Vermont Immigrants Are Now Reluctant to Cross the Border

A few weeks ago, Fuad Al-Amoody, his wife and three children took a familiar trip from their home in Colchester to their cabin in the Northeast Kingdom. They spent a day swimming in the clear waters of Lake Willoughby and then traveled into Québec, just a half-hour drive away.

In Montréal, they stopped at their favorite Middle Eastern grocer to stock up on halal beef — a staple they have trouble finding in Vermont — before crossing back over the border and heading home.

It’s a ritual Al-Amoody has grown accustomed to.

Then his wife told him about a Congolese Vermonter with a green card who had been detained at the border recently while returning from a wedding in Canada. Esther Ngoy Tekele was held for 12 days in a South Burlington prison.

“I was very surprised, like, really?” said Al-Amoody, 45. “I’m a naturalized citizen, and I was like, ‘How about me? Will they be able to stop me?'”

Al-Amoody, who’s originally from Kenya, has lived in the U.S. for 25 years. He was the first in his family to make a life in Vermont, and, over the years, a handful of his relatives have followed. He had plans to bring one of them, who has a green card and a pending application for citizenship, to Montréal for the first time this summer.

Not anymore.

“I wanted to,” he said. “But why risk it?”

As the administration of President Donald Trump works to carry out what he vowed would be the “largest deportation operation in American history,” fear and anxiety are spreading among immigrants in Vermont who previously felt safe leaving the country to visit family, take a vacation or just spend the day in Canada. Several recent incidents have raised the alarm across Vermont, including the arrest of Tekele — a legal permanent resident who lives in Burlington — and the nearly five-hour interrogation by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials that rattled Winooski schools superintendent Wilmer Chavarria, a U.S. citizen who was returning from visiting his family in Nicaragua.

“It’s terrorizing people,” said Michele Jenness, legal services coordinator at AALV, a nonprofit that serves refugees in Vermont and has provided legal representation for several people recently detained at the border, including Tekele. “People aren’t going out. They’re scared to send their kids to school. They don’t want to go to the doctor. It’s working.”

Vermont and Québec have long been intertwined, with people on both sides of the border crossing regularly for work, to visit family and friends, or to enjoy the other’s natural and cultural offerings. Montréal is also the nearest city with sizable African, Arab and Asian populations, offering familiar cuisine and cultural ties for Vermont’s immigrant communities. Tekele and her family had regularly visited friends in Québec before she was detained on July 6.

“People are not traveling,” said Molly Gray, executive director of the Vermont Afghan Alliance, which serves the roughly 600 Afghans who live in the state. “Crossing the border now is wildly unpredictable, even for green card holders. They just don’t know what to expect.”

That fear is particularly acute for a Burlington woman from Venezuela, a country that Trump has repeatedly demonized as a hotbed for gang activity and criminals. The woman, who asked to speak anonymously for fear of reprisal, told Seven Days that after she received her green card, she would travel to Montréal “just for food, just for fun.”

Now, she doesn’t leave the country and is afraid to even leave Vermont. She removed the “Venezuela” bumper sticker from her car, installed a camera on the dashboard and wears her green card on a lanyard around her neck while driving around the state for work.

“Being Venezuelan right now is to have a target on your back,” she said. “Afraid is not the word. I’m terrified. I’m terrified about everything.”

Several days after Trump took office, the woman said she was driving with a coworker when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped them and asked about their immigration status. Even though she had been granted asylum and was a legal resident, the officer accused the woman of coming to the country illegally, she said. He eventually let them go, but the incident shook her.

“It made me feel like I will never be enough,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how hard I work, how well I behave. Coming from a country with a dictatorship, everything happening right now looks very familiar for me. It feels like a movie you’ve watched in the past. I have seen this before, and I don’t like how this ends.”

“Crossing the border now is wildly unpredictable, even for green card holders.” Molly Gray

In June, an Afghan truck driver who was granted asylum by the U.S. in 2023 made a wrong turn while transporting a truckload of coffee and accidentally wound up at the Vermont border with Canada, unable to turn around. As he tried to return to the U.S., border officials detained him, sending him to a St. Albans prison. For days, he was unable to contact his family or lawyer. Then, after 10 days in detention, he was suddenly released. The government never filed any charges to justify holding him, his lawyer said.

“It’s like a policy of detain first, verify later,” said Gray of the Afghan Alliance, who helped coordinate legal support and translation services for the trucker. “The burden is on an immigration attorney, if one can obtain access to those who are detained, to challenge the reasons for detention.”

Exactly how many people have canceled their travel plans or changed their habits is hard to say. Data collected by Canadian officials show that in June, the number of cars with Vermont license plates entering Canada was 10 percent lower than the same time last year. In May, personal vehicle crossings between Canada and Vermont were 38 percent lower than last year.

Even if many people continue to cross the border without issue, stories of immigrants — including those with no criminal history — detained by border officials and cut off from contact with their families for days or weeks are enough to make people think twice about leaving the country.

The uncertainty around the border has also led school officials to cancel planned field trips. Both Burlington High School and Winooski Middle School had plans to take students to Montréal this spring. But as immigration enforcement ramped up, school officials changed course. The Burlington students went to New York City instead; Winooski’s stayed home.

Winooski had sent students to Canada the previous year, and school officials had hoped to offer annual excursions to Montréal for students studying French, said Kate Grodin, coprincipal of Winooski Middle and High Schools.

“I felt like, Gosh, we’re right at the border. Montréal is beautiful, it certainly feels European, and they speak French,” she said. “It was ultimately too stressful.”

Cyrus Dudgeon and Wilmer Chavarria Credit: Luke Awtry

Chavarria, the Winooski superintendent, said students often ask him whether it’s safe for them to travel. He leads the most diverse school district in the state, where a majority of students are of color. Many were not born in the U.S., though Chavarria said most asking for his travel advice are citizens or permanent residents.

Up until last week, he advised them not to worry.

But then Chavarria, who grew up in Nicaragua and has been a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2018, was detained and interrogated at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston on his way home to Vermont. He was separated from his husband and pressed to give Customs and Border Protection officials the passwords to his phone and work laptop, which he said contain confidential student information. He told them he could only do so with permission from the district’s legal counsel, but agents refused to let him contact anyone. They questioned the validity of his marriage, threatened his job and told him he had no constitutional rights while in their custody, Chavarria said.

By the time he was released and reunited with his husband, Cyrus Dudgeon, the two had missed their connecting flight. Shaken by the incident and stranded in Houston, they spent the night in the airport and flew back to Burlington the following day.

Chavarria said he has returned to Nicaragua regularly to visit his mother and six siblings since he was a teen living abroad on a student visa. “I just want to see my mother and have a chat with her and cook with her,” he said. “I want to have that at least a few times a year.”

He’ll continue to do so, he said. Since his interrogation, Chavarria has spoken with staff for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) about a contingency plan in the event he is detained.

One thing has changed, he said: his advice to students.

“I can no longer say that being a U.S. citizen is a guarantee of your rights,” he said. “It breaks my heart that I’m going to have to tell them to be just as careful, if not more.”

The original print version of this article was headlined “Hemmed In | Vermont immigrants are reluctant to leave the country after high-profile detentions of legal U.S. residents”