Jul 22
2025
Migrant crossings on our northern border
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Border patrol surveillance cameras at Fort Niagara State Park. Photo by Tina MacIntyre-Yee/Democrat and Chronicle.
By the time four people paddled halfway across the Niagara River in an inflatable raft one night in 2024, a surveillance camera had already picked them out of the winter darkness.
The image was gray and pixelated, their raft a single speck of black in the mouth of the river.
Several miles away, a U.S. Border Patrol agent sat behind a dozen or more monitors and counted as four people stepped onto land. The camera followed the migrants to the shore in Lewiston, while agents on the ground raced to intercept them. The officers tracked footprints through the damp forest from the bank of the river to the parkway above and made their arrests soon after the migrants climbed into the van of a smuggler.
They had just barely made it to America.
Standing on the Youngstown Public Dock, not far from where the migrants landed, you can see clear across to Canada. From top to bottom, about 35 miles of river carve this stretch of Earth in two: Ontario on one side, Western New York on the other. Between them the water spans about 500 meters — less than one-third the distance of the nearby Peace Bridge. In calm waters, an Olympic swimmer could cross this natural border in five minutes.
The Niagara River will deceive you, though.
While it looks like a long, straight trench here, this stream is ever-changing. The water never stops or slows. Even in the coldest months, a strong current prevents the river from freezing over. A few miles south of this point, it swirls into turbulent, unforgiving rapids, considered some of the most violent in the world.
A power plant churns that anger into electricity for surrounding homes and businesses. A whirlpool spins nearly 25 miles per hour, forcing whatever dares to cross it into a vortex 125 feet below the surface. Even further south, the roar of Niagara Falls offers a deafening warning: People have died here.
Still, many have braved the wrath of the river for centuries, using this channel as a means of escape from one country to the next. Under moonlit skies, enslaved Americans fled toward Canada in rowboats, the Niagara River their final stop on a path that led them away from their captors.
Today, migrants cross on small vinyl rafts in the opposite direction. Federal officials have flooded Western New York with surveillance technology in response, despite studies and federal audits that question whether their high-tech equipment will stop anyone from attempting the dangerous journey.
Unauthorized northern border crossings peak in 2024
For decades, a national conversation about immigration has centered around the southern border, where illegal crossings vastly outnumber those in the north.
That focus is slowly shifting in our direction. President Donald Trump has taken aim at the “forgotten border,” launching a trade war with Canada over exaggerated claims that our neighbors to the north refuse to stop a “massive” flow of fentanyl and an “invasion” of migrants into the United States.
About 5,525 miles separate the U.S. and Canada. It is the world’s longest international border, and for many years, it was considered undefended — a testament to a strong friendship between the two countries. In some spots across the northern border, the only thing demarcating one country from the next is a 20-foot-wide clearing in the forest known as “The Slash.”
That doesn’t mean the border is completely porous. Federal officials have spent billions of dollars over the last four decades to build extensive surveillance networks in the name of border security — although the northern border is far less militarized than its southern counterpart.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomPetra Molnar, a lawyer and anthropologist with Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center, worries Trump’s hyper-focus on the U.S.-Canada border will lead to an expansion in surveillance technology here. Canada, in response to tariff threats, has already crafted a $900 million border security plan.
Molnar said the heightened surveillance will endanger the lives of migrants.
“States say, ‘Well, we need the surveillance to prevent people from coming,’” she said. “Except that doesn’t work. Empirically, we have studies that show that, as a result of smart borders and surveillance, people don’t stop coming. What happens is they take increasingly riskier routes to try and avoid that surveillance, leading to what has been an exponential increase in deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s what we’re worried about at the northern border, too.”
There was a sharp increase in illegal crossings along the northern border last year. Border Patrol agents detained about 24,000 people attempting to cross into the United States from Canada — up from just 1,800 arrests in 2022. But that figure represents less than two percent of the 1.5 million illegal crossings nationwide last year, according to federal data.
And the amount of fentanyl seized at the northern border last year totaled less than a single piece of checked luggage: 43 pounds. That’s compared to 21,000 pounds at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Along the Buffalo Sector — a swath of border lands spanning from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Wellesley Island, New York — Border Patrol agents made about 500 arrests last year. In 2022, they recorded 90 illegal crossings.
Eyes on Us: Surveillance along the Niagara River
Most migrants who cross illegally in Western New York use the Niagara River, the only passable landscape sandwiched between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. They pick their routes carefully, opting for spots like Youngstown, Lewiston and Grand Island — where the current slows, the gorge is not so steep and wooden staircases carry them from the river’s edge to cars waiting for them at the side of the road.
They are often unprepared for this journey, sent over in flimsy rafts that are no match for the rapids, sometimes with only a single oar to assist them. If they manage to make it across, they are confronted by “no trespassing” signs along privately-owned land. This is not a deterrent for anyone who has already made it this far.
Federal officials have taken note of these migration patterns and met them with surveillance.
Thirteen towers, each about 100-or-so feet tall with several high-powered cameras on top, line this part of the border. An official from U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the towers are “strategically placed” to prevent “the illegal trafficking of people and contraband” — they wouldn’t say where.
The agency declined a request for a tour or interview about security efforts.
Driving along the Niagara River in February, a reporter found three towers. One was at the very tip of Western New York, overlooking the boat launch at Fort Niagara State Park, near the U.S. Coast Guard Station. Another peered over more than a dozen homes along the coast of Grand Island, on West River Road. The third towered above a disc golf course and a popular sledding hill at Beaver Island State Park.
Looking across the river from Canada, you can pick this tower out of the trees along the U.S. shoreline. All three are located on calmer, more narrow sections of the river.
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With the help of human operators, the cameras can theoretically find and track migrants as far as 3 to 7.5 miles away. They are designed to search for body heat and movement in the darkness and are continuously recording and feeding that footage back to Border Patrol agents, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy organization that studies border surveillance technology.
Less visible surveillance exists here, too: ground sensors and BuckEye trail cameras and drones and helicopters and ATVs and boats with radar that are always watching, always collecting data.
“There is not going to be one site along the Niagara River that we cannot monitor,” a Border Patrol spokesperson said in 2009, when several of the towers went up.
That surveillance likely also includes the day-to-day activities of lawful U.S. and Canadian citizens living or fishing or playing in parks near the river. As a reporter stood beside the tower at Beaver Island State Park, one of the cameras swiveled away from the river to look at the reporter.
Does surveillance of migrants stop them from coming?
The Department of Homeland Security has continued to pour millions of taxpayer dollars into this technology — with some plans still in the works — without a true assessment of how it will enhance security at the northern border and despite humanitarian concerns raised by researchers like Molnar.
It has been nearly a decade since Homeland Security officials have conducted a threat analysis to measure the severity of illicit activity at the northern border. The last time the agency published a strategic plan to address those concerns was in 2018.
Around the same time, a pair of reports from government auditors found U.S. Customs and Border Protection could not fully say whether its surveillance towers were leading to a meaningful decline in illegal crossings and criticized the agency for a lack of performance measures for operations across the northern border.
CBP has yet to address recommendations from the reports, according to auditors. A spokesperson declined to comment on the findings or describe how the agency evaluates the use of technology.
The spokesperson would not provide data on the number of alerts triggered by the surveillance towers or how many of those led to an arrest of an unauthorized migrant at the Niagara River.
Internal discussions, however, have acknowledged ongoing problems with the system. In a 2021 pitch to industry leaders, CBP revealed Border Patrol agents watching the cameras found it difficult to identify objects, dispatching field agents for “cows, cows and more cows.” In a 2024 pitch for more AI-powered solutions, the agency said the less-advanced surveillance towers lead to “poor data integrity and missed detections” because of the reliance on human operators. And last year, a leaked internal memo revealed nearly one-third of all surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border were broken.
Still, Border Patrol officials publicize the technology as crucial to their mission, allowing them to cover expansive sections of the border with fewer agents in the field. One agent called the surveillance towers “the partner that never sleeps, never needs to take a coffee break, never even blinks.”
Their push for more surveillance is never-ending. Agency records reveal plans to build 16 more surveillance towers along the Buffalo Sector by 2032, including 11 in the Buffalo area and one in Rochester. State and federal lawmakers continue to rally for more resources and technology, hosting meetings with Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan as recently as late February.
A man fishes in Ontario, across from Buffalo. Photo by Tina McIntyre-Yee/Democrat and Chronicle.
And they promote success stories on social media — like the case from Lewiston — although we don’t have a grasp on how many migrants have crossed undetected or died during their journey.
Federal officials have argued that this virtual wall is more humane than physical barriers and can save the lives of ill-equipped migrants sent over the border at the whim of smugglers.
Immigration advocates say their efforts are misguided. A 2019 study by researchers from the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute found border surveillance technology pushed migrants crossing the southern Arizona desert to more remote corridors, where they risked dehydration and heat exposure. Aid groups on search-and-rescue missions found an open graveyard dotted with human remains.
It was barely above freezing in Lewiston that night last January when the four individuals crossed the Niagara River, with winds up to 15 miles per hour. By the time they made it to the shore, all four were soaking wet, a Border Patrol agent later said.
It’s unclear whether the migrants knew the cameras were watching, or if they thought they could slip through the shadows of the night.
They were fortunate enough to reach the shore.
About a decade ago, boaters on the Niagara River rescued a Czech citizen who had attempted to swim across the river to Lewiston. They found him close to death, clinging to a log in the middle of the river, a news release said. The surveillance towers didn’t see him.
Molnar said the focus on technology ignores the cost to human life and fails to address the root causes of unauthorized immigration.
“Surveillance isn’t going to stop them,” she said. “What it’s going to do is force people into more life-threatening terrain.”
At the Niagara River, that means into the rapids that wish to consume them.
The Democrat and Chronicle is examining surveillance efforts in Western New York as part of an investigative project called “Eyes on Us.” This project was reported by Kayla Canne and edited by Beryl Lipton and William Ramsey. Lipton and New York State Team reporter David Robinson contributed reporting. cross-
