By Chris Hippensteel
Albany Times Union

CHATEAUGAY — Danny Cowan slowed his off-road vehicle to a crawl as he spotted the abandoned backpack. It lay half hidden in the brush, just beside the track that separated the towering cornstalks — Cowan’s property — from the dense treeline, which demarcates the international border between New York and Canada. 

He grabbed a stick from the vehicle’s bed and used it to slide the bag’s zipper open. Inside was a change of clothes, a quart-sized bottle of water and a bag of trash. The typical remains of an illegal crossing. 

“I’ll send it into the intel unit later,” Cowan said, snapping pictures on his phone to send to the Border Patrol. “Why you would drop this here is beyond me.”

Cowan isn’t surprised, though. Findings like these — clothes, bags or trash abandoned in fields or backyards — have become common lately, as this stretch of northern New York has become a major route for illicit southbound migration into the United States.

Illegal crossings along the 5,250-mile U.S.-Canada border represent a fraction of those that occur along the border with Mexico. But that fraction is growing, as more migrants look northward to what they see as a relatively safer crossing into the United States from Canada. 

This year, the numbers of illegal crossings along the northern border have remained as high as they’ve ever been, even as crossings along the southern border have dropped precipitously. 

Northern New York, due to its proximity to the Canadian cities of Montreal and Toronto, remains the epicenter of that southbound surge. In August, the most recent month for which data is available, Border Patrol reported 19,000 migrant encounters along the U.S.-Canada border. Of those, 9,200 — nearly half — entered through New York. And a not-insignificant number of that group passed through the particular stretch of North Country backwoods Danny Cowan and his family call home. 

Cowan reports as many of them as he can, he said, sharing the locations of suspected crossings directly with Border Patrol agents, sometimes using a hunting app. One acquaintance suggested, half-jokingly, that Cowan has intercepted more border crossings than the Border Patrol itself.

“Fifty out of my 53 years, I’ve lived on this property,” Cowan said. “And I’ve never seen anything like it’s been the last two years.”

Residents and emergency

services overwhelmed

The woman appeared on Peggy Robare’s front porch at dawn, a backpack slung over one shoulder, a child on the other. Another child, holding what looked like a green stuffed animal, milled around at her feet.

“She was asking me for something, kind of pleading,” Robare said. “But there was clearly a, you know, a language barrier, so I couldn’t understand what she wanted.”

Robare eventually managed to direct the group down the road, in the direction of a nearby border station. 

Scenes like that one have become commonplace for Robare and her neighbors. They live on a quiet road running just below the border, and their homes might be the first buildings migrants see upon crossing into the United States.

Previously, migrants largely tried to avoid apprehension, seeking to connect with pickup cars and get out of the area as fast as possible. Now, more border crossers are turning themselves in at the first available opportunity, several residents said, either by calling authorities themselves or approaching residents they hope will connect them with emergency services.

One of the people who fields those calls is Todd Gumlaw, fire chief for the town of Mooers. 

“At times, these individuals coming across have told us that they were told when we get across the border into the United States, call 911, and somebody will come pick us up,” Gumlaw said.

The shift might reflect a change in the tactics of the smugglers that shuttle migrants to the border and arrange for their pickup on the other side. But it’s also placed a strain on local first responders, said Gumlaw and Churubusco fire Chief Greg Poupore. 

Clinton County Sheriff David Favro argued the same while speaking to Congress last year.

Both Gumlaw and Poupore — whose volunteer-run departments cover vast tracts of North County land — recalled late-night runs to search for migrants reported missing, or expeditions to assist those stranded deep in the woods. 

“One of the first calls that we went on, on a rescue, it was nine degrees out with three feet of snow in the woods. We had two individuals in the swamp barefoot,” Gumlaw said. He later heard one of the migrants had to have multiple toes amputated due to frostbite.

Other migrants — especially those who’ve tried to traverse the border during the brutal North County winter — haven’t survived the trek. 

In March, Border Patrol agents discovered the bodies of two Senegalese men who appeared to have frozen to death near Gumlaw’s town of Mooers.

And in Champlain, a cross-shaped memorial stands in honor of Ana Karen Vasquez-Flores, whose body was found in the Great Chazy River after she went missing during a border crossing. It was made by an Arizona-based artist who has long marked locations on the U.S.-Mexico border where migrants have died in the journey across the desert. 

“We sat down with Border Patrol,” Gumlaw said, recalling a recent meeting. “And one of the gentlemen told us that the numbers that we’re seeing up here are greater than some of the southern border towns.”

‘It’s such a different

mindset now’

The engine of Cowan’s side-by-side vehicle whined as it churned through deep mud and chest-high grass, bouncing along an east-west track barely wide enough to fit it.

On the northern side, the tree line of the Canadian border beat against his windshield. To the south sprawled his property — 230-plus acres of fields, forest and marshland scattered with cabins and hunting blinds, and monitored by a network of Border Patrol surveillance technology. 

Cowan occasionally stopped to point out evidence of former crossings; places where the brush was beaten down by vehicle tires or foot traffic. Bright red bands — trail blazes — tied onto branches by guides. A muddy trail, carved by a vehicle much like his own, that Cowan said extended to a housing development on the Canadian side. 

“You don’t know what you’re gonna run into, when you come back here,” he said. 

For much of his life, Cowan said, this border was relatively quiet. But that tranquility ended a few years ago, when the end of a pandemic and overlapping geopolitical crises converged to make this section of the northern border — and his land — a new chokepoint for migrants entering the United States.

Since then it’s become a normal occurrence for him to spot migrants crossing beneath his tree stand while hunting, or to pass them on the nearby roads or trails. 

One chaotic night a few months earlier, agents apprehended three separate groups passing through the area within the span of a few hours. A picture on his phone captured the outcome of one of the crossings that night — a car, crashed head-first into a creek bed, after its driver apparently failed to spot a missing bridge.

In one tense, late-night encounter at the beginning of the uptick, Cowan said he held a man he described as an escaped smuggler at gunpoint in the snow, after the man turned up in his backyard.

Now, Cowan kept two guns on him as he drove through his property — a handgun and a shotgun, both stored within reach.

“Five years ago, I didn’t worry about that. I never carried a pistol back here,” he said. “It’s such a different mindset now, living on the border.”

Read more at TimesUnion.com