visibility traces back to the “Great Bear Rainforest” era, when U.S. philanthropic foundations poured large sums of money into environmental campaigns in British Columbia. A Senate of Canada committee document notes that the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation alone provided approximately $25 million directly to Coastal First Nations, delivered as twenty-five nearly $1 million installments.

CFN also played a central role in the Great Bear Rainforest negotiations, which were financed by a coalition of foreign philanthropies including the Packard Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Nature Conservancy/Nature United, and Tides Canada Foundation. These foundations collectively contributed tens of millions of dollars to the “conservation financing” model that anchored CFN’s operating environment.

This history isn’t speculative. It’s well documented in foundation reports, Canadian Parliamentary evidence, and the publicly disclosed financial architecture behind the Great Bear Rainforest. For a generation, well-funded U.S. environmental campaigns have worked to make Canadians afraid of their own shadow by seeding doubt, stoking paralysis, and teaching a resource nation to second-guess the very wealth that built it.

Between 2010 and 2018, an independent forensic accounting review by Deloitte Forensic (backed by the Alberta government) found that foreign foundations provided roughly $788.1 million in grants for Canadian environmental initiatives. The largest single category — by a wide margin — was marine-based initiatives, totalling $297.2 million. In Deloitte’s categorization, “marine-based” overwhelmingly refers to coastal campaigns: Great Bear Rainforest–related advocacy, anti-tanker/shipping activism, marine-use regulation campaigns, marine ecological programs, and other coastal political work.

Land-based initiatives were the second-largest category ($191 million), followed by wildlife preservation ($173 million).

The forensic review also showed that of the $427.2 million that physically entered Canada, 82% — approximately $350.3 million — was spent in British Columbia, with the dominant share directed specifically toward coastal and marine initiatives.

Taken together, these findings confirm that foreign-funded environmental activity in Canada has been geographically concentrated in British Columbia and thematically concentrated on the coast – exactly the domain where CFN has been positioned as a public-facing authority.

The real authority lies with the nations themselves

If British Columbians want to understand who truly governs the coast, they should look to the Indigenous governments that hold rights, title, citizens, and accountability — not NGOs that comment from the sidelines. That means not overlooking:

• Haisla Nation, leaders of Cedar LNG
• Nisga’a Nation, co-developers of Ksi Lisims LNG
• Gitxaala Nation, asserting legal and territorial authority
• Kitselas and Kitsumkalum, both shaping regional development

These governments are also coastal First Nations. They negotiate major economic partnerships, steward lands and waters, and make decisions grounded in their own legal orders. Moreover, representation is the key measure of accountability in a democracy: First Nations governing councils are elected by their members. The CFN is not elected. The nations are accountable to their own people — not to U.S. philanthropies or to the strategic objectives of foreign-backed environmental campaigns.

The Haisla Nation once belonged to CFN, but quit in protest in 2012 when the body opposed LNG. The Haisla council went on to fully embrace economic development via liquefied natural gas and own the upcoming Cedar LNG project.

Meanwhile, the central and northern coastal regions where CFN has opposed numerous economic opportunities continue to suffer the worst child poverty in British Columbia.

In the delicate politics of the region’s First Nations alliances, relationships are constantly in motion and governed by inviolable traditions of mutual respect. From these threads, it has to be said that the CFN’s strategy of weaving the appearance of unanimity is truly a fabrication. In point of fact, CFN represents just one half of the story. My data source tells the story, by drawing together the latest available economic and demographic information for 216 British Columbia First Nations:

• Status Indian residents of CFN communities on the north coast number 5,484, with a total membership near and far of 20,447.
• The pro-development group noted earlier numbers 5,505 living local out of a total membership of 16,830.

In other words, virtually equal. Hence it’s obvious that any media report citing CFN as the singular authority for local First Nations interests is a misleading one. CFN speaks for only a slice of the North Coast, not the whole, and the numbers make that impossible to ignore.

When a CFN motion opposing responsible resource development was adopted by the Assembly of First Nations (see Dec. 2 news), it was further evidence that the deck is stacked against First Nations that are accountable and position themselves as having broad responsibilities, including but not limited to raising the standard of living of their members.

The future belongs to the nations

The politics of LNG on the North Coast can’t be grasped without staring directly at the tanker ban — not as scripture, but as the political curiosity it has become. Anyone who knows these waters understands it’s mostly theatre: it doesn’t question letting Alaska oil tanker ships transit our exclusive economic zone when we cannot, and it doesn’t touch the real risks coastal people actually worry about. Yet waving it away is naïve. The ban behaves like a trickster spirit in our public life — capricious, emotionally loaded, and capable of turning a routine policy debate into a cultural conflagration with barely a flick of its tail.

This is why Coastal First Nations retain such gravitational pull. For years, the ban has served as the moral architecture of their Great Bear Sea campaign. CFN represents a long-game strategy — build legitimacy, occupy the moral high ground, and shape the destiny of a nation by holding the symbolic centre. Their concerns seem genuine and rooted in lived stewardship – yet were shaped by Madison Avenue minds hired by American philanthropists to affect our politics. But a near equal number of coastal nation residents unified by a different outlook also have skin in the game. They are charting futures grounded in prosperity, environmental care, and sovereignty on their own terms, and their authority is the real thing — born of title, law, and accountability to their own people.

And here is the irony worth heeding: the tanker ban’s pageantry masks a solution. It is dragging into daylight a conversation the province has avoided for decades — a conversation that will soon prove inevitable as court rulings unsettle the very foundation of property rights in British Columbia. This is the hinge that the moment turns on.

Canada cannot resolve its growing national contradictions without moving its energy to global markets. Alberta has already made its grand bargain with the country. Now British Columbia must craft its own — harnessing the prosperity of energy development to discharge political debts and finally settle the title question that has defined the province’s modern era.