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CHAMPLAIN, New York Pictures of immigrant families stretch across the back wall of a United States Border Patrol station located on the U.S.-Canada border. Its here in the northeastern tip of New York that more family arrivals showed up in fiscal 2019, which ended Oct. 1, than any of the other 49 northern Border Patrol stations between Washington state and Maine.

The Champlain Station is thousands of miles away from the southern border, which saw nearly half a million family members arrive in fiscal 2019, but agents here say they faced their own influx of families.

The main room of this station is packed with rows of desks, along with two empty detention rooms in the back left corner. But walking inside the station, it is the images of about 70 families staring back from the white wall that catches the eye.

The hundreds of people in the pictures were taken into custody over roughly the last year after being stopped while attempting to illegally cross from Canada into the U.S., including those who later claimed asylum.

Anna Giaritelli / Washington Examiner

Each familys picture was taken either inside the station or outside. Champlain Station patrol agent in charge, Norm Lague, told the Washington Examiner during a recent tour of the region that he decided to start posting the photos after his agents began seeing more families cross here. It's a poignant collection, but it has a very practical purpose. Agents want to make sure adults are not reusing the same children in order to come as a "family," which makes it easier under immigration laws to stay.

This past year, Border Patrol agents saw a total of 440 adults with children illegally cross from Canada. Exactly 295 of those took place in the Swanton Sector, one of eight regions that comprise the northern border. The Champlain Station, one of several local hubs within the region, saw the majority of illegal entries, which Lague attributed to its proximity to Montreal.

Family apprehensions on the northern border have increased from 67 in fiscal 2016 to 230 in 2018 before nearly doubling to 440 in 2019, according to unreleased data reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

During the beginning of last [fiscal year], we were seeing multiple families a day similar to the southern border give-ups," he said, using the term for surrendering to agents. "We wanted to make sure we were learning why they were coming, whether the families knew one another and also were concerned about tactics on the southern border being employed on the northern border, he said. It was a check and balance we used for intelligence purposes and to ensure children were not being exploited for smuggling purposes.

Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said in June that between December 2018 and May, DHS personnel documented 4,800 instances where families arriving at the southern border were not related just under 1.5% of the 332,981 total family members apprehended between ports of entry. Families were released into the interior of the U.S. weeks after being taken into custody, unlike single adults who are typically removed and prosecuted for entering the country without permission.

Lague said the photo wall gives agents an easy way to potentially spot children who had been recycled," a reference to the rare instances on the southern border this past year when a child who crossed with an unrelated adult posing as a parent was returned to Mexico and came back over with another unrelated adult.

Lague did not provide any specific examples where children had been reused by different adults. The 440 family members apprehended along the Canadian border were not broken down by nationality, making it impossible to know how many used Canadian no-visa laws to initially enter legally on a commercial flight before then going south into the U.S. between ports of entry.

The rest is here:
The illegal immigrant family photos lining the wall of a remote Border Patrol station next to Canada - Washington Examiner