The U.S. has fortified the border with Mexico since the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001 in the name of intercepting terrorists and undocumented migrants.
However, some people believe there’s a greater potential threat of terrorists entering the U.S. from the northern border with Canada than from across the Mexican border.
For the United States, security on the Canadian border has taken on a more pronounced edge in the past year. The self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) urges supporters to carry out attacks against Western countries, including Canada, that are in the U.S.-led coalition fighting it. Following that call, two Canadian soldiers were murdered in October 2014.
First a soldier was murdered in a deliberate hit-and-run near Montreal. But it was the second attack, four days later, that traumatized Canada.
Gunfire erupted inside Canada’s parliament, the seat of its federal government, after the murder of a soldier outside.
The shooter had just killed a soldier at Canada’s War Memorial a few steps away. Imagine a gunman killing an honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then invading the U.S. Capitol.
The suspect was shot dead inside the parliament building. The suspect in the hit-and-run led police on a high-speed chase that ended with the suspect's car rolling over. That was followed by an exchange of gunfire with police, in which the suspect was killed.
“I was horrified when I saw what happened up there," said U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter pilot Gerhardt Perry. He is now stationed in upstate New York after years of flying the southwest border.
“I was in the air. I heard about it over the radio,” Perry recalled.
Canada had raised its terror alert a few days before.
“These sort of things, we never would even think would occur in a place like Montreal," Perry continued.
“I started saying to myself, 'this is serious business.' I’m going to start looking hard here, what could be happening, could somebody be running across, could somebody be trying to escape through the border to get away from that?"
While the U.S. is hyper-focused on the southern border, there are Canadian cities with known ISIS sympathizers in them.
Ten students were arrested before leaving Canada, in May, allegedly to join ISIS. Six other suspected jihadists are missing after leaving for Syria.
If a terrorist wants to enter the U.S., some security experts believe it’s far easier here than in the southwest. There’s heavy tree cover in many parts of the Canada border, which is twice as long as the U.S. border with Mexico.
Ground sensors along the U.S. side can trigger cameras of unauthorized crossings from Canada.
I was shown photographs of camouflage-clad, machine gun-carrying suspects moving across the border into the U.S. Agents would not disclose the nature of the investigation, prompted by the photographs, but the inference is clear, namely that there is activity on the northern border that the United States is concerned about.
“I think we overemphasize security on the southern border and we don’t emphasize enough on the northern border, said Howard Campbell, a border researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso.
His book ”Drug War Zone” focuses on crime on the southern border. He’s also studied the Canadian border extensively.
“If Homeland Security is really concerned with security, and the biggest security threat is terrorism, we should be more worried about the Canadian border than the Mexican border," said Campbell, "because Mexican and Central American migrant workers are not a threat to the United States."
There are 6,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents working the 4,000 mile border with Canada. Along the Mexico border, less than half the length of the border with Canada, there are 18,000 agents.
In Canada itself, the soldier murders have changed the way people think.
“For a lot of people, it’s seen as Canada’s 9-11," said Philip Oxhorn, Chair of McGill University’s political science department in Montreal.
“It brought terrorism to their front door, not their back door. And it made people realize that Canada wasn’t immune, that it wasn’t off on an island unto itself," he said.
Canada is the middle of a federal election campaign. Election Day is October 19.
One of the most controversial issues in the campaign is a new law that gives police powers to arrest suspected extremists before any actual act of terror is committed. The law grants wide latitude to police to detain someone they think might commit an act of terror.
In a nation that prides itself on multiculturalism and open doors, that’s remarkable.
