Newport Center family’s game cameras document border security concerns

One version of this story first published By Newport Dispatch on October 24, 2024.

NEWPORT CENTER — When Justin LeBlanc’s sons installed game cameras on the family farm in Newport Center, they weren’t aiming to document illegal border crossings. But in a few nights they got exactly that.

The first images were recorded Sunday, just hours after trail cameras were installed near the intersection of Leadville Road and Lake Road. The next night, a second camera in the same area captured another group, including several men led by a man. He wears a turban.

“The person in front is their guide,” LeBlanc said. “He’s the one going back and forth with different groups of people.”

Those men were not captured, but U.S. Border Patrol agents detained a separate group in LeBlanc’s driveway in a later incident, LeBlanc said.

Border Patrol responded quickly to the initial footage, according to LeBlanc. “They did a really good job of going out and looking at the area and then having a big meeting with each other to come up with a game plan of what they were going to do to catch these guys,” he said.

The event is not isolated. LeBlanc described how a neighbor recently witnessed five people emerge from the woods, get into a waiting vehicle on nearby Leadville Road, and speed away. Reports of suspicious vehicles have become commonplace in the area; some residents have noticed that vehicles with out-of-state license plates, including those with New York registration, frequently show up in connection with these events.

“This is a daily occurrence,” LeBlanc said, expressing concern for her family’s safety on their farm where they produce hay for horses and dairy cows and where they regularly hunt and hike. “It’s definitely concerning and we definitely have an uneasy feeling,” he said. “You can’t let kids go alone anymore. “It turns things around that we’re not used to.”

As VTDigger reported in AugustThe Border Patrol reported a record number of migrants crossing the international border from Canada to the United States, particularly in the area known as the Swanton Sector, which includes parts of Vermont, New Hampshire and New York.

latest figures Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees border patrol, shows Swanton Sector agents arrested 19,385 people in the year that ended in September. This is up from 6,925 the previous year and 1,065 the year before that. (The final figures also include those deported.) Title 42public health order of the pandemic era.)

Arrests appear to have peaked in June, when 3,310 people were detained in the Swanton area. The numbers have since fallen to 1,575 in September, but this is still well above the 956 recorded in September 2023.

Border Patrol has increased its staff in the region in response to that surge, assigning groups of 20 to 25 agents across the sector, some of whom have been reassigned from the southern border, Special Operations chief Josh Cozzens told VTDigger in August.

“Our agents are very busy,” Cozzens said at the time. “We have witnessed a number of arrests in this area that we have not seen in our recorded history,” he said.

A Border Patrol spokesman said Friday that he could not immediately comment on events at Newport Center.

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LeBlanc’s footage spread widely on social media, prompting thousands of shares and comments from community members.

“A lot of people didn’t know this was going on, and some still don’t believe it,” LeBlanc said. “This is not a joke.”

VTVDigger contributed to reporting on this story.