“They come across in small airplanes and on foot, astride horses and atop snowmobiles. They hike and float and ski and dog-sled their way out of Canada and across Montana’s northern border, often smuggling drugs or people.
Sometimes they are caught. Sometimes not.
”We’ve tripled in manpower up here,” Moore said. ”We now have seven-day-a-week, 24-hour coverage, which wasn’t always the case before.”
But the real key to the 24/7 coverage is not manpower, but technology.
There are motion detectors in the woods these days, infrared cameras, heat sensors, magnetic detectors — and a lot more high-tech infrastructure no one is authorized to talk about.
The Canadian border, according to Meehan, will always be somewhat porous.