Vermont: On Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Joe Biden unveiled a plan to close an immigration agreement's loophole that has allowed thousands of immigrants seeking asylum to travel between the two nations along a backroad connecting New York state to the Canadian province of Quebec.

Since early 2017, so many people have crossed the border illegally on Roxham Road outside of Champlain, New York, that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police set up a processing facility for them less than five miles (8 kilometres) from the border's official crossing.

The migrants at the end of the slender, two-lane road, which is surrounded by farms and forests, have been warned by mounties that they will be detained if they cross the border. However, once they arrived in Canada, they were given permission to remain and pursue their asylum claims, which can take years to resolve.

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Asylum seekers without US or Canadian citizenship who are apprehended within 14 days of crossing any point along the 3,145-mile (5,061-kilometer) border will be returned, according to the new policy. This includes Roxham Road pedestrians.

According to Canadian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the agreement in advance, the agreement was scheduled to go into effect at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. This quick implementation was done to prevent a spike in the number of people trying to claim refugee status.

A total of eight individuals in two families, one from Haiti and the other from Afghanistan, arrived at the US end of Roxham Road shortly after dawn on Friday. They were among the last migrants to cross the border before the Biden-Trudeau announcement. Both claimed to have taken detours.

The 28-year-old Gerson Solay carried Bianca to the border. He claimed he lacked the necessary papers to continue living in the US. Before he was taken into custody for processing, he said, "That is why Canada is my last destination.

It's unclear how Roxham Road came to be a popular route, but it can be reached in a short taxi ride from the point where Interstate 87 approaches the Canadian border, and for migrants travelling south, it's a short trip to New York City.

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These immigrants have taken advantage of a loophole in a 2002 agreement between the US and Canada, which states that applicants for asylum must do so in the nation they first enter. Those who cross into Canada legally are sent back to the US and instructed to apply there. However, those who enter Canada somewhere other than a port of entry, such as the facility close to Roxham Road, are permitted to remain and ask for protection.

The agreement drew immediate criticism from those who believed it might jeopardise asylum seekers' safety by preventing them from receiving crucial support from both governments.

Danilo Zak, associate director for policy and advocacy for CWS, also known as Church World Services, urged President Biden to "strongly reconsider this deal, work with Congress to restore access to asylum, and support policies that recognise the dignity of all those arriving at our borders." The group fights for people who have been ejected from their homes all over the world.

The agreement is made at the same time that the US Border Patrol is addressing a sharp rise in unauthorised southbound crossings along the open Canadian border. Nearly all occur along the section of the border closest to Toronto and Montreal, Canada's two largest cities, in northern New York and Vermont.

The Border Patrol has increased staffing in the area and started releasing some migrants into Vermont with a future date to appear before immigration authorities, even though the numbers are still small compared to the US-Mexico border.

Canada also consented to allow 15,000 migrants from the Western Hemisphere to apply for asylum on a humanitarian basis throughout the year as part of the agreement. Southbound migrants are currently putting a strain on US border officials.

628 illegal immigrants were stopped by US Border Patrol agents in February, which is more than five times the amount they were stopped in the same period last year. Even though those figures pale in comparison to the number of migrants arriving from Mexico, where more than 220,000 of them were apprehended in just December, there has been a significant change in percentage terms.

Agents in the Swanton Sector of the Border Patrol, which includes parts of upstate New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, stopped migrants 418 times in February, an increase of more than ten times from the same month last year. Mexican citizens, who can fly to Canada from Mexico without a visa, make up about half of those entering from Canada.

The police chief of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, which has a population of 6,000 and is about an hour south of the border, informed state authorities that the Border Patrol had unexpectedly dropped off a vanload of immigrants at the town's welcome centre. The same thing has occurred several times in the previous few weeks.

The migrants who were dropped off in St. Johnsbury, according to a statement from US Customs and Border Protection, had been apprehended along the border after entering the country illegally. They were given a notice to appear for further immigration proceedings.

Because St. Johnsbury has a bus station where migrants can board a bus to a bigger city, they were left there. In such situations, USBP collaborates with local communities to guarantee the security of all parties, including local residents and migrants, as well as the stability of the community's resources, according to the statement.

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But according to local officials, they weren't given enough time to plan. State officials are currently setting up a system to offer any services that migrants might need.

A Haitian couple and their three children—two boys, ages 17 and 9, and a girl, 15,—were dropped off at the welcome centre on Thursday. The family, who wished to remain anonymous, desired to board a bus for Miami. They claimed to have been in Canada for two months but would not discuss what had led them to continue travelling.

They missed the bus on Thursday that would have let them connect to one in Boston from which they could board another bus to Miami. A group of neighbourhood volunteers spent the day providing them with food, helping them find lodging for the night, and setting up transportation for them to catch the bus on Friday.

St. Johnsbury wants to assist these migrants, but not immediately, according to police chief Tim Page. In order to know what to do when these families arrive, he said, "We need to write something down." "This will all go a little smoother when we have a system set up," someone said.