Canada: Reservation Required
Duration: 11'51"
Reporter/Camera: Ivan O'Mahoney
Producer: Jordan Kronick
Executive Producer: Richard Fabb
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"I would like to tell each and everyone who have plans to cross the border - don't ever do it." (Lenora, arrested migrant)
You say illegal migration into the United States and most immediately think of the Mexican/US border. But as Insight News reports a 15 km hole in the 6,500 km northern border with Canada is rapidly becoming the prime location for people smuggling. The Mohawk Indian Reservation of Akwesasne which straddles the border with a complex maze of waterways and islands has attracted migrants from 110 countries. When the sun goes down in this territory, Akwesasne changes into a playground for cat and mouse games between the police, local boat drivers and their human cargo.
Samba Sow was chasing the American dream but it ended on the shores of Akwesasne where his smugglers dumped him. The police were quick to arrest the young Senegalese who'd been part of his country's karate team at the Francophone Games held in Canada. We see Samba being led away by the border patrol and follow him to a Pennsylvania detention centre. He tells the story of his river journey after having paid US$1,300 - almost three times the average annual income in Senegal - for a trip which should have brought him all the way to New York City.
Samba's story comes as no surprise to the Mohawk police in Akwesasne. On night patrol around the river shores and the territory's dark back-roads they tell us of the problems they face in battling the traffic and the desperate state in which they often find abandoned migrants. We also join the US Border Patrol who inform us that there are only 400 out of 10,000 border patrol agents on the entire Northern border, while this is the border, they say, "where the serious criminal element and terrorists come in."
For a price, there are always Mohawks who are happy to provide a boat service for the migrants to cross the reservation. They regard the land as theirs and do not recognise the international border between the US and Canada. Local Mohawk, Stacey Boots, says the countries' attempts to stop imigrants from crossing is hypocrytical. "It's foreigners telling Natives they can't help other foreigners."
We also meet Leonora. She too was abandoned by smugglers and picked up by the police. She made it across the river and was picked up by a car supposedly taking her to New York. But just a few miles outside Akwesasne the driver told Lenora to get out and make her own way. After her subsequent arrest she says: "My fifteen hundred dollars gone down the drain like that.... and now I am in a cell and he outside free. One day to come he gonna pay for it. One day somebody's gonna take his life out."
Insight News is the first news organisation to have gained access to the migrants who are abandoned and arrested.
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