ATLANTA — With intense focus on southern border security this election season, a Channel 2 Action News investigation has uncovered significant exposure along our northern border.
Through his sources, Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Aaron Diamant got hold of a secret federal document and used it as a guide for an eye-opening, cross-country border tour.
We traveled from the frigid Atlantic inlets and remote forests of northern Maine to the picturesque Pacific Coast, between which the border between the United States and Canada runs 4,000 porous miles.
From border agents to federal lawmakers to local sheriffs we met along the way, the concern is the same.
"(Combating) terrorism is our primary mission,” border agent James Peters said.
In a recent congressional hearing, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin remained emphatic.
"Islamic terror represents a threat,” Johnson said. “This is real. It's growing."
In many places, the United States and Canada are separated by little more than a small ditch.
We crossed into Quebec, Canada, from northern Vermont through a small rural checkpoint surrounded by fences and cameras. But just yards down the road, there are no fences or barriers of any kind. The only thing denoting the border is a small white marker.
We saw firsthand some of the countless open sections like that, in between official ports of entry.
Through public U.S. Department of Homeland Security documents, we know last year alone border patrol agents captured more than 2,600 people along the northern border.
Through our federal sources, we got hold of the numbers the DHS secret, including dozens of special interest aliens, or "SIAs" from nations with terrorist ties, including eight from Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh, six from Pakistan, five from Turkey, four from Yemen, two from Egypt, and one each from Iran and Somalia.
"It's nerve-racking, because you're going to encounter people that are trying to blend in," said Kristen Brassard, a deputy with the Clinton County Sheriff’s Department in Upstate New York.
Brassard’s agency helps monitor parts of U.S. Border Protection’s busy Swanton sector, along the Quebec border, where U.S. federal agents apprehended more SIAs last year than anywhere else along the Canadian border.
"I’m not worried about somebody really coming into Clinton County and committing an act of terrorism,” Clinton County Sheriff John Favro said. “I'm more worried them passing through Clinton County and committing an act of terrorism on our country."
Favro told us the dense, “unpatrollable” woods along his section of border are filled with secret cameras and sensors.
"But that's a response issue,” Favro explained. “That's a matter of when the sensor gets tripped, and you respond, and when you get there."
Favro, like many, is pushing for more federal boots on the ground. Right now, only 10 percent of our country's 20,000 border agents are stationed along the northern border.
"This is the hole,” Favro said. “There's no cheese around the hole. This basically is wide open."
Meanwhile, Martin Collacott, Canada’s former ambassador to now war-torn Syria, offered an ominous warning for all Americans.
“If I were an American, I would want to keep a fairly close eye on how things were developing,” Collacott said in an exclusive interview with Diamant in Washington. "I think some of the things we're doing could create major problems for us."
Since taking office last November, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's new government has resettled more than 25,000 Syrian refugees, making good on a central, but controversial, campaign promise.
"We did it in such a rush, unnecessarily, just to meet politically stated deadlines," Collacot said. "In the longer term, we can expect fairly, a very large Muslim population in Canada, four times per-capita that in the United States, and my suspicion is a lot of them will become fairly radicalized."
A scary prospect for veteran U.S. border agents like Michael Cox.
"We don't know who they are, how they are vetted, how good they are vetted," Cox said.
Diamant met Cox in Peace Arch Park in far west Washington state, where a playground sits just feet from the unfenced Canadian border.
"My biggest concern right now is just the lack of manpower and detection we have in these wide open spots along the northern border," Cox said
One of the more striking things we saw in Washington was a well-worn path through the light brush separating a Blaine, Washington, neighborhood and a busy border road in British Columbia.
In an exclusive interview, Diamant questioned U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske.
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