Almost a year after a family from India froze to death near the international border in southern Manitoba, similar cases of people walking over to the U.S. are on the rise but they involve people from a different country.
On the Canadian border, agents look for footprints in snow or mud, a hole in a fence or a rock painted orange as a meeting point anything that could hint at illegal crossings. Down south, agents pull giant tires behind trucks to smooth dirt roads so footprints are more easily noticed.
"It's almost a game of cat and mouse we change one thing, they change another," one agent said.
On the Canadian border, agents look for footprints in snow or mud, a hole in a fence or a rock painted orange as a meeting point anything that could hint at illegal crossings. Down south, agents pull giant tires behind trucks to smooth dirt roads so footprints are more easily noticed.
"It's almost a game of cat and mouse we change one thing, they change another," one agent said.
The air temperature was pushing 20 below zero and howling winds were whipping up blinding snow one morning in January when US Border Patrol agents in North Dakota spotted five human forms moving through the barren borderland where America and Canada meet.
Illegal immigration is a constant issue in the United States, focused on the southern border. In the north, far fewer agents patrol a vast and often treacherous landscape.