Troubled Waters

A month before Sept. 11, U.S. and Canadian law enforcement officials launched a joint exercise in Buffalo, N.Y., known as Operation Prelude, aimed at improving border security. It involved dozens of federal, state, provincial and local agencies operating under the auspices of an integrated border enforcement team. It was one of several teams formed along the northern border in 2000 to coordinate information and activity among dozens of law enforcement organizations on both sides of the international border.

Coast Guard Cmdr. Jeffrey Hammond arrived a month before the exercise to take command of the service's Group Buffalo, which includes 10 small boat stations from Fairport, Ohio, to Massena, N.Y., and covers 500 miles of shoreline from the middle of Lake Erie to the St. Lawrence River. The area is home to such critical infrastructure as international bridges and rail lines as well as four nuclear power plants. "I had been all over the Coast Guard but had never seen stations so undermanned," Hammond says. Eighty percent of the boats under his control were operating past their expected life span.

Out of necessity, the Coast Guard worked closely with the Border Patrol's Buffalo Sector, which is responsible for protecting 400 miles from Western Pennsylvania to Wellesley Island on the St. Lawrence River. Not that the Border Patrol was any better off. Even though the 400 miles under its jurisdiction are composed entirely of water, the Border Patrol had only two boats, and even those could not be operated in the winter-several months of the year in this part of the world.

Ed Duda, the deputy chief patrol agent in Buffalo, says, "The bad news is we didn't have enough resources. The good news is we developed good working relationships with other agencies. We had to."

Operation Prelude participants understood the need for better cooperation, says Hammond. If they didn't, 9/11 a month later drove home the point. The United States temporarily closed the border, but the attacks permanently changed the structure of many of the border agencies. The Border Patrol and Coast Guard, formerly parts of the Justice and Treasury departments, respectively, were merged, along with 20 other agencies, to create the Homeland Security Department. And while the U.S. government was creating DHS by carving up existing agencies, the Canadian government was doing its own restructuring.

Influx of Resources

A tour of the border from Buffalo to Vermont late last fall showed significant progress in improving security. Yet thousands of undocumented people and smugglers still cross from Canada every year. The situation is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from the southwest border, where law enforcement officials apprehend more than a million illegal immigrants annually. Yet the northern border offers challenges that suggest just how difficult securing international boundaries will continue to be.

To Duda and Hammond, the changes since 9/11 have been enormous and mostly welcome. Today, only 20 percent of Hammond's boats are operating past their scheduled life span. His staff has grown between 10 percent and 15 percent at most of the small boat stations. The command has been able to buy more protective equipment-essential for cold-water operations. "We beg, borrow and steal-we're really good at that," he says.

The Border Patrol also has done well. Today, the Buffalo Sector has five boats operating year-round. It also has a new air operations office with three aircraft and four pilots, where previously it had none. In addition, the sector has installed high-tech cameras that are monitored 24 hours a day from a Buffalo command center along the Niagara River, where illegal trafficking is a particular problem. It can pass information immediately to field agents or other agencies. Duda won't say how many agents are assigned to the sector, but he says the staff has quadrupled, allowing for round-the-clock surveillance, something that was not possible before.

Perhaps most important, he says, is that the Border Patrol has very productive relationships with other agencies here and in Canada. "You hear a lot about the FBI not sharing information with other agencies, but that's not the case here at all. Those guys [in the FBI's Buffalo field office] are sweethearts." Agents in his office talk to their counterparts in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police every day and meet frequently, he adds. John Madsen, the Customs and Border Protection bureau's chief inspector at the Peace Bridge port of entry in Buffalo, echoes Duda's assessment: "Port inspectors regularly receive information from the Border Patrol and vice versa, something that rarely happened a few years ago."

The relationship between the Border Patrol and Coast Guard has been especially important. Both are responsible for security between ports of entry, as official border-crossing places are known. After 9/11, the Border Patrol was able to tap into the Coast Guard's fleet modernization contract to buy two Safe Boats-highly maneuverable craft ideal for operating on Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, which is littered with the sunken wreckage of ambitious navigators who underestimated the lake's unpredictable winds. The agencies conduct joint patrols and share resources, with the Coast Guard providing maritime safety and navigation training and Border Patrol providing law enforcement training. "Most of our guys are very young," says Hammond, "and the Border Patrol brings a lot of law enforcement experience."

Nowhere is the relationship between the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard more critical than along the St. Lawrence River, officials say. According to data compiled by the Coast Guard's Ninth District, which is responsible for operations in the Great Lakes region, the St. Lawrence River is the most active smuggling area-more active than either Detroit or Buffalo. Much of the action takes place near Massena, N.Y., around the Akwesasne tribal lands, which span the border between New York and Ontario and Quebec provinces. Federal officials made 600 arrests along the St. Lawrence last year and seized all manner of contraband, including more than $6 million in cash, an assortment of narcotics, nearly 500 weapons, 100 stalks of khat (a plant whose leaves are chewed for a stimulating effect), 11 tanks of nitrous oxide, 80 sticks of dynamite and six cows. Coast Guard and Border Patrol officials say they frequently have been on the receiving end of gunfire and even dynamite.

'Jurisdictional Nightmare'

Winter comes early in upstate New York, so the Border Patrol's Richard "Kip" Stratton and the Coast Guard's Trevor Kimber come prepared for the night shift patrolling the frigid waters of the St. Lawrence River in an open-air speed boat. Wearing cold-weather gear and carrying a large thermos of hot tea, the two are relieved on a November night when the predicted wind fails to materialize and the temperature hovers above freezing.

According to Stratton, the job is deadly dull, except when it's adrenaline-pumping, seat-of-the-pants exciting. As it happens, the watery region is, by one senior federal official's measure, "the most lawless place in the United States," which results in a good deal of adrenaline-pumping action. Stratton and Kimber's area includes a portion of Akwesasne lands. A complicated tribal government structure, a legacy of exploitation by outsiders, a history of conflict (often armed) with the U.S. and Canadian governments, and the fact that some tribal members do not recognize the international boundary, combine to create an ideal environment for smuggling.

Stratton and Kimber move out onto the St. Lawrence from the Grass River near Massena, where the Border Patrol maintains its boats, to watch for illegal activity. They move east up the St. Lawrence toward the confluence with the St. Regis River, keeping an eye on the marinas known as embarkation points for illegal ferrying of people and goods. They watch for spotters, who in turn will be watching for them. They drive a fast boat and use night-vision goggles, but they know the smugglers usually drive faster boats and sometimes have more sophisticated night-vision gear. It's a cat-and-mouse game, and if they don't exactly expect to win it, they also are unwilling to cede it.

It is a long, cold night. Coordinating with the Border Patrol's Pyotr Kukharsky and the Coast Guard's Ryan Chatland, who are in another boat, Stratton and Kimber sit and watch a range of suspicious activity-boats being loaded in the dark, trucks delivering goods to a darkened dock, someone on shore searching the water with a spotlight.

Another Border Patrol boat nearly is rammed by what everyone believes to be a smuggler-one apparently not using night-vision goggles. Based on long experience, Stratton and the others say they're witnessing cigarette smuggling-an enterprise that officials on both sides of the border estimate has cost the two governments billions of dollars in lost tax revenue over the past decade. But the activity they witness is not taking place in U.S. territory. Because the smugglers are careful to stay on Canadian waters, U.S. officials can only watch.

Intricate and contentious jurisdictional issues on sovereign tribal lands and the area's peculiar geography make border control here enormously complicated. The Canadian portion of the Akwesasne territory includes two islands on the St. Lawrence, Cornwall Island and the Isle de St. Regis. Also on the Canadian side is a spit of land on the south side of the St. Lawrence sandwiched between the river and the Akwesasne tribal lands in the United States, known to non-natives as the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation. The tribe's land on the south bank of the St. Lawrence is reachable by boat through Canadian waters, or by land through the U.S. portion of the reservation.

Stratton and Kimber pause near Buoy No. 1, where U.S. and Canadian waters intersect. U.S. law enforcement officers cannot conduct operations in Canadian territory, but the Border Patrol has a handshake agreement with the RCMP allowing the American officers to cross Canadian water en route to U.S. territory on the other side. That means they can travel around the spit of Canadian tribal land on the south side of the St. Lawrence and return to U.S. territory through the St. Regis River on the other side.

"It's a jurisdictional nightmare," says Dick Ashlaw, the Border Patrol agent in charge at the Massena station. "It's a perfect place for smuggling because all of us [in law enforcement] have borders and boundaries, and the criminals don't."

The Canadian tribal police are based on Cornwall Island. The RCMP also have authority, but in a recent shift in tactics, they now conduct only "intelligence-driven" operations, which means they no longer routinely patrol the area. Law enforcement officials say their cross-border relationship is good. But as a practical matter, if U.S. law enforcement officers (federal, state or tribal) observe illegal activity in the area, they must contact Canadian law enforcement officials who, they say, often have a hard time getting there in time to take action.

With limited resources, Canadian law enforcement officials say their operations must be driven by intelligence, although they acknowledge that the region around the Akwesasne is a "target-rich" environment. Says one senior Canadian official who is on the integrated border team: "We can no longer afford to do operations that are commodity-driven. We have to get to the top people."

There are no official ports of entry between the Canadian and American sides of the reservation, but there are dozens of roads. Several law enforcement officials say there are places on this tiny reservation-no more than 50 square miles on both sides of the international border-where they dare not venture unless they are executing a well-planned operation with significant backup.

Smugglers Shift Tactics

The majority of smugglers now operating through the reservation are moving drugs or cigarettes, but that hasn't always been the case. In 1998, U.S. and Canadian officials broke up a smuggling ring that was running undocumented immigrants from China to Canada and through the reservation into the United States. After 9/11, there was a clear shift in the native community's tolerance for human smuggling, Ashlaw says.

"You have a very close-knit traditional community there. Granted, they have their share of bad elements, but the majority don't [support the smugglers]. They police themselves. After 9/11, we didn't stop the alien smuggling there. The native community stopped it," Ashlaw says. "A lot of the people on this reservation are iron workers. They built the World Trade Centers and took a personal offense [to the terrorist attacks]. There are a lot of veterans here as well. We started getting calls [from tribal members] saying, 'Come down and pick these [undocumented immigrants] up."

Of necessity, the Border Patrol has essentially established what Ashlaw calls an "unholy alliance" with the cigarette smugglers so his agents can focus on smuggling of more critical commodities, such as drugs, which still come through the reservation, and undocumented people, who for the most part are now crossing the border elsewhere in the region.

The Border Patrol's Swanton, Vt., sector, which includes much of the area along the St. Lawrence in New York, has the distinction of apprehending more people from "nations of interest" than any other sector along the northern border. Nearly 900 undocumented people were caught there last year from more than 100 different nations, many of them at a checkpoint on Interstate 91, a major East Coast corridor that runs from Montreal to New York City.

If the Border Patrol's apprehension rate here is a measure of the agency's success, the lack of detention space to hold those people points to a failure within the Homeland Security Department, many agents believe. Detention space is managed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm of the department's Border and Transportation Security bureau (the Border Patrol is part of Customs and Border Protection, which is in the same bureau). Unless those who are caught have a criminal record, or are wanted by another law enforcement agency, they frequently are given a summons to appear in court-a summons few expect they will honor-and are released because there is no place to hold them. ICE lacks adequate detention space, and a budget freeze precludes the purchase of space at state or local facilities.

Homeland Security officials are quick to point out that no known criminals are released, and that all names are checked against law enforcement databases to ensure that those let go are not wanted in connection with terrorist activity.

Michael Gilhooly, an ICE spokesman in Vermont, says the agency has 19,500 detention spaces nationwide-nowhere near enough space to hold the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who are picked up every year. About 80 percent of the detention space is occupied by known criminals or others deemed threatening, leaving only a few thousand spaces available for other illegal immigrants. That space is allocated as judiciously as possible, he says, based on a number of potential risk factors, including the likelihood that an individual will honor their court summons. "We try to make the most efficient use of the space we have," says Gilhooly. ICE is now testing a program to electronically monitor individuals to ensure they do not simply abscond.

But the system is hardly infallible and has been a source of great frustration among Border Patrol agents, who point out that they often apprehend people at great risk to themselves, only to wonder why, when those people are later released.

What's more, it sends conflicting messages about the nation's security values. "If you're catching people and then releasing them, they know that," says Stanley Spencer, chief patrol agent in the Swanton sector. "It also has a pretty negative effect on morale."