Roxham Road
Roxham Road is a rural road from the former hamlet of Perry Mills in the town of Champlain, New York, United States, generally north to the vicinity of the former hamlet of Bogton, in the municipality of Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Quebec, Canada. It has existed since the early 19th century, before the Canada–United States border was formally established along the 45th parallel north between the St. Lawrence and Connecticut rivers. For most of its length it is a rural two-lane blacktop; north of Parc Safari, it is also part of Quebec Route 202.
For most of its history, it was possible to freely cross the border through Roxham Road, since it largely carried local traffic. Canada established a small customs station just north of the border; the U.S. never followed suit, leaving Roxham an uncontrolled border crossing, even after Canada closed its customs station in the 1950s. That ended when Canadian authorities decided, in advance of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, to barricade all the uncontrolled land border crossings between Quebec and New York, as well as the neighboring U.S. state of Vermont. Since then Roxham has officially been a dead end in both directions at the border.
Until March 25, 2023, Roxham Road was a key "irregular" border crossing for people who were in the United States and wished to apply for asylum in Canada. This was because of a "loophole" in the "Safe Third Country Agreement" between Canada and the United States that did not provide for the return to the United States of people claiming asylum in Canada if they entered Canada at a place other than an official border crossing. Beginning in 2017, more than 90 percent of those who irregularly entered Canada seeking asylum did so through Roxham Road, making it a metonym for the complications of Canada's immigration policies. Housing the asylum seekers required building facilities at the border, a camp nearby at considerable expense to the Canadian government, and led to anti-immigration groups protesting near the border crossing.
Under a 2022 change to the agreement that took effect at 12:01 a.m. on March 25, 2023, that is no longer the case for most such people who make such a claim within 14 days of entry into Canada. The 2023 implementation of this "protocol" amending the agreement was seen as likely to stem the growth that had taken place since 2017 of Roxham Road being the entry point into Canada of large numbers of people seeking asylum status. Some of those individuals had been awaiting a decision on their immigration status in the U.S. and feared a negative outcome due to stricter immigration policies of Donald Trump's presidential administration, but many had just briefly passed through the U.S. to get to Canada, began entering Canada through Roxham in order to seek political asylum there. Later, immigrants began coming to the United States specifically to make the crossing at Roxham and apply for asylum in Canada, leading to criticism of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government for its apparent failure to enforce Canadian immigration law. In 2023, the Roxham crossing was closed permanently. During the time it was widely used as an unofficial border crossing, more than 100,000 asylum seekers passed through it.
Route description
In both countries, Roxham runs generally north-south. Its southern portions pass through mostly wooded lands, which give way to farmland after Route 202 joins it north of Parc Safari.New York
Roxham Road begins in the northwest corner of the town of Champlain, at a three-way intersection with North Star Road in the hamlet of Perry Mills, the first intersection along North Star, west of where it forks off from Perry Mills Road. A minor paved road, Roxham heads due north for, then veers northwest, passing through fields and wooded areas interspersed with homes.A half-mile from the turn to the northwest, the road reaches a cul-de-sac at the Canadian border, 0.6 mi from its southern terminus. Large boulders and a gate obstruct vehicular passage, signage indicates in English and French that the road is closed and pedestrian traffic prohibited, and a tall pole with a light and monitoring station used by the U.S. Border Patrol. In the border vista there is a stone obelisk marking the border and a metal strip. Short gravel paths on either side of the barricades cross the border.
Quebec
s, augmented by similar no-crossing signage, across the road block vehicle passage on the Canadian side as Roxham, now signed Rang Roxham as required by Quebec law mandating the use of only French on most traffic signs, resumes its course. On the west is a wide cul-de-sac for vehicles to turn around and also provides access to a shared driveway for several houses. To deal with the influx of irregular migrants in the late 2010s, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police paved the cul-de-sac and erected two temporary structures on it to process them.The former customs station, now a private home, is located on the east side of Roxham north of the border. The road continues north through more wooded areas and fields for to its first intersection, with Chemin Fisher on the west.
North of Chemin Fisher, the road is designated as Chemin Roxham. Another to the north at a T-intersection, it reaches Montée Glass, which runs east towards Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle and the southernmost exit on Quebec's Autoroute 15, the continuation of Interstate 87 connecting New York City and Montreal.
Roxham continues north for another, and enters the farming community where it gets its name, then passes the Parc Safari entrance. Bordering the park, Roxham Road ends north of the entrance, where Route 202 joins it from the west and continues the course of Roxham northeast beyond the intersection.
History
There had been scattered European settlement of the area through which Roxham Road runs by both British and French colonists throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, but the hamlet of Roxham only began to develop at the beginning of the 19th century with the emigration of American Loyalists who would not renounce their allegiance to the British crown after the Revolution ended in independence for the Thirteen Colonies. Many of them found the land in today's Roxham very productive, producing 30 bushels of wheat per acre. They took their grain to the nearest mill, in Champlain, to be ground. A later Canadian history of that time records that the road from Roxham was first able to handle wheeled vehicles in 1810.By 1838 the population along the road had grown enough that a small cemetery was established along it in the town of Champlain. The road, along its current course but unnamed, is shown on an 1856 map of Clinton County. By this time it was also, like other back roads crossing the border in the area, used by agents of the Underground Railroad to guide escaped enslaved Blacks to freedom—North Star Road, at the southern terminus of Roxham, is said to have gotten its name from the lore among escapees to look for Polaris in the night sky as a guide to which way was north.
Canada established a customs station on Roxham just north of the border by the early 20th century. The U.S. did not reciprocate, even as the advent of Prohibition in the 1920s created a large market for illegal alcoholic beverages which bootleggers and rumrunners served, making use of the many unguarded roads across the border, such as Roxham, often at night. In the 1950s the Canadian government closed the customs station; it has since been repurposed as a private house. This left an gap along the border between ports of entry, between the busy Blackpool crossing of I-87 and A-15 to the east and the Mooers–Hemmingford Border Crossing on the west.
Roxham Road was barricaded in both directions at the border in the 1970s. The U.S. Border Patrol had begun putting gates up at some unguarded crossings along the land border in New York and Vermont to inhibit smuggling early in the decade. Canada barricaded all uncontrolled crossings on its side as part of security operations supporting the 1976 Summer Olympics, fearful that terrorists like those who had killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics could do something similar in Montreal, where the Games were held, and then quickly escape across the border.
During the 1980s, when illegal migration primarily took place from Canada into the U.S., the Border Patrol augmented this with electronic surveillance equipment.
At some time since the early 1990s, the U.S. segment of the road was paved.
Irregularly entering asylum seekers in the 2010s
Background
Safe Third Country Agreement
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Canada and the U.S. worked together to improve border security. Among many agreements signed was the Safe Third Country Agreement, stipulating that refugees coming to either country must apply for asylum in the first one they reach. It was generally seen at the time it was signed in 2002 as being sought primarily by Canada, to prevent refugees from "asylum-shopping". In 2004 it came into force and the amount of asylum applications to Canada began to drop; three years later a Canadian Federal Court ruled the treaty unconstitutional, on the basis that U.S. law did not offer the same protections as Canada for applicants, but that decision was in turn overturned by an appeals court on procedural grounds.Under the STCA, any prospective refugee who does not have an application for asylum already pending in Canada will be refused admission to the country if they enter from the U.S. Those refugees would then have to return to the U.S., where their attempt to exit would nullify any application process they had begun for asylum in the U.S. and lead to their detention pending deportation as illegal aliens. But this provision of the agreement applies only to those who present themselves at official ports of entry. Should they cross the border anywhere else, they would be entering unlawfully as long as they did not go to the nearest border crossing and present themselves to Canada Border Services Agency personnel for inspection and processing. Those taken into custody before reaching a border station are detained, cannot be returned to the U.S. until their case is handled, and may file an asylum application.