The longest international border in the world has a security problem, and Canada is not treating it with the urgency it deserves.
Recently, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin laid out a sobering picture of how people from 78 nations have been apprehended crossing the northern border. U.S. agents are now arresting a terrorist on the watch list nearly every week at the northern border, and over the past year alone, enough fentanyl to kill 17 million Americans has been seized coming through Canada. Cartel organizations, squeezed by the intensified enforcement operations and physical infrastructure along our southern border, are pivoting north.
Federal prosecutors have unsealed a string of recent cases documenting organized smuggling networks operating directly through the northern border. They are the front edge of a corridor that cartels and transnational criminal organizations are actively developing.
CANADA’S PRIME MINISTER REFERS TO US ECONOMIC TIES AS A WEAKNESS
Congressional Republicans are rightly raising the alarm, holding hearings and pressing Canada for action. And the Trump administration is recognizing exactly what leverage it holds.
On July 1, the United States declined to renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in its current form, opting instead for annual reviews until the agreement expires in 2036. Ottawa and Mexico City wanted the 16-year extension. Washington said no. Canada’s economy is deeply woven into American markets. Roughly $900 billion in trade moves across this border every year. Canada wants predictability and a long-term framework. The Trump administration holds the pen.
Canada has long been a country that enjoys open access to American markets while keeping its own rigorously walled off. Canadas bad trade behavior must be called out.
Canada’s dairy supply management system often functions as a government-sanctioned cartel, setting production quotas, controlling prices and throttling foreign competition behind tariff walls that can exceed 200%. U.S. dairy producers have filed repeated USMCA dispute complaints over Canada’s manipulation of tariff-rate quotas, arguing that Ottawa deliberately underfills import access in ways that violate the agreement’s terms.
Canada’s illicit cigarette market is one of the most sophisticated contraband networks in North America, and it runs directly through the same corridors being used to move hard drugs and people. When law enforcement executed Manitoba’s largest drug bust in history in May 2026, police found 1.35 million contraband cigarettes sitting in the same evidence locker.
Investigators with decades of experience tracing illicit tobacco networks have noted that contraband cigarette revenues are a consistent funding stream for the same organized crime networks moving fentanyl south. Ottawa has known for years that the illicit tobacco pipeline and the drug pipeline share infrastructure, financing and personnel. The enforcement response has not matched the scale of the problem.
NEW MEXICO AG LAUNCHES CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION INTO DEA OVER ALLEGAT
