— Roxham Road is a quiet country road jutting off another quiet country road, where a couple of horses munch on soggy hay
and a ditch running along the muddy pavement flows with melted snow.
“I used to hunt along the border,” said Parker Cashman, who was staying with Mr. Turner, “and there’s too many places where it’s too easy to cross.”
“Maybe we need to build a wall!” Mr. Turner replied, jokingly.
Since Trump, Quiet Upstate Road Becomes a Busy Exit From U. S. -
Residents of Champlain, N. Y., watch as migrants, both adults and children, use a country road to reach Canada, where they can seek asylum.
“People just want to live their life,” Mr. Crowningshiele, 48, said, “and not be scared.”
Given their proximity to Canada, people around here have always had some awareness of the world beyond the border.
An agreement between the United States and Canada makes it virtually impossible for them to ask
for asylum at a legal border crossing; Canadian border officials would have to turn them back.
Migrants have been coming to places like Roxham Road not
because they want to sneak over the border; the expectation is to walk right into the arms of the Canadian authorities.
“It’s almost like this road doesn’t exist,” said Mr. Turner, a 21-year-old warehouse worker.
But in recent weeks, riders have been asking him — two, three, sometimes as many as seven times a day — to bring them to the end of Roxham Road.
“I think what he set out to do, he’s doing,” Mr. Hogle, 54, said of Mr. Trump.