Easy Ways to Cross the Border Wall
THE US border is often thought of as one of the more tightly guarded crossings in the western world.
But this month a British family found it all too easy and later ended up locked up in a US detention centre.
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While it may be true of the border with Mexico, and Trump planning to make it even stronger with his famous wall, it's a very different story up north.
Londoners David and Eileen Connors claim they mistakenly barrelled into the US from Canada after swerving to avoid an animal and careering over a ditch separating British Colombia from Washington State.
They ended up spending two weeks in a detention centre with their baby son before being put on a plane back from New York and banned from the USA.
The US-Canada border is the longest international border between two countries in the world but huge swathes of it are completely unpatrolled.
It stretches 5,525 miles from the Pacific to the Atlantic, touching eight Canadian provinces and 13 US States.
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And in many places there is nothing but a ditch, and sometimes not even that preventing people crossing the 49th parallel, and the Connors are not the only ones to discover this the hard way.
Just last year a 19-year-old French tourist claimed she was also banged up for a fortnight after she accidentally jogged across the border while visiting relatives in Canada.
Cedella Roman, 19, unknowingly ran into the United States in May 2018 after running south down a beach in White Rock, British Columbia and accidentally into Washington State.
When officers realised she didn't have a passport, they locked her in a van before driving her 120 miles to Tacoma Northwest detention facility.
Her mum Christine soon rushed to the facility with her daughter's passport - but Cedella was locked up for another fortnight while Canadian authorities verified their authenticity.
Simon Reeve meets a man whose house is in the US and Canada
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The extent of how easy it can be to breach the border was revealed in a recent BBC show by Simon Reeve.
There the author and TV presenter drove right up the border from the Canadian side to be met with just a ditch, monitored by CCTV.
A little further down the road he had a conversation with a man stood in the United States whose garden backed on to Canada.
During a brief chat the man told Simon he had to phone the border patrol if he wanted to cut the grass at the very edge of his land.
The official policy of US customs and border protection is that anyone who enters the US outside an official port of entry and without inspection has crossed the border illegally and will be detained.
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But there is an exception, in an even more bizarre scenario a house went on sale that actually straddled the border between Vermont and Quebec in 2017.
The almost 7,000-square-foot house, cut into five currently vacant apartments, sits on a lot less than a quarter of an acre of land but still manages to be in two countries.
The house has entrances from the United States and Canada.
Brian DuMoulin, who grew up in the house was accustomed to life literally on the border at a time when no one thought twice about crossing from one country to the other.
But he says since the security changes following 9/11 it "stresses everyone out,'' HuffPo reports.
The home in Beebe Plain Vemont, also bleeds into Stanstead, Quebec.
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The two towns have become the cliche of security changes on the U.S.-Canadian border brought on by the 9-11 attacks on the United States.
Residential streets that used to be open were blocked by gates, the back doors of an apartment building straddling the border were locked shut.
And the street next to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, deliberately built in both countries, is blocked by flower pots, but Canadians are still allowed to walk to the library's U.S. entrance without going through a border post.
Source: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10156540/easy-cross-us-canada-border-roads-split-yards-of-grass/
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