Long before the U.S.-Mexico border dominated American conversations about immigration enforcement, a cold lake in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom had already been the site of one of the country’s longest-running and least-told human smuggling histories.
by Timothy Page
In August 2025, Canadian police stopped a rented U-Haul truck on Haskell Road in Stanstead, Quebec, just north of the Derby Line border crossing, at 2:20 in the morning. Inside, packed without ventilation, were 44 people — most of them Haitian, including a 4-year-old child and a pregnant woman. The migrants had walked approximately two hours through the dark to reach the crossing, wading at points through waist-high water. They arrived wet, hungry, and exhausted. Officers provided blankets, food, and water. Three men were charged with human smuggling.
It was described as one of the largest trafficking operations seen in the region in recent years. It was also, in the longer view of this particular stretch of border, entirely ordinary.
The Vermont-Quebec line around Lake Memphremagog and Derby Line has been a corridor for moving people across the border under duress, in darkness, and for profit, for more than two hundred years. The people being moved have changed with every generation — cattle drovers and contraband merchants, Chinese laborers fleeing federal exclusion, Prohibition-era bootleggers, Cold War-era asylum seekers, and now Haitians and Latin Americans navigating a broken international refugee system. What has not changed is the geography: the lake, the forest, the porous line between two countries, and the consistent willingness of desperate people to cross it by whatever means available.
The tradition of defying this border is older than the border itself. When Vermont was still a young state and the line between it and British Canada was newly surveyed — imprecisely, it turned out, with some stretches running nearly a mile off from where they were supposed to be — commerce between Vermont farmers and their Canadian neighbors was already too entangled to stop. The Embargo Act of 1807 made trade with Britain and Canada illegal, and many Vermont merchants simply became smugglers overnight. Some constructed wharves precisely on the border line, unloading cargo on the American side and reloading it onto Canadian boats on the other side, just out of reach of customs agents.
The War of 1812 turned this into something bloodier. Vermont’s northern border was, as historian Jason Barney has documented, “a precarious and disturbed place to live” throughout the conflict. The Vermont legislature passed anti-smuggling laws in compliance with federal prohibitions, but they were largely ignored in the Derby and Stanstead communities. Herds of cattle were gathered in Brownington, just south of Derby, and smuggled across into Canada to sell to British forces at a profit — in direct contravention of the war effort. Vermonters fired gunshots at other Vermonters over it. One man from Canaan, holding a governor’s pass to legally cross into Canada for mill repairs, was shot and killed by a vigilante enforcer, who then fled into the Vermont wilderness and was himself killed months later while resisting arrest. The North Star Monthly’s account of the period notes that “resistance had proceeded to fearful extremities in the northeastern part of the state.” The border was enforced with guns, and it still didn’t hold.
It would never fully hold again.
The most consequential and least-remembered chapter in the smuggling history of this corridor opened in 1882, when President Chester A. Arthur — born in Fairfield, Vermont, making him one of two presidents native to the state — signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law. The Act was the first piece of American legislation to bar immigration on the basis of nationality and race. It prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States, was extended in 1892, made permanent in 1902, and remained on the books until 1943. In the words of Vermont Historical Society Executive Director Steve Perkins, it was “the first — and really, only — time in U.S. history where we’ve said to one group of people, based on your country of origin, we’re completely excluding you.”
The Act did not stop Chinese immigration. It redirected it. Many Chinese workers had arrived on the West Coast of Canada after crossing the Pacific. Those who wanted to reach the employment centers of Boston and New York found, in the rural Northeast Kingdom corridor, an almost perfectly unguarded route. The border near Newport and Derby Line had few customs agents, vast forest cover, and communities that had been casually defying federal authority since the embargo years. Vermont historian Scott Wheeler, who has spent decades researching this period, describes his first encounter with the scale of it as a genuine shock: “It wasn’t just a trickle of people of Chinese immigrants coming through this area. It was hundreds and it was thousands.”
The operation was organized and commercial. A 1924 article in the Vermont Standard — originally published by the Bennington Banner — reported that for each Chinese person smuggled across Vermont’s border and delivered to New York City or Boston, the smugglers received approximately $1,000, the equivalent of roughly $18,000 today. Since most migrants could not pay this fee upfront, it was covered on delivery by what the newspapers of the time called “a wealthy Chinese ring.” The migrant then worked to pay off the debt — a system the same article described, with the blunt racism characteristic of the era’s press, as entering “into virtual slavery for the rest of his life.” The human cost of this arrangement, for people who had already crossed the Pacific and traversed Canada to reach a dark Vermont borderland, was enormous and is largely unrecorded.
To contain the flow, the federal government established a Chinese immigrant detention facility in Richford, Vermont — one of only four such facilities along the entire U.S.-Canada border. Richford, like the Memphremagog corridor, was one of the busiest crossing points in the country. Chinese detainees processed there were eventually funneled to a central facility in Boston. The Richford Historical Society retains some documentation from this period, including a photograph of an interpreter who worked at the detention center. For the people who passed through it, no comparable record survives.
Canada made things worse in 1923, when it passed its own Chinese Immigration Act, often called the Chinese Exclusion Act, which went even further than the American version: it banned almost all Chinese immigration into Canada outright, requiring even Canadian-born people of Chinese heritage to register with the government, and allowed as few as fifteen Chinese immigrants to legally enter the country in the years it was in effect. The effect was to strand a population with nowhere legal to go on either side of the border, pressing more of them into the underground routes through the Northeast Kingdom.
When Prohibition arrived in 1920, the Memphremagog corridor pivoted smoothly from human smuggling to liquor smuggling — the same geography, the same networks, the same dark lake. But even during the bootlegging era, people were still being moved. The U.S. Border Patrol opened its first Vermont headquarters in Newport in 1924, moved it to Derby Line five years later, and agents found themselves managing both streams simultaneously — whiskey in one direction, people in another, in a landscape that made surveillance nearly impossible.
Prohibition ended in 1933. The human smuggling did not. In the decades that followed, the corridor accommodated whoever the current immigration law had decided to exclude or made desperate enough to cross illegally. The faces changed; the route did not.
By the time the Haskell Free Library and Opera House — the Victorian building deliberately constructed in 1904 astride the international boundary in Derby Line, with the stage in Canada and the audience seats in Vermont — became a tourist attraction rather than simply a community institution, the border around it had already hardened considerably. The September 11 attacks prompted the U.S. to block two of the three streets connecting Derby Line and Stanstead with steel fences. The third, Church Street, running beside the Haskell, remained open. A white slash on the pavement and a small stone pillar mark the line; a posted sign warns against illegal passage. An empty set of flower pots sometimes demarcates the spot where two countries meet on the library’s front walk.
For local residents, the tightening after 9/11 was a rupture of something that had felt frictionless for generations. People in Derby Line and Stanstead had shared water and sewer lines, attended the same events, and crossed the street between countries as casually as crossing any other street. The border became real in a way it hadn’t been for a long time. But for people with no legal standing on either side of it, the border had always been real — and the woods around Memphremagog had always been the way around it.
The current era of Memphremagog-corridor smuggling bears structural similarities to every era before it. The people moving through the forest now are mostly fleeing conditions — in Haiti, in Central America, in Eastern Europe — that make the risks of the crossing seem preferable to staying. Border Patrol agents in the Swanton Sector, which covers all of Vermont’s border with Canada, describe the recent years as producing illegal crossing numbers they had never previously seen. “It was a flood we had never seen before. It was an exponential shift,” one agent told CBS News. A Derby resident whose property sits directly on the border told the same outlet that surveillance camera footage routinely shows groups crossing through his backyard in the middle of the night, loading into trucks and driving away before anyone can respond.
The smuggling organizations charge between $2,000 and $30,000 per person, depending on origin and destination — different numbers from the 1924 newspapers, but the same basic architecture of debt and desperation. Recruiters operate on both sides of the border; foot guides and drivers are recruited locally; scouts monitor patrol patterns. The U.S. Border Patrol agent in charge of the Newport station told Vermont Public Radio that they would “be foolish to think that we’re running our operations and they weren’t running any against us to see where they could cross and when they could cross.”
The 44 Haitians in the U-Haul were discovered because U.S. authorities passed a tip to Canadian police. The smugglers — three Turkish nationals — were arrested. The migrants, including the child and the pregnant woman, were transferred to a refugee processing center. The investigation, authorities said, was ongoing.
What the investigation cannot be ongoing into is the full length of this history — the thousands of Chinese workers who crossed this lake and these forests under an act signed by a Vermont president, the figures moving through the dark during the War of 1812, the generations of people who found in the Memphremagog corridor the thing every desperate migration seeks: not a welcome, exactly, but a gap in the wall. The current Border Patrol uses ground sensors, drones, and local tipsters to monitor 295 miles of border across Vermont. The gap keeps moving. It has always kept moving. The lake is 31 miles long, its deepest point is 351 feet down, and its shoreline has never been fully sealed against anyone determined enough to walk along it in the dark.
Sources:
Newport Dispatch — Derby Line 44-Person Case
Vermont Historical Society — Immigrant Smuggling in Newport
Vermont Historical Society — Richford Chinese Detention Center
MyChamplainValley — This Place in History: Immigrant Smuggling
Woodstock History Center — Immigration in 1924
VTDigger — Vermont and the War of 1812
Vermont Historical Society — War of 1812 Journal
Vermont Public Radio — Human Smuggling on Northern Border