Unveiling a $1.4 million program to increase police presence at the northern border last year, state officials asserted that rising illegal crossings from Canada into New Hampshire posed a crisis.

New data obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire rebuts that characterization, showing that fewer than two dozen encounters by federal border patrol at the New Hampshire-Canada border occurred in the last fifteen months. 

Governor Chris Sununu’s Northern Border Alliance program added more than 10,000 patrol hours by state, county and local police along New Hampshire’s 58-mile international border through June of next year. Participating officers would cooperate with federal law enforcement on potential immigration crimes and gain the authority to patrol within 25 miles of the Canadian border. 

Sununu, along with Attorney General John Formella, cited U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports showing that attempted crossings through the Swanton Sector, a section of the US-Canada border spanning New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, had spiked and that more members of the terrorist watch list had tried to enter the United States through the northern border than the southern. 

None of those reports narrowed their findings to New Hampshire. Immigration and civil liberties advocates pushed for the release of such figures to justify the increased police presence, which they warned threatened community safety and the tourism industry. 

 After initially being denied by federal officials, ACLU-NH sued in May for state-specific data on encounters and apprehensions at the northern border. Data released Wednesday that was obtained through the suit indicated that encounters in New Hampshire represented a fraction of the regional spike in crossings that triggered the program.

Federal border agents had 21 encounters and apprehensions at the New Hampshire-Canada border between October 1, 2022 and December 31, 2023, according to the data received by the ACLU. All of those took place in 2023 — with one in January, nine in June, one in July, three in August and seven in September — a period in which the full, 295-mile-long Swanton Sector saw more than 6,000 apprehensions, as cited by Sununu last year. 

“No state official has been able to show any evidence to support claims of an increase in unauthorized border apprehensions in New Hampshire – and now we know why,” Gilles Bissonnette, Legal Director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, said in a written statement. “During the time period in which state officials suggested that there was a crisis at the New Hampshire-Canada border from October 2022 to January 2023, there was only one encounter in New Hampshire.”

State officials criticized the data Wednesday saying it was too narrow.

The governor called the new data “cherry-picked” and “misleading,” arguing that exclusively focusing on the New Hampshire border undercuts the risk posed to the state by a regional trend.

“The Swanton Sector continues to see record numbers of migrant crossings across New England, and for most of the last two years, New Hampshire has had limited resources patrolling the border due to federal inaction. We expect to see numbers increase as the Northern Border Alliance patrols continue to ramp up,” said in a statement.

Sununu and Formella asserted that the disparity between New Hampshire’s figures and those of the entire Swanton Sector were because of a federal drop in northern border resources — indicating, rather than refuting, the reason for adding more state law enforcement.

“This incomplete snapshot represents data collected by a severely limited number of U.S. Border Patrol assets patrolling the state in 2023. New Hampshire law enforcement officials were warned by our federal partners in 2023 that assets normally assigned to New Hampshire were being pulled away from New Hampshire to address the crisis at the southern border,” the Attorney General’s office said in a statement. 

Senate President Jeb Bradley emphasized state Republicans’ resolve to stand by the program. 

“Senate Republicans will not allow open border activists to downplay this issue. We have a border crisis,” Bradley said in a statement. 

The AG’s office also claimed that the data only represented apprehensions, rather than the totality of law enforcement interactions at the border, saying that “what the Border Patrol calls known ‘got aways’, unknown ‘got aways’, or sensor activations” were not included.

As migration at the nation’s southern border remains a top issue for voters nationwide, security up North has drawn heated debate in New Hampshire. 

But Granite State voters are not as worried about security at the northern border as they are the southern, according to a poll by  The Boston Globe, Suffolk University and USA Today, where only 36% of respondents said New Hampshire’s border was a concern.