So close to Canada, but stranded in Maine. After Roxham change, migrants are piling up in this small U.S. city

A fierce wind and cold rain blew through the street in Portland, Maine, where Louisma Dosou, his wife and their two children huddled outside a shelter for families last week. 

"They don't have space for us," Dosou, 40, said Wednesday morning. The family had been in the small coastal city about a week and still had no place to lay their heads. Every place they tried was full. 

"We've slept in the street, at the airport," he said, shaking against the gales coming off the Atlantic. "I am homeless. I don't have a place to rest with my wife and children. They are sick, they have fevers." 

Dosou's wife, Rodeline Celestine, covered their daughters, aged four and one-and-a-half, with a thin blanket as they crouched on a stoop behind Dosou. The girls wore socks in their little pink flip flops. 

The family were among a group of asylum seekers who had stopped at the Chestnut Street Family Services shelter that morning before trying to find somewhere else to sleep later that night. One woman there was two or three weeks away from giving birth, her husband said. 

Dosou and Celestine fled unrest in Haiti, travelling north from Brazil over the past three years in search of a safe new home. Their goal had been to reach Canada. Now, they are among the roughly 1,500 asylum seekers in Portland, population 68,000, where services are buckling under the needs of the growing number of migrants, many of whom had hoped to continue onto Canada. 

"We just cannot guarantee shelter anymore," said Kristen Dow, director of health and human services for the city, which is about 230 kilometres southeast of the U.S. border with Quebec. Quebecers vacation at nearby beaches in summer.

Save for some exceptions, asylum seekers can no longer cross into Canada on foot, following changes to the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) with the U.S. earlier this spring.

Speaking in her office behind a waiting room filled with asylum seekers, Dow said the city and local organizations are using nearly every vacant space left to keep people from sleeping in the cold. Still, in recent weeks, Dow knows some have had to anyway. 

She recalls a night in February when she got a call at 8:30 p.m. — both the family shelter and an overflow space with floor mats for 36 people were full — and there were 40 people waiting outside in the –10 C weather. 

Dow asked if those 40 people could fit inside if workers picked up the mats and put everyone in chairs instead. "I said, 'Then, let's do that.' There were children who were going to school and sleeping in a chair at night. I mean, that's really heartbreaking to see," she said.

In mid-April when the local basketball team's season ended, the city set up 300 cots in their stadium, known as the Expo. Within a week it was full.

When CBC News visited the Expo last week, a crowd of about 20 gathered outside to speak with a reporter and photographer, asking when Canada would again let all asylum seekers in — saying their children were showing signs of malnutrition because they were only being fed bread, cakes and expired milk. 

Nearly all of them said they had aimed to cross into Canada at Roxham Road, an unofficial border crossing straddling Quebec and upstate New York near Plattsburgh, a city 100 kilometres south of Montreal.