A couple of winters ago, Libby Hillhouse awoke around 5 a.m. to her phone ringing. A U.S. Border Patrol agent was on the line with an urgent question: Did she know of anyone with a spare room for the night? Agents had caught someone crossing without papers into northern Vermont from Canada. Foll owing its protocol at the time, the border agency planned to release the person, with a notice to appear in immigration court later on. Hillhouse, who lives in Danville and leads a nonprofit that supports asylum seekers, sprang into action. A few phone calls later, she’d found a willing host. For months after that, the calls kept coming, as Vermont’s remote and usually sleepy stretch of the international divide suddenly became a busy entryway for people from all over the world seeking economic opportunity or safe haven in the U.S. Hillhouse soon became part of a statewide emergency network that helped provide hotel rooms, bus tickets, meals and rides to the train station for more than 80 migrants — mostly families with children — from places such as Mexico, Afghanistan, Angola and Haiti. Those days are now over. Crossings by undocumented migrants along the 295-mile swath known as the Swanton Sector, which includes Vermont, New Hampshire and eastern New York, have plummeted. After reaching historic highs in 2024, average monthly Border Patrol apprehensions last year tumbled by 92 percent. The drop-off was already underway by the time Donald Trump assumed the presidency a year ago, but his administration’s aggressive stance on immigration has accelerated the decline. The relative quiet has been a welcome change for some border residents who were troubled by the sight of migrant families stranded at gas stations or strangers trooping through their backyards. But even as border enforcement has tightened with the help of hidden cameras and other technology, people from all over the world continue to make the journey across, trudging through dense forest and snow, often with the help of smuggling networks and drivers on the U.S. side who wait on rural roads to pick them up. While down from their peak, illegal border crossings have not fallen back to the levels seen before the surge. Those who get caught crossing without papers these days are almost universally detained and criminally prosecuted, producing a huge increase in such cases in Vermont’s federal courthouse in downtown Burlington. Every week, migrants in handcuffs shuffle into courtrooms to face sentencing from a federal judge before being handed over to immigration officers for deportation. Enforcement has also bled into Vermont’s interior. Over the past year, Border Patrol agents, whose duty it is to police the international boundary between official ports of entry, have arrested roofers and construction workers, including longtime Vermont residents, in targeted operations miles south of the border.  Under Trump, the Border Patrol has been tapped increasingly to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which is focused on the country’s interior — in carrying out the administration’s immigration crackdown, blurring the line between the two agencies. The administration’s uncompromising approach has sparked sustained protests across Vermont, especially in the days since an ICE agent in Minneapolis fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, 37, an unarmed U.S. citizen who was protesting ICE activity that day. More change is ahead: The Border Patrol is in the midst of a massive recruitment drive, offering salary bonuses and easing requirements for new hires who want to come up north. Robert Garcia, the Swanton Sector’s chief patrol agent, said he hopes to double his roster of about 300 agents in the coming years. In Vermont, whose frontier with Canada was once little more than a formality, a new era of stepped-up enforcement is taking shape, as the Border Patrol assumes a harsher, more expansive approach to its duties. “We are going to do our job with whatever we encounter, wherever we encounter it,” Garcia said during a recent conversation at his headquarters in Swanton. “Because Border Patrol agent authority is everywhere.” The Other Border At the Richford Border Patrol station — a single-story brick building just outside the border town of about 2,300 — framed photos snapped by hidden surveillance cameras adorn a hallway wall. The photos show bears, egrets, moose and deer caught in the act in the border zone.  Until recently, illegal immigration was considered almost solely as an issue of the southwest border. But as the U.S.-Mexico border was fortified with imposing barriers, stadium-style lights and buried motion sensors — and Mexican drug cartels muscled into the lucrative human-smuggling business there — migrants with the means and ability to fly to Canada have opted to cross the long-overlooked northern border. The northern border with Canada near Richford, Vt. Credit: Owen Leavey Beginning in 2021, amid a global surge in migration, the numbers grew dramatically. In the fiscal year that ended in September 2024, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded 23,721 encounters across the entire northern border — a record high, though still nowhere near the 1.5 million recorded that year at the border with Mexico. The numbers here have died down since Canada tightened visa requirements for Mexican citizens and worked with the U.S. government to close exemptions to the binational pact that requires asylum seekers to file their claim in the country in which they first arrive.  That stricter stance has only deepened since Trump took over, and the numbers have continued to drop. In November, 72 people were detained in the Swanton Sector, mostly on the New York side. Even so, Swanton remains the busiest sector on the entire 5,525-mile border with Canada. And unsanctioned crossings are still well above the pre-pandemic baseline. During a three-hour tour of the border near Richford last week, patrol agent in charge Bryan Dyke said his team is still adjusting to the busier reality. When Dyke arrived in 2009, the desolate swath felt forgotten. Most of his work involved tracking gun or drug smugglers through the woods. When things were really slow, he broke up bar fights and responded to other local dramas on the U.S. side. Today, he and fellow agents are contending with the effects of fluctuating international economic and political forces that show up on Vermont’s doorstep in human form. About half the people arrested in the Swanton Sector last year came from India, followed by Bangladesh, Mexico and Guatemala.  Bryan Dyke Credit: Owen Leavey The work is often unglamorous. Dyke pointed to an overgrown country road along the border that drivers began using as an illegal entry point a few years ago. Agents sought to plug the access by placing a row of rocks that they’d purchased at Leach Family, a local gravel supplier. But the stones weren’t big enough, so the cars drove right over them. “I had to buy bigger rocks,” Dyke said. Much of the border here is obstructed by similar small-scale barriers, if anything. At another spot beside a dairy farm that straddles the border, where cars had been crashing through the farmer’s fence, agents arranged a line of boulders in a field. The farmer helped. “We’re not looking to put a wall up here,” Dyke said. “We want something that kind of fits with the aesthetic and the spirit of Vermont.” Even now, Dyke doesn’t think the northern border gets the attention it deserves. “I don’t think a lot of people know what’s going on up here,” he said. “They think that it’s real sleepy and quiet. But it’s been a half decade, really, of being active.” A Perilous Journey Robert Garcia, the Swanton Sector’s chief patrol agent Credit: Owen Leavey In court affidavits, border agents paint a picture of a smuggling apparatus along the northern border that is less sophisticated than down south. But compared to just a few years ago, agents say, organized smuggling has become far more common. From Montréal, smuggling networks often arrange rides that drop people near the border, where migrants walk through the woods, guided or alone, to a designated pickup spot on the U.S. side. From there, a driver, often from outside Vermont, will drive them to their final destination. A honk of the horn signals when it’s safe for the migrants to come out of hiding and get in the car. Some migrants have told agents that they found their guides on TikTok or Facebook, paying anywhere from several hundred dollars to $7,000. Drivers might be relatives, friends or strangers looking to pay off a debt from their own journey across.  One consequence of stricter enforcement is that migrants are spending more money on organized smuggling operations and taking increasingly remote and perilous routes to avoid detection. The risks can be substantial. The international divide cuts across rugged mountains, thick woods, swamps and rivers. Freezing winter temperatures can quickly become life-threatening. Since 2020, at least five migrants have died while attempting to cross in the Swanton Sector. In January 2023, Fritznel Richard, a 44-year-old man from Haiti, drowned on the Canadian side after contracting hypothermia while trying to reach the U.S. The following winter, the body of Ana Vasquez Flores, a 33-year-old woman from Mexico who was five months pregnant, was found in the Great Chazy River in Champlain, N.Y. And in October, authorities found human remains near Jay, in northern Vermont, while searching for a woman who went missing last January attempting to cross with a group into Canada. She has not yet been publicly identified. We will apprehend you, we’re going to prosecute you, then we’re going to remove you back to your country of origin.Robert Garcia “We’re trying to get the message out: Don’t cross the border illegally,” Garcia told Seven Days. “You’re putting your life in peril, and, of course, your freedom as well. Because we will apprehend you, we’re going to prosecute you, then we’re going to remove you back to your country of origin.” When people are caught, it’s usually thanks to surveillance technology or the agents’ roving patrols. Hidden cameras send hundreds of live feeds back to an intelligence hub in Swanton, capturing people walking through the woods or across rural roads. Agents have expanded authority to set up immigration checkpoints anywhere within 100 miles of the border and coastline — a zone that includes almost all of Vermont. They can also stop and search vehicles based solely on reasonable suspicion, a lower legal standard than required for other law enforcement agencies. Advocates of immigrants’ rights argue that this authority can too easily lead to racial profiling. In June, when Border Patrol pulled over a van near Richford with two members of the local advocacy group Migrant Justice, an agent cited the passengers’ plain clothing, facial expressions, and the fact that they didn’t wave or smile when driving past a Border Patrol vehicle among his reasons. “The residents on Drew Road are generally friendly and supportive” of Border Patrol agents, “and will typically acknowledge agents with a smile, head nod, or a wave,” the agent wrote in an affidavit about the incident. “These individuals did not.” The agent also said he thought he saw more people in the back of the van, but that turned out not to be the case. The resulting detentions of Juan Ignacio “Nacho” De La Cruz and his 18-year-old stepdaughter, Heidi Perez, sparked impassioned protests outside the Border Patrol station in Richford, where they were initially detained, and later at the Statehouse in Montpelier and federal courthouse in Burlington. A legal battle led to their release after a month in detention. Both face deportation proceedings. De La Cruz and Perez said they had been delivering food to migrant farmworkers near the border. After detaining the pair, a separate affidavit said, agents discovered that De La Cruz’s cellphone number matched one that had communicated via WhatsApp with a Mexican woman who was caught crossing the border in April. The exchange included plans to pick her up once she reached the U.S. The government filed a search warrant for De La Cruz’s cellphone, but he has not been criminally charged. Give and Take One other key source of Border Patrol intel is locals. In many of Vermont’s rural northern towns, border agents are the nearest law enforcement officers. Agents sometimes respond to emergency calls that would otherwise be handled by local police: domestic disputes, car crashes. That relationship goes both ways. Over the past few years, as migration was increasing, the number of tips from residents has soared, Garcia said.  “They’re the best at understanding what is different,” he said.  From her dining room window, Sheila Hardy, 61, has noticed an uptick in activity by Border Patrol agents near her home on Ayers Hill Road, northwest of Richford — an area that in recent years has become a hot spot for illicit border crossings. “Before, they’d go by once or twice a day,” Hardy said of federal agents. “Now it’s many times. We see them shining lights, checking cameras.” The landscape here is a mix of wide-open fields where last season’s trimmed cornstalks poke up through the snow in neat rows alongside heavily wooded areas in which sugar maple tap lines form a web among the trees. In the distance, beyond the smattering of farmhouses, barns and double-wides, loom mountains dusted with snow.  It’s the heart of Vermont’s dairy country and so depends heavily on undocumented migrant workers, mostly from Mexico. Despite that, the region leans more conservative than the rest of Vermont, which voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Vermont’s border counties formed a solidly red band. Hardy’s house is perched above a patch of forest through which the border runs. She’s lived there for 46 years with her husband, who used to run a dairy farm nearby. Above her backyard, Mont Pinacle rises on the Canadian side. For a long time, this stretch of the border was largely unguarded. Now if you go berry picking and set off a sensor, they’ll be here.Sheila Hardy “Now if you go berry picking and set off a sensor, they’ll be here,” Hardy said on a recent afternoon, as her grandchildren, 2 and 4, ran around the house. Hardy said she is “not a fan” of Trump and did not vote for him. But she feels no qualms about the increased patrols. “I like to know they’re out watching,” she said. “I feel more protected.” Just a few weeks earlier, Border Patrol agents caught four people — two adults from Mexico and Ecuador and two teenagers — who had walked into the country just down the road from her house.  Earlier in the year, a Guatemalan man leading a Chinese couple and their 10-year-old child were also captured nearby, wet and cold from slogging through the snow. Hardy said she hasn’t witnessed any border crossers in years and suspects that anyone making the trek these days is taking extra pains to stay hidden. But, she said, border life does breed a certain degree of suspicion of unfamiliar people or cars passing by.  If something catches her eye, Hardy can make use of a business card she keeps handy: the tip line number for Border Patrol. On the Border Around 7 a.m. on December 23, Border Patrol agents in Derby heard their radios crackle. A hidden camera had caught someone walking across the border near the Holy Transfiguration Monastery, a Russian Orthodox religious complex overlooking the Missisquoi River on the Québec side.  According to an affidavit, an agent identified only by his surname, Spencer, hopped into his patrol car and drove to the area on the U.S. side. He soon noticed footprints in the snow that appeared to belong to five different sets of shoes. Then he spotted people through the trees. “U.S. Border Patrol! Don’t move!” he yelled. The group fled, running over a nearby ridge and out of sight. Spencer chased after them through the snow, catching up to a young woman from China. Spencer handcuffed her and walked her back out to the road, where another agent took her to the Border Patrol station in Newport. Spencer called on his radio for backup and went to find the others, whose footprints led past the North Troy Cemetery and into someone’s backyard. There, he detained an Ecuadoran man and a 17-year old from Brazil. Another agent caught up to a third man, a 20-year-old from Venezuela, who was heading back toward Canada.  Tracking the last set of footprints, Spencer soon found a woman with twigs stuck in her hair who was walking along a dirt road with a backpack, looking exhausted. The woman gave Spencer a Portuguese passport and confessed to being in the U.S. illegally, the affidavit said. In prior years, migrants caught crossing in this way typically would have been quickly turned back to Canada or returned to their home countries. Under the Biden administration, people fleeing persecution who reached U.S. soil to apply for asylum would often be released into the country while their case wound its way through the immigration system. That’s not happening anymore.  The group of five was taken to a holding cell at the Border Patrol station in Newport. There, the affidavit says, two of them told agents that the captured Venezuelan man who sought to flee back toward Canada had been their guide.   Two weeks later, the Venezuelan, Joneyker Rafael Ramos Guillen, would stand before a federal judge in Burlington, facing felony smuggling charges. ‘Improper Entry’ Surveillance photo of a man authorities said is Joneyker Rafael Ramos Guillen walking across the border, from the Border Patrol affidavit Credit: Courtesy Ramos Guillen strode into a windowless courtroom on the fourth floor of Burlington’s federal courthouse, his wrists in handcuffs.  On this cold January afternoon, he wore a neon-orange jacket zipped over his prison uniform. His brown hair, cut in a shaggy, boyish mullet, stuck out in different directions. Ramos Guillen sat down at a table between his attorney, federal public defender Alejandro Fernandez, and a Spanish-language interpreter, who whispered the day’s proceedings into his ear. An attorney for the U.S. government, David Golubock, sat before the judge’s bench in a gray suit. As the Trump administration has taken a harder line on illegal immigration, the number of migrants facing criminal charges in Vermont’s federal court has skyrocketed. Only three people were charged with “improper entry” in 2024, when border encounters were at an all-time high. But last year, even as illegal immigration dwindled, that number shot up to 66. Many of those cases have landed on the desk of Vermont’s federal public defender. National priorities seem to be getting expressed here in Vermont by the incredible uptick in charging people with “improper entry by an alien.”Alejandro Fernandez “National priorities seem to be getting expressed here in Vermont by the incredible uptick in charging people with ‘improper entry by an alien,’” Fernandez told Seven Days. The legal consequences for that petty offense are generally minimal: Migrants usually plead guilty and receive a sentence of time served before being deported. Ramos Guillen’s future, however, is less certain. According to court testimony and records, Ramos Guillen was living in Montréal with his family, including five sisters and a brother. They had fled Venezuela and have a pending asylum claim in Canada, where Ramos Guillen says he worked cleaning buildings. For his role guiding the migrants across the border in December, he told border agents he expected to earn $750. He now faces five felony counts of bringing in and harboring aliens and a count of improper entry to the U.S., a misdemeanor. If convicted of the smuggling charges, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of three years in prison. “He put his liberty at tremendous risk for allegedly $750,” Fernandez told Magistrate Judge Kevin Doyle. “That shows how little money he has.” Canadian officials now say they won’t take him back. On January 12, Ramos Guillen pleaded not guilty to all the charges. A trial in Burlington is pending, with the next hearing scheduled for March. In an interview, Fernandez noted that prosecutors have a “tremendous amount of discretion in how they choose to charge a case.” Under U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, they are reaching for charges that require mandatory prison time much more often. In September, Vermont’s then-acting U.S. attorney, Michael Drescher, joined Bondi at a press conference in Tampa, along with counterparts from Texas and Florida. Bondi touted what she said were successes of Joint Task Force Alpha — an initiative focused on dismantling human smuggling and trafficking networks — and announced its expansion to the northern border. She highlighted several recent prosecutions, including that of a woman who allegedly was paid to pick up and transport migrants who had crossed into Vermont from Canada. “We are investigating and prosecuting their crimes more aggressively than ever,” Bondi said. During the briefing, Drescher said his office was “proud” to work with the Border Patrol and other agencies to “help secure the northern border.” Drescher’s office turned down requests for an interview. Two weeks ago, he resigned from his position after Gov. Phil Scott appointed him to the Vermont Supreme Court. In his Vermont Senate confirmation hearings, Drescher has sought to distance himself from the work he did for the Trump administration, including his role representing the government in the detention cases of Mohsen Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk, university students targeted for their criticisms of the war in Gaza. Those cases received national attention and drew protesters to the same Burlington courthouse where scores of border crossers now face prosecution. Blurred Line A protest in Burlington on January 8 Credit: Daria Bishop It was still dark on the morning of November 5 when three vans carrying roofing crews pulled into the parking lot of a Maplefields convenience store and gas station in Jeffersonville. The roofers came here every morning to load up on food and gas on their way to work.  On this morning, one of them remembers, it was oddly quiet. Nearby, Border Patrol agents were waiting for the workers to arrive, having staked out the place based on a tip about “suspected illegal aliens,” according to government documents. As the workers started to get out of the vans around 5:30 a.m., Border Patrol agents in unmarked cars surrounded them. Many of the workers fled. A chaotic chase broke out. By the end of it, eight people were in custody. As part of Trump’s immigration drive, Border Patrol agents have turned their sights increasingly to Vermont’s interior, detaining people far from the border. They have justified the raids by pointing out that their authority to enforce immigration law is not limited to the border region. Other immigration agencies, such as ICE, “may ask for our assistance,” said Garcia, the Swanton Sector chief. “And when those asks come, they’re our partners, and we’re going to assist.” Over the past year, roofing and construction crews have been the targets of some of the largest workforce enforcement raids in Vermont, which has seen a surge in immigration detentions. The Burlington-based advocacy group Migrant Justice has tracked arrests of Latino residents in particular and reports that at least 107 people across Vermont were detained by immigration authorities in 2025, compared to just four that it tallied the year before. The Border Patrol was involved in many of last year’s arrests, according to government records, detainees and other witnesses. “This is all interior enforcement,” said Will Lambek, a spokesperson for the group. “These are not people being apprehended crossing the northern border.” Among those detained in Jeffersonville was Vicente Acosta Yupangui, 39, an Ecuadoran who had lived in the U.S. for more than two decades and in Vermont for about six years. Acosta Yupangui owns a roofing subcontractor business in Cambridge and has four daughters between the ages of 10 and 19 who are U.S. citizens. At 17, he left his village in Ecuador, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on foot in 2004. His wife, Maria Yupangui Guaman, 39, came soon after. Both have pending asylum claims. Maria Yupangui Guaman, Vicente Acosta Yupangui and their twin 10-year-old daughters Credit: Lucy Tompkins Agents took Acosta Yupangui and the other detainees to the Border Patrol station in Richford until they could be transferred elsewhere. Later that day, agents also picked up a 6-year-old and a 1-year-old whose parents were detained in the raid. In detention, the agents showed the men photos of themselves shopping at the mall and going about their daily lives, indicating they’d been under surveillance for days. Acosta Yupangui’s 19-year-old daughter, Luz Acosta Yupangui, said her cousin and her Ecuadoran fiancé, Alex Japon Benites, were also detained that day. All were held without the benefit of a bond hearing — an increasingly common practice under the Trump administration — and she was unable to communicate with them for days. “All I did was cry and cry,” she recalled. The men said agents pressured them to sign documents agreeing to their deportation. Vicente Acosta Yupangui refused at first, but after a week behind bars, he started to consider it. When his wife and daughters were finally able to visit him, though, he changed his mind. “They lifted my spirits,” he said on a recent morning from his home in Cambridge, where his daughters’ four white first communion dresses hung in a row on the wall. “And I told myself: ‘They need me.’” His wife and daughter eventually found a lawyer who helped the three men file emergency habeas corpus petitions, asking a federal court to review their detentions. They have all been freed from custody. Four others, including the 6-year-old girl, have been deported. After the raid, friends and community members came together to support Acosta Yupangui and his family. They wrote letters to the immigration judge, attesting to his community ties and good character, and brought food to his wife and children, who were afraid to leave home and go to school during the three weeks he was in detention. “We have lost a lot this year,” Acosta Yupangui said. “But this whole community supported me, and I am grateful to everyone who helped us and made sure there was always food on my family’s table.” After the men were released, Japon Benites and Luz Acosta Yupangui married. Japon Benites, 28, said he illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in December 2022. The rest of his family remains in Ecuador. I came with a dream to help my parents build a home that isn’t made of mud.Alex Japon Benites “I came with a dream to help my parents build a home that isn’t made of mud,” he said in Spanish. “Not a huge house, but a decent house.” Several months earlier, Border Patrol agents surrounded and detained nine members of a separate roofing crew in Barton. In a statement, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said agents received an anonymous report from a concerned citizen “regarding a roofing company in Barton, Vermont that was possibly employing illegal aliens.”  All but one of those arrested have been deported. Rosa Elvira Sañay Auqui Credit: Courtesy One of the deportees, 24-year-old Rosa Elvira Sañay Auqui, recounted how she left her village and family in rural Ecuador in 2023 to find work in the U.S. Her parents leveraged their home and guinea pig stable for a $20,000 loan to fund her journey. She flew to El Salvador, made her way north through Mexico, then climbed over a border wall near El Paso, Texas. “Many people fall from the wall and stay there,” she said in Spanish during a phone call from her village in Ecuador. “I mustered the courage and said, ‘For my family, I’ll do it.’” She was driven to Vermont and worked for two years at restaurants and on roofing crews to send money home to her parents to buy food and pay for her siblings’ schooling. After her arrest in Barton, Sañay Auqui was eventually transferred to a detention center in Louisiana, where she was held for two months before being deported. Now back in Ecuador, she owes $10,000 in unpaid debt from her cross-border journey.  “Sometimes I wonder, Why me?” she said. “But we’ll see what God has in store for me.” Agents Wanted Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol, is slated to receive more than $70 billion in supplemental funding over four years to increase border security operations nationwide. The funds include $4.1 billion to hire and train new Border Patrol agents and support staff, plus more than $2 billion in bonuses to hire and keep agents. It’s unclear how many of these resources will end up in Vermont. None of the state’s three members of Congress knew the specifics. But Garcia said the sector has plans to significantly grow its workforce.  In late October, Customs and Border Protection hosted an online webinar to aid recruitment along the northern border.  Rookie agents usually have to spend several years on the southwest border before they can transfer up north. Now they can come here directly. The agency is offering up to $50,000 in bonuses over the first five years of employment. But a major expansion won’t happen overnight. New agents have to attend a six-month training program in New Mexico before starting the job. And the Border Patrol is competing with ICE and a separate agency, Homeland Security Investigations, for potential agents. Rural Vermont can be a tough sell for some prospects. In the webinar, Swanton agent Jeff Vining offered some words of encouragement. “In my 18 years, I’ve never seen it as easy as it is to get into federal law enforcement as it is right now,” he told the prospective agents. “I highly encourage you all to take advantage of it.” Watchful Eye Paul de la Bruere in his chapel Credit: Lucy Tompkins Highgate farmer Paul de la Bruere voted for Trump. That’s in part because the past few years had brought groups of migrants trekking through his property, about half a mile from the Canadian border, and that of his neighbors. He hoped Trump would change things. “Way up here in God’s country, we never lock our doors,” he said. “It was very stressful for us because we didn’t know who was coming over. Suddenly we didn’t feel safe anymore.” One afternoon last summer, de la Bruere’s hay baler broke. To clear his head, he walked up the hill to a small cedar chapel he had built a few years earlier in the woods behind his home. Light streamed through stained glass windows onto statuettes of Catholic saints arranged along an altar. For de la Bruere, 70, who has lived on this 30-acre plot since 1999, the chapel serves as his private sanctuary. As the sun set that day, he made his way back through the woods to his house, where he found a Border Patrol agent shining a flashlight across his porch. The agent explained that hidden cameras had captured someone walking in the nearby woods. De la Bruere realized it must have been him. Although the intrusion made him feel uneasy at first, he now sees it as a sign that his hopes for tighter security have been realized. In return, though, he has had to make peace with a different sort of presence in his backyard. Stepping through his snowy woods on a recent afternoon, de la Bruere gazed up into the trees. “It’s very possible we’re on camera right now,” he said. The original print version of this article was headlined “Dividing Line | Two years after apprehensions on Vermont’s northern border reached historic highs, fewer people are making the perilous trek. But not all is quiet.” The post Vermont Border Crossings Are Dropping — But Not All Is Quiet appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less