A family from the United States enters the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Derby Line, Vermont, on March 21. (Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press/AP)
STANSTEAD, Quebec — For Sylvie Boudreau, it was only a matter of time. The retired Canadian border agent, watching from this quaint town on the border with Vermont, had grown increasingly alarmed as President Donald Trump upended U.S.-Canada ties. Trump has been threatening to make Canada the “51st state” — a taunt a Cabinet secretary repeated in front of her — and imposing tariffs on its goods over unsubstantiated claims of a northern“invasion” of fentanyl and migrants.
With the frontier a flash point, Boudreau wondered what it might mean for the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, where she is president of the board of trustees. For 120 years, it has straddled the Quebec-Vermont border, with tattered black tape marking the line as it cuts across a children’s reading room. Its location was no accident. Its founders wanted the tiny library to be enjoyed by both Canadians and Americans, as a physical embodiment of the friendly coexistence of the two countries.
Now, the bilateral relationship is more frayed than the tape on the Haskell’s creaky wooden floor. Prime Minister Mark Carney has said Canada’s traditional relationship with the United States is “over.” So when U.S. authorities met Boudreau last month and said that they had decided unilaterally to restrict the access Canadians have long enjoyed to the building, which has its entrance on the U.S. side, she wasn’t surprised.
“I was pissed,” Boudreau said. “Like, is this really, really necessary?”
The Department of Homeland Security maintains that it is. It says drug traffickers and smugglers have been exploiting the fact that Canadians could walk across the border on a path adjacent to the library and enter on the U.S. side without having to clear customs. It said there were 147 apprehensions, one vehicle incursion and four vehicle seizures tied to illicit activity surroundingthe library in the 2024 fiscal year.
But some people who live on both sides of the world’s longest undefended border contend that the move is unwarranted, will do little to stem whatever illegal activity might be occurring and is nothing more than a petty salvo in the Trump administration’s attacks on Canada — one that risks undermining the library’s very purpose and upending a cherished way of life for the residents of these close-knit border communities who bristle at the hardening of the frontier between them.
“It really, really just tears my heart out to see these things happening,” said Kim Prangley, a dual citizen in Stanstead who ran the library for two decades,succeeding her mother.
A beloved library
The library has its origins in a cross-border romance — a common occurrence along this swath of the frontier.
Co-founder Martha Stewart Haskell, a Canadian philanthropist, established the library and opera house in memory of her late husband, Carlos Freeman Haskell, a wealthy sawmill owner from Vermont. The Queen Anne-style building — designed by one Canadian and one American architect — opened in 1904.
It relies on both countries to function. Its hydroelectricity comes from Quebec, its oil from Vermont. It carries books in English and French and pays income taxes in Canada and the U.S. In the opera house, the stage is in Canada and much of the audience is in the United States. Patrons in seats J-13, K-10 and M-12 sit in both countries.
The library’s unique location has long drawn international attention. When Trump banned travel from several Muslim-majority countries during his first term, families split apart reunited at the library. In the 1980s, it was the site of a legal proceeding where Canadian defendants sat on one side of the border and U.S. prosecutors questioned them from the other.
Half a century before that, Bernard Wexler, a Romanian Jewish immigrant to Canada, put on a show there. It was the Great Depression, and the country fiddler’s band was traveling across Quebec. On a recent afternoon, his son, Gerald Wexler, made his own pilgrimage to the building that he’d heard so much about as a boy. As for what was happening now?
“It’s nuts,” Gerald Wexler said. “It’s crazy.”
A slow hardening of the border
There are few places along the northern border where ties are more intimate than Derby Line (population: 660) and Stanstead (population: 2,800). They celebrated the armistice that ended World War I together with a cross-border parade. People traversed the boundary to worship, work and give birth.
Many residents here remember a time when crossing the border was seamless, requiring nothing more than a smile and a wave. Stanstead’s mayor, Jody Stone, recalled riding his bike across unguarded roads as a child for swimming lessons. Prangley pedaled hers across for ice cream.
“The border was there, but not there,” Stone said.
Scott Wheeler, publisher of Vermont’s Northland Journal, recalled taking South Koreans on a tour of the area. They were “amazed,” he said, to see countries separated by a border marked only by granite obelisks.
Over time, that line has hardened. Many here point to 9/11 as a turning point.
Not long after the attacks, Prangley said, the community marked the centennial of the first brick being laid at the Haskell. She placed a letter in a time capsule to be opened in 2101 and wondered what the border might be like then. She wasn’t sure if authorities would allow the event, she said, but they did.
“That was wonderful,” Prangley said, “but we could all feel the noose tightening.”
Now, there are cameras on light poles. U.S. officials required the library to ban reunions of families separated because of immigration measures as a condition for reopening after the pandemic. A sign outside the Haskell warns against loitering — in French, Haitian, Creole, Persian, Romanian and Russian.
The building has also drawn the focus of authorities.
In 2018, a Quebec man pleaded guilty to charges in a plot to use the library to smuggle guns into Canada. In 2020, a Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to using a road near the building to smuggle parrots into Vermont. U.S. authorities in November charged a Venezuelan man with several offenses after he drove a motorcycle across the border, about a half mile from the library.
Boudreau and Stone said they had long worked with U.S. authorities to address concerns. A former member of the Canada Border Services Agency K-9 unit, Boudreau now trains employees on how to spot suspicious activity. She and others insist that illegal activity in and around the library is not a major issue and that the new measures will do little to stem it.
“It’s almost entirely theater,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of “When the World Closed Its Doors: The Covid-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders.”
‘Ashamed of my country’
Concern about the library’s informal immunity from border restrictions deepened here after a January visit from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem. First reported by the Boston Globe, Noem stepped from one side of the border tape to the other, saying “USA No. 1” on the U.S. side and “51st state” on the Canadian side.
Word spread quickly. Stone called it “childish.” Boudreau was “shocked.” Prangley found it “in bad taste.”
U.S. authorities will allow Canadian library cardholders to access the building as usual until Oct. 1. Then, they must go through an official U.S. border crossing. Boudreau plans to convert an emergency exit on the Canadian side into another entrance. Officials in both countries will have to approve the changes.
A GoFundMe to raise money for the new entrance has surpassed its goal. Its donors included several contrite Americans. “I’m ashamed of my country and heartbroken over the senseless damage we’re inflicting,” one wrote.
“What’s happening at Haskell is happening across the border, which is … the elimination of the special cross-border spaces,” Alden said. “They were symbols of the deep trust and friendship between the United States and Canada, which has sadly been badly eroded.”
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.