As she nosed her pickup slowly toward the international line, a border agent's face emerged slowly from the gloom, his head hanging out of what appeared to be a high-tech tollbooth.
“Oh look,” she said, “that's Mr. Schmidt. He was your junior high principal.”
And then Mr. Schmidt, who has known the family all these years, whose small-town classrooms have echoed with the voices of many Proudfoots, stepped out of his border booth.
“Passports, please,” he said, as if he'd never laid eyes on them in his life.
He rattled off the questions - where y'all from, where y'all going, have anything you need to declare, any firearms?
Then he stepped back into that little room of his, taking the passports with him.
“They know us personally,” Proudfoot said, “but they have to go through the whole process, I guess. Seems kind of silly, but that's the way it is.”
And the way it is changed in the dark hours of Thursday morning. Used to be, all you needed was proof of identity - a driver's license, usually - and a verbal declaration of citizenship: “I'm an American.”
As of Jan. 31, however, Canadians and U.S. citizens must show proof of citizenship, too, before entering America, part of a whole host of new rules targeted at securing the nation's borders.
“Some people show up with nothing but a Costco card,” said Dave Pudelka, port director at this rural crossing north of Eureka. “I've talked to people who say they're citizens of the world. I've talked to President Jesus Christ, and the pharaoh of Egypt, and everybody else. We're not looking to make things difficult on people, but we would like some proof that they are who they say they are.”
Proudfoot keeps that proof right there on the console of her big Chevy pickup, passports for the entire family, “in the truck, 24-7.”
“We're old pros at this,” she said. “We know how it goes.”
She did not, however, know about the rule changes that took effect Thursday, despite the fact that she crosses this border several times every week.
Two decades ago, Proudfoot blew south out of Alaska, landing in Eureka, a tiny border town tucked into northwest Montana. Cutting through Eureka's downtown is U.S. Highway 93, which runs south to Whitefish, north into British Columbia. It's a busy port for locals from both countries, and one day a handsome Canadian made his way south for a visit.
He met Proudfoot, married her, swept her and her two boys a few miles up into Canada, where they still live.
She and her oldest boys became “landed immigrants,” and then came two new boys, born in Canada and claiming dual citizenship. One of those boys, Dustin, was riding with his mom Thursday morning, on his way to school one country to the south.
Proudfoot remains a U.S. citizen, works in a Eureka veterinarian's office, and sends her sons to school in Eureka. But she lives in Canada, and so this border is a familiar part of the morning commute.
A couple years back, she said, she finally got the boys passports of their own, “because we heard this was coming someday. I didn't know it was here already, though.”
That she didn't know could prove a problem for Pudelka, because that likely means the rest of North America doesn't know, either.
“I bet there's going to be a lot of cranky people when they get here and find out,” Proudfoot predicted.
Pudelka's border crossing was sleepy Thursday morning, with a rig rolling through maybe every half-hour or so. But it's busier in the summer, he said, what with the tourists, and he figures some 250,000 people cross here every year.
“A lot of them are people we know,” Pudelka said. “And you have to remember, we see the same truck driver six times a day.”
Slowing down these tourists and truckers with paperwork has not been overly popular among northern-tier lawmakers. From New England to the Rocky Mountains, politicians from both sides of the aisle have criticized the new rules as cumbersome and, ultimately, fairly ineffective at sealing the border against terrorists.
In fact, those lawmakers have won delays in full implementation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, the umbrella under which these new rules were created.
“I want to ensure our northern border is safe and secure,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. But, he added, “These new rules don't make sense - they make folks jump through additional hoops and carry additional IDs and that's not right.”
His colleague in the Senate, Montana Democrat Jon Tester, agrees. Tester acknowledged “there are real vulnerabilities on our northern border,” adding he had “seen them firsthand.”
But, he said, “President Bush and the Department of Homeland Security need to address these weaknesses by seriously investing in technology and manpower, not by forcing law-abiding Montanans to travel around with a glove box full of IDs and documents.”
Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg concurs. He is a member of the Northern Border Caucus, and last week fired off a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff expressing his “strong disapproval” of the new citizenship documentation requirements.
“A strong and secure northern border is a top priority of mine,” Rehberg said, “and I believe that can be achieved without sacrificing the strong economic relationship that exists between the United States and Canada.”
Rehberg's complaint gets right to the heart of the debate: A tremendous flow of commerce - some $1.5 billion per day - moves back and forth across the U.S.-Canada line, and anything that clogs the pipe is probably bad for business.
What about the tourist from Nebraska who takes a Montana vacation to see Glacier National Park, and then decides to make a day trip up to neighboring Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada? He most likely will not have his birth certificate in the jockey box, and likely won't be traveling with his passport, either.
Air travelers generally are prepared for such requirements, Pudelka said, because air travel requires so much more preparation in general. A spur-of-the-moment road trip, however, is a whole different story.
And with most of Canada living within 200 miles of the border, and the dollar there strong against U.S. currency, no one wants to hinder the flow southward.
“These ill-conceived and unnecessarily cumbersome travel requirements will have a deleterious effect on our nation's weakening economy,” Rehberg wrote in his letter to Chertoff, “and will adversely affect the economies of the border communities.”
Chertoff, for his part, has held firm, telling his critics to “grow up,” and warning that if the new requirements were not fully enacted, “some bad stuff will happen.”
Pudelka, for one, isn't saying what that stuff might be. In fact, he isn't saying much about the law at all.
“Well,” the port director said, “they don't call us up when they pass a law and ask us what we think. There is a lot of commerce that goes back and forth, but like I said, they don't call us up and ask us before they pass new rules.”
Pudelka's offices are brightly lit against the pre-dawn dark, with big glossies of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the wall. Above those photos is a whale baleen, seized at the border as contraband. There's a wolf hide, too, and a seal fur and some eagle feathers, all confiscated.
They are not, you must suppose, the “bad stuff” Chertoff was talking about.
Still, they are bad enough, Pudelka said, and if you cannot completely seal the nation's borders to terrorists, then you can at least make entering more secure and, in the process, catch a few more everyday ne'er-do-wells.
The trick, he said, will be to “use a little common sense and keep things moving along.”
Last year, the country's border agents caught 31,000 cases of people making false claims about their citizenship, “and so we know we can't trust what everyone tells us,” he said. “But you have to look at the whole situation; you can usually tell if something's up.”
His crew is trained to read body language, he said, to ask probing and detailed questions that either verify the traveler's story or else signal that the gig is up.
“All they really have to do is convince us they are who they say they are,” Pudelka said of travelers.
And that remains true even now, with the new rules in place.
“We aren't going to keep any American citizens out of the country,” he said. Instead, if a traveler shows up without proof of citizenship - a passport, say, or a birth certificate - Pudelka will probe a bit, establish citizenship and wave the traveler through. He keeps a stack of fliers on the counter, handouts to remind people about what they'll need next time.
“We definitely don't want to delay people just because they don't have the paperwork,” he said. “We'll get them home, one way or the other. And we'll sort out the Americans - it shouldn't be too hard. Americans sort of stand out.”
The sorting just might take a while longer, if the passport isn't ready.
“What we want to do is make things easier,” Pudelka said. “We want to facilitate the flow of legitimate travelers, so we have more time to target the people we really want to look at.”
The people Pudelka wants to look at, though, might not be deterred much by the new law.
“It's not going to change a lot in terms of safety,” Proudfoot predicted. “I don't suppose Bin Laden would have a very hard time working up a phony birth certificate on his home computer.”
In fact, he might not even need one.
The Government Accountability Office recently sent its agents into the field, into the wild, open places between the official border crossings, to see how hard it would be to dash across unnoticed. They even carried bright red duffels full of counterfeit credit cards, fake detonators, phony radioactive material and bogus narcotics.
Then they crossed, many times over, unchallenged. As few as 250 agents are on patrol at any given time across roughly 4,000 miles of northern border.
As shown by the GAO tests, “It's quite easy to transport enough radioactive material to cause significant damage in a dirty bomb,” said John Cooney, the GAO's assistant director of forensic audits and special investigations. “The security on that border has really not increased too much since the French and Indian War, frankly.”
And so the debate - how to balance the real threat of curbed economic opportunity against the real threat of a porous border? Can a birth certificate really make it safer, and not just more complicated?
Yes, is Pudelka's answer, so long as the rule is implemented with a good portion of “common sense.”
“It's better to do something like this, in a reasonable manner,” he said, “than to do nothing at all, don't you think? If we don't try, they are just going to drive on down the road. I definitely don't want to be the one responsible for letting the wrong person into the country.”
And the proof-of-citizenship requirement he said, is a quick way to sort out who's who as quickly as possible, and so could actually improve the flow of transboundary commerce.
“We've both got better things to do with our time,” he said. “You want to get down the road, and we want to get to the next car in line. Having a passport speeds everything along.”
This morning, Proudfoot's stop at the border is brief, and crisp as the Canadian cold front that has dipped south across the imaginary line. Principal Schmidt, now wearing his border agent badge, moves them through with a clipped efficiency.
“They used to joke around,” Proudfoot said. “When I first started doing this, they pretty much waved me through and said,
“ ‘Morning Kris.' Now, it's all paperwork. Sometimes, they even search my rig, but not very often.”
It makes more sense, arguably, to search her Chevy than it does to ask for her passport, since they know who she is but don't necessarily know what's in the truck today. But these are the rules, “and they love their rules,” she says. “They're very particular.”
Since Sept. 11, 2001, she said, you don't try to joke, even with folks you've known for decades, “unless you want the full monty. Even some of the guys who work there think it's silly. It's frustrating; you feel like a criminal.”
Until, of course, you head north. Because this is a two-way street.
And this morning, the Canadian border guard makes a quick joke, waves everyone through with a smile and, apparently, no concern that these regulars are anyone other than the people they were yesterday, or the day before that.
“They know us,” Dustin Proudfoot says. “The Canadian guys, they just say ‘hi' as we drive by. It's normal, you know?”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
Border now requires proof of citizenship
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
As of Thursday, U.S. and Canadian citizens crossing the border into America must show not only proof of identity (a driver's license, for instance) but also proof of citizenship.
The new rule - implemented by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State - changes the previous protocol, in which citizens of the two countries needed only make a verbal declaration of citizenship.
Adults age 19 and older now must show the following:
- For identification, a driver's license or military ID.
- For citizenship, a birth certificate, certificate of naturalization, certificate of citizenship, citizenship card or official report of their birth abroad.
Some documents serve as proof of both identity and citizenship. These include passports, trusted traveler cards (commonly used by those who cross often for work, and including NEXUS, SENTRI or FAST cards), an “enhanced” driver's license (not yet available in most states), a military ID with travel orders, U.S. Merchant Mariner document, Native American tribal identification card, or American Indian Card.
Children 18 and under need only present a birth certificate.
Those who do not carry such documentation when crossing into the United States from Canada could be subject to considerable delay as border agents work to establish their citizenship.
Border requirements for citizens of other countries remain unchanged.
The rules are part of the transition to the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which will not be fully implemented until summer 2009. That initiative grew out of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.
For information on obtaining a passport, call 1-877-487-2778, or go to the State Department's Web site at www.state.gov.
Information on the new rules also is available at www.cpb.gov, online home of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
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