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The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are taking down their facilities on Quebec’s Roxham Road, an unofficial border crossing that served as a pathway into the country for countless asylum seekers.
In March, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden announced that they were closing a long-standing loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement. The agreement calls for asylum seekers to apply for refugee status in the first of two countries they enter. Prior to March, the deal only applied to official ports of entry.
According to numbers released by the RCMP on Monday, its officers have intercepted 113,000 people on Roxham Road since 2017.
“Following the modification to the Safe Third Country Agreement, the number of migrants that cross through Roxham Road has dwindled and our presence here is no longer necessary,” said Sgt. Charles Poirier.
Poirier said the removal of its facilities on Roxham Road means the RCMP will no longer have a constant physical presence on Roxham Road. It will instead rely on regular patrols and camera surveillance.
The spokesperson said the facilities at Roxham Road were meant to last three to five years. The decrease in foot traffic and the considerable cost of upgrading the facilities played major roles in the RCMP’s decision to tear them down.
Poirier said he could not provide a specific price tag for the RCMP’s continued presence at the unofficial border crossing, only saying it was in the millions.
“At certain moments, there were hundreds of RCMP agents per week working here,” he said. “We are back to the deployment we had prior to the migrant crisis.”
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