U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers have begun occasionally stopping northbound traffic at the Aldergrove and Abbotsford crossings into B.C., adding to travel delays.
That is in addition to checkpoints at the Surrey Peace Arch and truck crossings, which began several weeks ago and continued over the Victoria Day weekend.
Blaine immigration lawyer Leonard Saunders, who makes regular trips across the B.C.-Washington State border, confirmed the Aldergrove and Sumas checkpoints, saying northbound traffic stops have become far more frequent.
"In the past, when I would see them, it'd be maybe every six months," Saunders told the Langley Advance Times.
"And there was always a reason for doing it, right? Like there was a suspect who is travelling north on the I-5 and they're trying to catch them or an Amber alert ."
Now, Saunders said, some clients have told him they've faced waits as long as two hours while U.S. officers conducted time-consuming searches of individual vehicles, pulling them over before they arrived at the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) side.
"Routine is not doing them every single day, but that is now their new routine," he remarked.
After the first week, officers appear to have scaled back their searches, reducing delays, Saunders observed.
Saunders noted the "outbound checkpoints" as the CBP refers to them, began happening on a regular basis around the time the agency reassigned Blaine area port director Harmit Gill.
It happened a few weeks after the first checkpoints went up, and Gill was replaced with a manager from a U.S.-Mexican border crossing near San Diego, Bonnie Arellano.
No reason was given for the switch, but Gill, a Blaine native who started his CBP career at the Point Roberts crossing in Tsawwassen, was known for taking a cooperative approach to cross-border concerns, before the Trump administration claimed Canada was allowing drugs and illegal immigrants to cross into the U.S.
"We have a lot of conversations with our counterparts in Canada about the community and what we can do to assist them," Gill was quoted as saying in an interview with The Northern Light website.
CBP did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but an earlier statement said there was nothing new about conducting outbound checks.
In the first few days of stepped-up searches, a CBP spokesperson said officers had only made "minor narcotics seizures" as well as finding about 300 rounds of 9 mm ammunition and close to 40 rounds of 12-gauge ammunition.
"It just seems like a colossal waste of time," Saunders remarked.
One side-effect, he said, has been backlogs of southbound traffic heading for the states, because CBP officers are being pulled from U.S. border crossings to conduct the northbound checkpoints.
"So it's actually creating lineups in both directions," Saunders said.
Guy Occhiogrosso, President and CEO of the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce, hasn't heard an official reason for the stepped-up searches.
"It does seem to be unusual and possibly unusually timed," Occhiogrosso commented.
"It does give me a bit of concern, as we are trying to create a sense of a warm welcome for our cross-border visitors, and these actions without an official cause may go against that intention we want to re-establish."
According to the Cascade Gateway Border Wait Times website, cross-border traffic volumes were down over the recent long weekend, with a 31 per cent drop at the Aldergrove/Lynden crossing on Victoria Day compared to last year, and a 35 per cent reduction at Sumas.
