The Trials Of Cross-Border Commuting

A Mohawk community struggles with a daily logistical nightmare

- Sonya Fatah

ON A COLD JANUARY morning in 2013, April Elaine Thompson was rushing out to work when her ex husband called. He’d been scheduled to pick up their daughter, Kaitlyn, who was then eighteen, from Thompson’s place but wouldn’t be able to come over in time. Could Thompson drop her off at his place instead?

It wasn’t necessarily an unreasonable request: his home was on Thompson’s way to work. But Thompson, who is Mohawk, lives in Akwesasne, a reserve that sprawls across the United States– Canada border: sections of it stretch into Quebec, Ontario, and New York state.

To reach the school where she works, Thompson drives north from her home in upstate New York, across the bridge spanning the Saint Lawrence River to Cornwall Island, Ontario, and from there on to the city of Cornwall on the mainland, where the Canadian border post is located. There, she has to report to Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officials before continuing to her workplace. Thompson’s ex-husband, however, lives on Cornwall Island, so dropping off her daughter there meant Thompson would need to drive past his home on the island and to the border post on the mainland to report Kaitlyn and herself, return to the island to drop her off at his place, then drive back through the border post and re-report to officials before continuing. All told, she would roughly double her commute time — and arrive late for work.

Thompson decided to skip reporting her daughter, instead dropping her off en route to the border post, where she planned to report just herself and then proceed to work. But when Thompson reached the border post, a CBSA official pulled her over and demanded she enter the CBSA building for further questioning.

“I ended up spending seven hours there,” Thompson told me over a cup of tea at a Tim Hortons near her school in the spring of 2017, referring to the amount of time she spent held in a cell.