A black car carrying seven people sped across the manicured lawn of the Haskell Free Library in Derby Line, Vt., which straddles the border of Vermont and Canada, on the Fourth of July, according to Border Patrol officials.
As it pulled onto the street around 5 p.m., the car nearly collided with another vehicle, according to Richard Ross, the patrol agent in charge of the Newport station.
“I’m sure their adrenaline was pumping and in their haste to enter undetected, they weren’t paying attention at all to their surroundings, and they almost collided with another vehicle,” Ross said. “It was a near miss.”
The scene was captured on surveillance video by the Swanton Sector of the United States Border Patrol. Agents in the Newport station were dispatched to intercept the car as it traveled south along Interstate 91, authorities said.
Agents pulled the car over about 20 miles south of Derby Line. Ross said the occupants of the vehicle — a family ranging in age from less than a year old to 54 years old — were cooperative.
Ross said he didn’t know why the family was attempting to cross from Canada into the United States. Members of the family held Canadian, French and Romanian passports.
The Haskell Free Library was built in the early 20th century for both Canadian and American citizens. The entrance is in Vermont, and before the pandemic, Canadians could visit the library without passing through customs. However, when the border closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the library temporarily closed.
After they were stopped by border patrol agents, the family was sent back to Canada. They will likely not face legal repercussions, Ross said, but if they try to enter the United States legally in the future, it may be more difficult because of their attempted illegal entry.
Ross said border crossings like this one, in which people try to illegally enter the United States via the library, have happened “many, many times.” Ross says this type of border crossing negatively impacts the Derby Line community because it can be dangerous.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Family expelled after crossing the border using the Haskell Library lawn.