Bringing migrants to Roxham Road, a paying job for American taxi drivers



With the reopening of Roxham Road last November, business is rolling for taxi drivers in Plattsburgh. It is to them that asylum seekers turn to lead them to Canada. We followed them, across the border.

• Read also: What’s going on at Roxham Road? 6 questions to better understand

The sun is beating down on the parking lot of Cumberland’s Dunkin’ Donuts in North Plattsburgh, New York.

Located along the 9, a short distance from Highway 87, the immense expanse of asphalt also hosts a Mobile gas station. Here stop for the last time before Canada the Greyhound buses which land there daily their share of travelers.


Mathieu Carbasse

Parked next to each other, Tom, John and a few other taxi drivers chain cigarettes while chatting. Like every day, they wait for the arrival of the next bus, scheduled between 3 p.m. and 3:30 p.m.

Above all, they expect a lucrative clientele.

The three taxis on the left are waiting for the bus, which will finally arrive at 3:23 p.m.

Mathieu Carbasse

The three taxis on the left are waiting for the bus, which will finally arrive at 3:23 p.m.

“I got into the taxi a few years ago, after working for the city for a long time,” says Tom, 65, with tattoos on each arm and a long white mustache that Hulk Hogan would not deny.


Mathieu Carbasse

“It’s simple, I pick up travelers at the foot of the bus. Most of the time I’m the one asking them if they’re going to Roxham Road. They are afraid to ask. I then drop them off at the end of the road and that’s where they go to Canada.”

His work, he likes it because “people are nice in general”. Understand: they don’t make a fuss and pay without complaining. Tom also tells me about a woman who sometimes insults people who get off the bus and asks them to go back to their country.

“But these people don’t stay here, they just want to go to Canada.”

In the presence of a journalist, one of the other drivers who had just joined the group suddenly became agitated.

“I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to be photographed. You do your job, I do mine. I don’t want to appear in your article or on TV”, he exclaims, before finally being quite talkative and telling the reality of his job.

It should be said that the taxi drivers of the surroundings do not carry in their heart the journalists, guilty in their eyes to have harmed their flourishing businesses by revealing certain practices.

“There’s nothing illegal about what we’re doing,” he explains, as if trying to justify himself when people talk to him about making money on the backs of the asylum seekers he leaves every day at the end of a path.

“We’re just doing our job.”

At nearly US$80 for the 30-minute ride to the infamous crossing, it’s a job that pays off, it seems. In any case, enough to have convinced John, in his sixties, to give up his delivery job last week to go into business.

The Greyhound bus finally arrives.

With a few clicks of the finger, the drivers move their vehicle as close as possible to the bus and then suggest to each person getting off if they want to go to “the border” or more directly to “Roxham Road”.


Mathieu Carbasse

Today, the bus is not very full. Only two drivers among the handful present will find customers for the Roxham crossing point. The others will return for the next early evening bus. A total of four or five buses arrive daily in Plattsburgh.


Mathieu Carbasse

The two taxis, with asylum seekers on board, are now traveling north on Highway 87, towards the border.

They then spin on Perry Mills Road for a good ten minutes, a road through wet, marshy areas… before taking on Roxham Road. Dead end.

At the end of the road, Canada.

Mathieu Carbasse

At the end of the road, Canada.


Mathieu Carbasse

That day, as is the case every day and several times a day, it is between two blue plastic barrels that the race for three asylum seekers ends.

It is through this crossing that a hundred people arrive in Canada every day.

Mathieu Carbasse

It is through this crossing that a hundred people arrive in Canada every day.

As the two taxis leave, they cross the border and disappear into a white tent attached to a large prefabricated building.


Mathieu Carbasse

It is here that new arrivals will be arrested, as is the usual process. Before being transported by bus 10 minutes away, to the former St-Bernard hotel which now serves as a detention center on behalf of the federal government.




Reference-www.24heures.ca

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