How smugglers bring people across a river through a quiet Michigan town
A ringing phone cut through the dead of night. A woman called a resident of Harsens Island, a marshy island nestled between Michigan and Canada, around 3:30 a.m. in March 2023 asking if she could move into one of his rental properties. She was already on the island, she said, and needed a room immediately.
The man told her he didn’t rent properties that early in the day and hung up. He alerted police.
Two U.S. Border Patrol agents and a local police officer were dispatched to investigate. When they got on the Harsens Island ferry, a driver brought another vehicle on board and parked on the island.
Around 4:20 a.m., three people ran to the car. It was later stopped by federal border agents.
The three passengers said they had crossed the St. Clair River, an international border, by boat the night before, according to court records. They were picked up by a driver, a U.S. citizen, who told federal agents he had agreed to drive them to Lansing for $500.
It was the third federal case prosecuted that year of human smuggling in Algonac, a small town of roughly 4,200 people that’s known for its charming waterfront on the St. Clair River. Nicknamed the “Venice of Michigan,” canals wind through some neighborhoods. A boardwalk lines the edge of the city, overlooking boaters and fishermen bobbing on the river. And docks jut off the shore, floating on the turquoise waters.
But being on the water, less than a mile from Canada, makes Algonac ripe for international smuggling. Boats, jet skis and, once, a scuba diver have cut across the invisible water border – carrying mostly people, and occasionally, guns and drugs.
“All this happens around the Algonac area where the distance between Canada and the U.S. is very short,” said Michael Rataj, a federal criminal defense attorney who has represented people accused of smuggling in Michigan.
Although smuggling happens covertly in Algonac, often under the cover of darkness, it was visible through a spike of cases that landed in federal court in 2023 and 2024. But recently, prosecutions have slowed down.
Federal smuggling cases
National cases of alien smuggling, a term used when someone helps an unauthorized person enter the United States, jumped three years ago. In 2023, there were 4,731 cases in federal courts – up by more than 1,000 from two years prior.
And Michigan, home to 721 miles of northern border, saw a similar trend, although with much smaller numbers than southern border states.
Federal prosecutors filed 11 “alien smuggling” cases in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 2023 and 2024, according to an analysis of court records. Prior to that, there were one or two a year.
Some occurred at bustling ports of entry in Port Huron or Detroit. But almost half, five of the cases, occurred in and around 10 miles of Algonac, a stretch of the northern border that the feds have called “a popular drop-off location” for smugglers.
The St. Clair River, an international boundary between the U.S. and Canada, is thin near Algonac – less than a quarter mile to Canadian waters in some spots. And it only takes a couple of minutes to take a boat from shore to shore.
Algonac also shares the mouth of Lake St. Clair with Harsens Island and Walpole Island, a First Nation reserve in Canada.
St. Clair County Sheriff Capt. Matt Pohl says this landscape makes it “pretty advantageous” for smugglers despite a heavy presence of police and federal agents.
“We have boats in the water. Border Patrol has boats in the water,” he said. “But in some of those cases, it’s such a quick little shot across from Canada to Harsens or Algonac.”
In October 2022, border agents were told at 10:08 p.m. that a boat had left the Chenail Ecarté, the channel separating Walpole Island from Canada’s mainland. One minute later, it landed near the Big River Grille, a shuttered restaurant that court documents previously called a “drop off point for recent smuggling events” in Algonac.
Four people with Vietnamese passports got off, climbed into a car and drove away.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said the agency watches for smuggling in the Algonac area, a porous section of the border, with patrols, technology, intelligence and “tips from patriotic citizens.”
Prosecutions usually stem from long-term investigations or border agents stumbling across something suspicious, according to John Freeman, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who handled Michigan smuggling cases.
In a 2024 case, agents wearing plain clothes watched a boat that had been “used in recent smuggling events,” court records say, drop three people off at a neighborhood marina in East China, north of Algonac.
They had traveled from Romania to Toronto, trying to live and work in the U.S.
A Canadian who picked them up from the dock was arrested and charged with human smuggling.
“There’s always somebody over in Canada that’s responsible for getting these people to the water,” Rataj said. “And then somebody takes them across, and somebody picks them up.”
A smuggling route through a small town
U.S. Border Patrol hums quietly in the background of Algonac life.
An agent often parks at the public boat launch where fishermen get in and out of the water. A small border station processes people getting off the Walpole-Algonac car ferry. And residents say they see more green and white patrol vehicles on the road than police cars.
But being a border town doesn’t faze many locals.
Melody Vogler, 45, the branch lead for the Algonac-Clay Library, was surprised to find out smuggling runs through the quiet community. For her, Algonac is the kind of place where people raise money for neighbors who get hit with medical bills.
“It’s a close-knit, small town,” she said. “A lot of people know other people.”
Despite that, the border still looms 400 feet from shore.
Rumors can swirl around town, like people getting off a boat and running to hide in backyards or barns. And a vacation rental house was recently used as a meetup spot for an accused smuggler who was paid between $40 and $400 for each pickup.
Nick Marble, 32 from Clay Township, owns St. Clair Flats Taxidermy across the street from a house that a federal indictment called a “frequent site used by smugglers.”
Marble tends to keep his head down, “not my monkey, not my circus,” he says, but Border Patrol did come knocking a few summers ago after a group of people, adults and teenagers, lingered in the taxidermist’s parking lot one Saturday afternoon.
They asked to use Marble’s phone several times until a black vehicle picked them up.
A few days later, federal agents were combing the neighborhood. They told Marble they were looking into reports of people crossing the border illegally and pulled his phone records.
Marble, who has been fishing on the St. Clair Flats for two decades, understands why the waterways are used by smugglers: “You have so many little fingers and veins that run through all of it that you can’t monitor all of it.”
Last year, St. Clair Flats Taxidermy was mentioned, but not implicated, in a federal indictment that accused three Canadians of smuggling guns through Algonac.
An 18-page indictment says the Canadians parked in the taxidermist’s lot on Oct. 25, 2023, when they conducted a “dry run” across the river. They came back around 1 a.m., carrying a duffle bag stuffed with 36 firearms, each wrapped in a tube sock.
One man, wearing all black, took the bag, mounted a jet ski and sped over to Canada.
After he landed, a Canadian law enforcement officer noticed him hiding in the bushes at a marina. He then dropped the bag and tried to run away.
A grand jury charged all three of them with smuggling. The case is still pending.
“They get pretty creative,” Pohl said.
Who is smuggling?
Federal court cases create a loose picture of how smuggling runs through Algonac, but they don’t represent every instance of illegal border crossing.
Freeman said it’s usually only the smugglers who face criminal prosecution while those being smuggled get put into civil immigration proceedings.
“If there’s a national security issue that obviously is going to get more attention and it’s going to be handled much more vigorously than if it’s some people who are moving other people because they want to join their family,” he said. “They just want to come into the country and get a job.”
It’s a felony to smuggle people across the border, a charge that brought an average sentence of 15 months in prison last year. Almost two-thirds of those convicted were U.S. citizens and the majority, 70%, did not have previous criminal records.
Smuggling can also be dangerous, injuring or killing people, like a recent incident where a family of four froze to death trying to cross into Minnesota during a blizzard. Those smugglers were convicted of running a large scheme that brought Indians to Canada on student visas and snuck them into the U.S.
In Algonac, border patrol agents stopped a boat with five people crossing the St. Clair River late at night in February 2023. Two of them were drenched, shivering after falling into the frigid winter waters.
Chief Patrol Agent Robert Danley said the smuggler “tried to take advantage of darkness and freezing temperatures,” which put everyone in danger.
The five people, from India, Nigeria, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, were processed for immigration violations. No criminal alien smuggling charges have been brought yet, according to court records.
“You can’t catch everyone, you can’t prosecute everyone,” Freeman said.
It’s often the “lower hanging fruit,” like boaters or drivers, Freeman says, who get caught. But it can be tricky tying them back to larger smuggling rings because they are often like a spoke on wheel, unaware of who else is involved.
“People farther upstream are going to be better able to isolate themselves and mask their identity,” Freeman said.
In May 2023, a Detroit man got a message on Signal, an encrypted messaging app, from a user named “momentocortez” who was interested in buying sneakers. The Signal user then asked if the man could pick up some “friends” from Harsens Island, a defense attorney said in court filings.
He drove to the Harsens Island ferry in a black van with Washington plates – a red flag for border agents who say smugglers often use rental vehicles to avoid getting their vehicle seized.
He picked up four passengers who had no luggage and did not speak English. They had traveled from Brazil to Toronto where they paid someone to be taken across the St. Clair River. A fifth passenger was trying to get to Canada but had missed the boat that day.
When Border Patrol stopped the van, the man realized what they were doing was illegal.
U.S. Attorney Susan Fairchild wrote the actions “may appear, at first glance, to be nothing more than an opportunity to make some quick cash,” but it does amount to human smuggling.
The man pled guilty and was sentenced to two years’ probation.
What’s happening now?
After prosecutions picked up pace in Michigan, with one noting an “increase in smuggling activity” in the Algonac area, they have since become less frequent.
There were five federal cases of “alien smuggling” filed in 2023 and six in 2024.
Only one case of alleged gun smuggling was brought last year. It was in Algonac.
This shift has occurred as border encounters have dropped dramatically, primarily at the southern border, going 3.2 million in 2023 to almost 692,000 last year. It’s similar in Michigan where border encounters dropped from 13,429 in 2023 to 9,654 last year.
Colleen Putzel, a border expert from the Migration Policy Institute, called this a “return to historical norms.”
“That’s a real shift back to what we would refer to as the more traditional migration patterns that have been witnessed for decades,” she said.
Border encounters started to decrease under policies enacted by former President Joe Biden, including an agreement with Mexico to beef up enforcement and new asylum restrictions.
The drop accelerated under President Donald Trump’s administration, which declared an emergency at the southern border, eliminated a Biden-era app that allowed migrants to seek asylum and escalated arrests inside the country.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection attributed Michigan’s decrease of smuggling attempts and border encounters to “stronger enforcement.” A spokesperson noted the St. Clair and Detroit rivers have “historically been targeted areas for smuggling due to their proximity to Canada and ease of access by watercraft.”
But other factors could be playing a role.
Staffing shortages have stretched northern Border Patrol stations thin, according to a February report from the U.S. Office of Government Accountability. From 2019 to 2024, number of agents decreased because they were reassigned to the southern border, leading to a wave of retirements.
One Border Patrol official said staffing made it hard to patrol a border on a lake because the station didn’t have boat commanders.
“If money and focus are earmarked for enforcement along the southern border,” Freeman said, “you would naturally expect there to be a dip in enforcement activity on the northern border.”
On top of that, Rataj speculates there could be fewer federal smuggling cases because the U.S. Department of Justice reportedly lost more than a quarter of its attorneys in the past year – meaning there aren’t as many prosecutors to file charges.
Smuggling cases have also dropped as the Trump administration shifted its immigration crackdown inward.
Experts say U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency primarily responsible for monitoring the border, has been playing a bigger role in helping with arrests inside the country.
Putzel called this a “real deviation” from how Border Patrol has been used in the past.
Last year, border agents were deployed to immigration operations in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The Trump administration reportedly planned to tap Border Patrol officials to enact its mass deportation agenda.
And the agency has broad jurisdiction to operate within 100 miles of the border, monitoring drivers, setting up checkpoints and turning traffic stops into a pipeline for deportations.
Under the Trump administration’s efforts, the number of immigration arrests and detentions have surged in Michigan and throughout the country. Most don’t have criminal convictions. And Border Patrol Detroit is playing a role, frequently posting about arrests made miles from the border: Alpena, Lapeer, Petoskey, Pontiac.
“Their focus is more on rounding up what was supposed to be the dangerous people, but they’re just scooping up grandmas and babies and want to stick them in warehouses,” Rataj said.
