A Border Patrol agent standing watch at the Montana-Canada border in the CBP Spokane Sector. The Spokane Sector covers the U.S.-Canada border along the northwestern section of Montana, part of Idaho, and the eastern part of Washington.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

From The Center Square 

By Bethany Blankley 

Lack of operational control at northern border poses national security threats

The northern border largely has been unmanned and understaffed for decades as federal reports issue conflicting conclusions about how much, or how little, operational control exists.

Some officials have suggested the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has just 1% operational control over the northern border after a 2019 General Accounting Office audit of U.S. Customs and Border northern border operations. But a December 2022 DHS report claimed, “The Border Patrol is better staffed today than at any time in its 87-year history,” noting no surveillance of extensive parts of the northern border existed prior to 9/11.

After 9/11, several federal agencies were combined to fall under the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Within 20 years, roughly 950 miles along the U.S.-Canada border from Washington to Minnesota, and roughly 200 miles along the northern border in New York and Lake Ontario, were under unmanned aircraft surveillance. None of these areas “were covered prior to the creation of DHS,” DHS says, meaning the northern border was largely unprotected since Border Patrol’s founding in 1924.

In 2012, DHS released its first unified department strategy for U.S.-Canada border security, prioritizing “deterring and preventing terrorism and smuggling, trafficking, and illegal immigration; safeguarding and encouraging the efficient flow of lawful trade, travel, and immigration; and, ensuring community resiliency before, during, and after terrorist attacks and other disasters.”

Within 10 years at the northern border, more than 2,200 Border Patrol agents were stationed between ports of entry; nearly 3,700 CBP officers were stationed at ports of entry; more than 35 land ports of entry were modernized; and thermal camera systems, mobile and remote video surveillance systems had been deployed.

Despite these improvements, “the northern border is under-resourced by far compared to the southwest border,” former Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan told The Center Square. “But at the same time, it still represents significant threats. Cartels are expanding their operations, flying people into Canada, which doesn’t require a visa, presenting an opportunity for terrorist watch-listed individuals to exploit. It’s much easier to get to Canada to come across.”

“Data from 39 months shows terrorist watch-listed individuals are coming here every day and they aren’t stopping,” Morgan added.

For years and prior to the current border crisis, there weren’t enough personnel to cover all shifts, and the infrastructure, technology and equipment afforded to them didn’t compare to those at the southwest border, he said. People can easily drive snow mobiles over frozen territory or boats across the Great Lakes in areas that are unmanned, Morgan said, with a previous policy of self-reporting to authorities.

“The northern border represents a threat,” Morgan said. Noting it only took 19 men to carry out the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Morgan has warned that a terrorist threat is already in the U.S. No one knows how many terrorist watch-listed individuals have illegally entered who weren’t caught, multiple officials have told The Center Square.

While much attention has focused on the southwest border, the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists to ever be apprehended in U.S. history were at the northern border in fiscal 2023, breaking fiscal 2022’s record, The Center Square first reported.

This fiscal year through April, the greatest number of KSTs (known or suspected terrorists) continue to be apprehended at the northern border, 143 so far, according to CBP data.

Potential terrorist threats are not new and have persisted for some time, federal reports indicate. One Border Patrol  intelligence report says terrorist threats potentially come from “foreign violent extremists to exploit established alien smuggling routes and networks for the purpose of evading detection en route to the United States.”

Other threats include drug smuggling from Canada into the U.S., connected to “criminal groups with known ties to or hired by Mexican drug trafficking organizations” and human smuggling. In the last few years, human smuggling attempts and apprehensions have significantly increased, The Center Square has reported.

The Center Square first began reporting on northern border national security threats several years ago. Since then, apprehensions of illegal border crossers in the first six months of fiscal 2024 were the highest on record. In the busiest sector of Swanton, Border Patrol agents recently apprehended more people in one week than they did in all of fiscal 2021.

Last month, they apprehended more than 1,400 illegal border crossers, more than they did in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 combined, Swanton Sector Chief Border Patrol Agent Robert Garcia just announced, saying it was “another record-breaking milestone in northern border history.”

This is after they apprehended more than 6,700 in fiscal 2023, more than the apprehensions of the previous 11 years combined, The Center Square first reported.

The U.S.-Canada border is the longest international border in the world of 5,525 miles. Unlike the U.S.-Mexico border, there are no border walls or similar barriers along the U.S.-Canada border. Through DHS, CBP officers are tasked with border security at ports of entry and Border Patrol agents between ports of entry along 4,000 miles. The U.S. Coast Guard, working with CBP’s Air and Maritime Operations, covers maritime security.

From the C2C Journal

By Peter Shawn Taylor

In China, minor security infractions are routinely punished with lengthy jail terms in dreadful conditions. In Canada, it’s just the opposite. Clear evidence of espionage is rewarded with a free pass back home after the mission is complete. Neglecting our national security in this way may suit the Justin Trudeau government, but it is doing great harm to Canada’s relationship with its most important allies. In the concluding instalment of his two-part series, Peter Shawn Taylor examines the many ways in which the spy scandal at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg has damaged Canada’s international standing and contributed to the growing perception that Canada is a foreign agent’s happy place. (Part I is here.)

As described in Part I, Qiu and Cheng first came to the attention of CSIS following a routine “insider threat briefing” at the NML in August 2018. An initial investigation into their activities turned up plenty of worrisome evidence, including a Chinese-registered patent filed in Qiu’s name and numerous violations of NML security protocols by Cheng regarding data storage, email security and access to the lab by his foreign research students. All of this could have been sufficient to immediately remove the pair from Canada’s only Level 4 Biosafety Laboratory (BSL4). Yet they didn’t lose their security clearances until July 2019, and weren’t fired until January 2021. Should CSIS bear any responsibility for this lengthy delay?

Phil Gurski is a former strategic analyst at CSIS and principal of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting. He’s also the author of several books on terrorism. While readily admitting a bias in favour of his former colleagues, Gurski says his reading of the documents is that CSIS acquitted itself ably throughout the affair. In quickly identifying Qiu and Cheng as possible threats, he says in an interview, “CSIS did its job properly. It found things that were inconsistent and worrisome. If someone else dropped the ball, that’s on them.”

Someone else dropped the ball: Phil Gurski, a former strategic analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), says the agency did its job by quickly identifying Qiu and Cheng as possible security threats and informing its federal clients of this fact. Shown at left, CSIS national headquarters building in Ottawa. (Source of left photo: CSIS Canada/Facebook)

Gurski points out that CSIS is merely an intelligence-gathering agency and is not allowed to arrest anyone or carry out any other law enforcement activities. It can only make recommendations to the federal institutions it serves. When it came to dealing with Qiu and Cheng, that decision rested with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which oversees the NML. As explained in Part I, PHAC’s handling of the two scientists was a tedious and unhurried affair, frequently bogged down by human resources requirements and union grievances, including allegations the original CSIS investigation was racist.

Leuprecht further suggests the NML was slow to react because senior administrators were blinded by the celebrity of Qiu, who won a Canadian Governor General’s Innovation Award in 2018 and was internationally recognized for her work on Ebola. “The lab had this superstar scientist and it prioritized a research culture and international collaboration over national security procedures,” he asserts.

“Superstar scientist”: According to Leuprecht, Qiu’s international reputation could have blinded the NML to the concerns that she and her husband were secretly working on behalf of China. Shown, Qiu (at right) accepts a Governor General’s Innovation Award at Rideau Hall from Governor General Julie Payette in 2018. (Source of photo: CBC)

As for CSIS’s conduct, Leuprecht agrees with Gurski’s positive assessment. “My sense is that CSIS did what it was supposed to do,” he says. “There is no suggestion they didn’t take the threat seriously.” Canada’s rookie mistakes, he explains, lie with the bureaucrats and politicians who should have acted with greater alacrity on the information they were given.

Picking Flowers, Making Honey

When he released the once-secret documents in February, federal Health Minister Mark Holland, who is responsible for PHAC, tried to explain away the massive security breach by arguing that such a thing had been impossible to predict at the time. “The extent to which China was attempting to influence the scientific community or to interfere in Canada’s domestic affairs was not known to the extent it is today,” he declared at a press conference the day the files were released. “The threat environment was in a very different place.”

Such claims of innocence are absurd, snaps Leuprecht. Chinese intentions regarding the theft of Western knowledge were obvious prior to the investigation into Qiu and Cheng. He points to a 2018 report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), entitled Picking Flowers, Making Honey, that detailed many years of rampant Chinese infiltration of Western universities at the behest of PLA interests.

ASPI data showed Canada ranked third, behind the U.S. and UK, in terms of problematic collaboration between PLA scientists and institutions of higher learning. If that reference is too obscure, Leuprecht offers up his own Toronto Star commentary from the same year headlined “China’s silent invasion of Western universities” that provided a similar warning. “To claim no one knew what China was up to by 2019 is nonsense, complete nonsense,” he fumes. Besides, given the NML’s status as Canada’s highest-security biohazard lab, those in charge should have been alert for all possible risks and incursions, not just those from familiar enemies.  

Today, even the Trudeau government seems to grudgingly acknowledge it took far too long to recognize the threat Qiu and Cheng posed to Canada’s national security. During a grilling by Conservative MP Michael Chong at the House of Common’s Canada-China Committee last month, Nathalie Drouin, national security intelligence advisor to the prime minister and Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council, admitted that, “From the first signal to the moment the two scientists were put on leave, yes there is a timeline that needs to be looked at.” In response Chong pointed out that the Royal Bank of Canada recently fired its Chief Financial Officer for breaching its code of conduct after an investigation that lasted less than a month. “Two and-a-half years to terminate someone for cause seems like an awfully long time,” he remarked drily.

In 2020 U.S. President Donald Trump cancelled the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese students and researchers in the U.S. because of their links to universities with ties to the Chinese military.

Tweet

The Scientists Who Came in From the Cold: Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal, Part I