This New York farmer is overwhelmed by illegal crossings from Canada, caught on camera

The outline of a liquor bottle is carved into boards just beneath the tip of the roof on one side of Chris Oliver's barn, which sits a few feet away from the Canadian border which runs along the northern edge of his farm near Fort Covington, N.Y.

The outline echoes another age along these borderlands when runners moved contraband liquor from Canada south across this stretch of land between Quebec and New York state during prohibition. 

Now a different type of traffic is moving through Oliver's farm: people.

Over the past several months a growing tide of men, women and sometimes children have used Oliver's farm as a transit point on clandestine foot journeys from Canada to the U.S.

They've all passed on front of his home, where he lives with his wife and three children, and it's all captured on his trail cameras.

In the week leading up to this past Labour Day, Oliver's cameras recorded 48 people crossing near his doorstep.

"And that's just one camera, in one area, so it's hard to say how many actually did walk by," said Oliver, 32.

Oliver's farm sits just east of the Dundee, Que., border crossing around 170 kilometres southwest of Montreal. It is part of an area that runs roughly 100 kilometres from Cornwall, Ont., and east to Champlain, N.Y., that sees some of the highest rates of U.S.-bound illegal crossings anywhere along the Canada-U.S. border, according to court records and U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

The U.S. Border Patrol intercepted just over 8,000 people, mostly from India, crossing between June and August through an area called the Swanton Sector, which includes Oliver's farm. That was nearly quadruple the number over the same period last year.

Canadian and U.S. law enforcement say human smuggling organizations operate throughout this stretch of rivers, brush and farmlands. The patterns of movement caught by Oliver's trail cameras suggest his farm may currently be one of their chosen routes.

In some videos, the same male individual appears talking or using a cellphone and leading groups which primarily move through the area in the late evenings or early morning hours like clockwork, says Oliver.

"Usually you get one group, maybe one or two people about 8:30 at night and you'll see another or bigger group of usually four to five people and those ones usually come through between midnight and 5:30 in the morning," he said.

Oliver installed the first camera on his house a year ago -- after the dogs woke his wife up at about 2 a.m. one time while he was away at work and she saw three men standing by their car in the driveway.

"Whether they were trying to get into it or not, I don't know," he said.