On Tuesday, December 12 at about 6:30 pm, US Customs and Border Protection (CPB) and the Clinton County Sheriff’s Office requested NYS Forest Ranger assistance with the search for 31-year-old Ana Karen Vasquez-Flores, who was reported missing by her husband on Monday, December 11th.
On Wednesday, December 13th, nine Forest Rangers arrived to helped coordinate linear search assignments. Investigative efforts narrowed the primary search area to the Great Chazy River.
On Thursday, December 14, thirteen NYS Forest Rangers searched with CBP Air and Marine Operations, Clinton County Sheriff’s Office, New York State Police (NYSP) Underwater Response Team, Clinton County Swiftwater Response Team, and the Champlain, Rouses Point and Mooers Volunteer fire departments.
At 11 am, a Ranger air boat crew found the subject deceased upstream from the State Route 11 bridge in the town of Champlain.
Rangers transported the subject to the Clinton County Coroner.
Vasquez-Flores’s death comes about nine months after the nearby Canadian border crossing at Roxham Road (chemin Roxham) was closed to migrants hoping to seek asylum in Canada by the US and Canadian governments.
In April, a month after the closure, eight people drowned in the St. Lawrence River.
According to North Country Public Radio “they were from Indian and Romanian families who authorities say were trying to cross the border into Canada illegally.”
The Roxham Road Crossing
There had been scattered European settlement of the area of Roxham Road by both British and French colonists throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The hamlet of Roxham was settled in earnest by the emigration of Loyalists after the American Revolution.
For most of its history however, it was possible to freely cross the border via Roxham Road, which largely carried local traffic, one of thousands of such place along the 5,525-mile Canadian border.
Roxham Road is believed to be the first road into Canada that was able to accommodate wheeled vehicles.
Before and during the Civil War, self-emancipating slaves were guided by abolition activists involved in the Underground Railroad to Roxham Road. North Star Road, at the southern end of Roxham Road, gets its name from this history.
During Prohibition bootleggers and rum-runners used Roxham Road and many of the similar places along the border to carry beer and liquor into the United States undetected.
Roxham Road was barricaded in both directions at the border in the 1970s when Canadian authorities decided, out of concerns that the terrorist killings at the 1972 Munich Olympics could also occur at the upcoming 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, to barricade all the uncontrolled land border crossings between Quebec and New York and Vermont.
Since then Roxham has officially been a dead end in both directions at the border after the Border Patrol installed a gate and electronic surveillance equipment.
Until March 25, 2023, Roxham Road was a key “irregular” border crossing for persons who were in the United States and wished to apply for asylum in Canada, thanks to the “Safe Third Country Agreement” which did not provide for the return to the US of those claiming asylum in Canada if they entered Canada at a place other than an official border crossing.
That agreement was amended largely ending the “irregular” border crossing loophole.
Photos, from above: Ranger air boat crew on Great Chazy River (DEC); and Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Roxham Road tell a family about to cross they will be arrested if they cross (Wikimedia).
I don’t understand. Was she trying to cross the border illegally? Why did she try crossing under such hazardous conditions?
Apparently, yes. Probably for the same reasons people have always crossed the border – a better job, to see their family, and or to flee persecution.