President Trump slammed the door on illegal immigration – and fentanyl trafficking – at our southern border, something never done before. The flipside is that northern states, like Maine, must be ready. Why? Bad guys find ways around – and the northern border is wide. A wave is coming, and leadership is needed.
Data is revealing, a warning for northern states and leaders to be proactive, not complacent. Maine is vulnerable, and why forward-leaning leadership is vital.
The chance that Maine, with a 611-mile border with Quebec, a 270-mile border with New Brunswick, and 3,500 coastline, is of growing interest to traffickers is high.
Data supports that intuition. As The Maine Wire recently reported, and law enforcement authorities corroborate, Maine’s land border is being tested.
Most of the 8,000 illegal immigrants in Maine were bused under Biden, and most fatal drugs presently come from Boston, but a pivot to the north may be coming.
In FY2024, Maine saw record illegal border crossers, with “CBP reporting a total of 344 encounters, up from 300 in FY23…over six times the amount of migrant apprehensions in 2021,” including 172 encounters in the last quarter of 2024.
The top five countries were Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Guatemala, and Ecuador – all countries tied to drug and human trafficking.
Equally unsettling, fentanyl intercepted on the northern border went from two pounds in 2022, to 43 pounds in 2023, to 58 pounds in early 2025. That is 26 million milligrams. Since .2 milligrams is fatal, that’s enough to kill 13 million people, or every man, woman, and child in Maine – more than nine times over.
No surprise, in the first five months of 2025, state data records 33 overdose deaths per month, even with the wide distribution of Narcan and public warnings.
So, the word is out. President Trump is clear that illegal traffickers will not penetrate the southern border, which means Maine must focus like a hawk.
Is that happening? No, Maine’s Democrat governor and legislature are fanning the problem. Incomprehensibly, they just passed a bill blocking police from helping ICE, making Maine a “sanctuary,” encouraging illegal immigration into the State.
Already, Maine’s northern border is under pressure. The pressure on local, State, and Federal law enforcement will rise, not least because illegal immigration is correlated with lawlessness, drug trafficking, gang crime, and overdoses.
Maine is particularly vulnerable. Why? Beyond a hard-to-police northern border and laws inviting illegals into Maine – Democrat goal 75,000 – police are simply underfunded, undermanned, regularly ignored, and stretched to their limits.
Inexplicably, Maine’s Democrat legislators – including one in Bangor, a city overwhelmed – are now pushing to block state and local police from even contracting with ICE to help stem the inflow of illegal aliens and traffickers.
Local law enforcement admit being against a wall, forced to let low level dealers in fentanyl, meth, and heroin go, empowering major trafficking groups to move in.
These include the worst elements of transnational organized crime, notably from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Colombia, China, El Salvador, and Venezuela.
So, what can be done? A new Governor of Maine – with a sympathetic legislature – could quickly tighten the northern border, crack down on traffickers Boston to the northern border, new technology, new hiring, pay, training, deployments, reverse non-cooperation laws, inviting ICE and DEA to help, reducing the disincentives to enforce laws, making Maine a “no-go-zone” for traffickers.
The truth is this: The northern border is only vulnerable as long as states leave it vulnerable. With fresh eyes, it can be shut down like the southern border. The missing ingredient? Serious leadership.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).
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