Stunned faces and heartbreak for migrants heading to Roxham as they learn Canada will likely send them back

At 4 a.m. on Saturday morning, two buses from New York City arrived at a gas station in Plattsburgh, NY, where groups of migrants carrying luggage and determined to cross into Canada disembarked with no knowledge of the closure of Roxham Road. 

Their faces were stunned as two taxi drivers, who had shown up only to give them the news, told them they could not drive them there. 

They were four hours too late. They had boarded their buses unaware that by the time they arrived in Plattsburgh, the city closest to the illegal border crossing, they would not be able to follow in the footsteps of the thousands of migrants seeking new lives in Canada who had crossed there before them. 

The temperature was –4 C and several of the migrants wore only hoodies. They shivered and looked at each other in disbelief, pleading with the drivers to take them to Roxham Road anyway. The drivers said a United States government directive had come down that they were not to drive them to the illegal crossing after midnight. 

Olivier Nanfah, a 42-year-old Cameroonian man, said he had spent his entire savings crossing more than a dozen countries to flee persecution, then trying to find work in the U.S. before he decided to try his luck in Canada, only to be told his last hope, Roxham Road, was closed. 

"It's awful. I have nowhere else to go," he said. 

Nanfah and a dozen other migrants from countries including Ecuador, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo gathered in another gas station next door to warm up and try to understand their predicament. 

Eventually, at around 6 a.m., some taxi drivers agreed to take most of the migrants who arrived by bus to Roxham. Nanfah and several others crossed Saturday morning, but, according to the details of the modified Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), announced Friday, they could be brought back to the U.S.

Nanfah said he wanted his story to be told so people could understand the hardships asylum seekers crossing at Roxham have faced. 

After Nanfah's father was killed in a nearby village, he said it became clear he and his family would be targeted. Nanfah walked from Cameroon to Equatorial Guinea in two weeks, then got a visa to fly to Brazil. He then made his way north on foot and by bus to the United States. He crossed the Darien jungle, where three of the 25 people in his group died because of how taxing the trek was. 

"I saw people die in front of me," Nanfah said, people who were younger than him — 28, 35, around those ages, he said. 

His wife and 11 kids are home in Cameroon, hoping they can come join him once he finds a safe place for them all. The couple's eldest, a daughter, is 18, their youngest: twins barely a year old. 

Nanfah hasn't seen them in nearly two years. 

"No one should have to not see their family like this, no one," he said.