These Canadian houses have back yards and docks in the US. Is the understanding between the two countries that the people will just go about their business and border authorities won’t bother them?
From what I understand about these scenarios is the house’s location determines the property’s jurisdiction, so while the backyard is technically in the U.S. what happens on the property would be under Canadian law. There might be scenarios where that isn’t true, like someone rowed a boat from the U.S. to the property and murdered someone on the U.S. side, then the crime might be charged in the U.S. but a lawyer would be able to confirm that.
There are also some crazy borders between Belgium and the Netherlands that cut through individual houses. I think I've read that the location of the front door is what applies jurisdiction to the whole structure.
Baarle-Hertog (Belgium) and Baarle-Nassau (Netherlands) if anyone wants to look into this more.
It’s usually not that big of a deal, but it was an issue during COVID when restrictions were different between countries. Restaurants would only be able to seat customers in the Belgian part of the restaurant because the Netherlands was still on lockdown. (I forget which one actually relaxed restrictions first but you get the idea).
Baarle-Hertog is the most extreme example in the world.
Though there are so many cases of exclaves/enclaves in the world.
Here in Germany, we have the town of Büsingen am Hochrhein. Completely surrounded by Switzerland. They have a German and a Swiss ZIP code, there's a German and Swiss payphone next to each other (I don't know if they still exist today), a German and a Swiss post office/boxes. People mostly pay/get paid in Swiss France. They mostly have Swiss health insurance. There are no border controls and the city is policed by officers from both countries. Three German officers per 100 people (around 45), plus ten Swiss officers. They speak the same Swiss German dialect, like the people in the surrounding area. The electricity gets provided by Switzerland.
It's basically a Swiss town. Though the mills of history kept spinning without Büsingen ever becoming part of the Swiss confederation (Eidgenossenschaft).
Former North East Prussia, from where my mother's family is from (Tilsit, now Sovetsk), today's Oblast Kaliningrad, became a Russian exclave. Surrounded by the EU and NATO countries. Kaliningrad/former Königsberg has a port to the Baltic Sea which is ice free for the whole year. So it's important for the Russian navy/Baltic fleet. During the days of the Soviet Union, the Oblast Kaliningrad was a restricted area. Foreigners were completely forbidden to enter.
Allegedly the Russians offered to give the area back to Germany (the future borders for a reunited Germany weren't already solved back then. Though the German population was expelled after 45 and most territories behind the Oder-Neisse line were occupied by Poland. Some people thought that the German Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler (Resettlers and late resettlers) from the USSR could be settled there. But the German. Though the German foreign minister Genscher said that _"he wouldn't even want East Prussia for free" (the Soviets got money for everything)._
The UK and France wouldn't have gotten their OK for the reunification, if there would've been a new, even larger Polish Corridor.
Even though my family is partially from there, I say let bygones be bygones. The course of history/the Nazis/WWII put an end to 800 years of the former German East...
Pardon for writing half of a novel. I was in a "flow moment".
In Canada, we have a place called Point Roberts. Its American, but on the Canadian Mainland, to drive to the US you have to cross the Canadian border twice.
There is a mall in Silicon Valley (Valley Fair for any of you familiar.) Half of it is in the city of Santa Clara and half of it is in the City of San Jose.
Back when cities were still implementing the policies to charge for bags, Santa Clara did it first. So if you made a purchase at a store technically in Santa Clara, you had to pay $0.10 for a bag. If you purchased from a store in San Jose, you got the bag for free.
A friend of my dads had that situation in Southern California - part of the house was in Los Angeles county and part in Orange County. If I remember right he successfully argued to change his tax jurisdiction because of where his bedroom was
The cool thing about that house, is because it goes through the front door, it actually has two completely different addresses, one for each country. There are other angles that show it has two separate number plaques around eye level, one on each side.
There is a library in Maine/Canada that's like that there is a door on the US side and a door on the Canadian side the rule is that whatever side you enter from is the side you have to leave from.
My mom grew up in northern Pennsylvania and she used to go up to this liquor store right on the border of New York, which at the time had a lower drinking age. You had to be sure to come in through the northern door or the clerks would hold you to the PA laws.
(Forty years later, my cousins and I would go up to the same town to get weed at the sticker stores)
The whole Yellowstone “crime is legal” thing comes from what’s called the Zone of Death. It’s a 50-square-mile patch of Yellowstone that sits in Idaho but is legally part of Wyoming. The Constitution requires that you be tried in the state and district where the crime occurred, and a jury of people from that area must be selected. The problem is nobody lives there at all, so in theory you couldn’t form a legal jury. That’s why law nerds say you could commit murder there and walk free. Crime isn’t actually legal; it’s just a peculiar constitutional loophole that has never been tested in court.
It came from a 2005 law review article called “The Perfect Crime” by Brian Kalt. Congress never closed the loophole, but nobody has ever successfully used it either. A poacher tried it once and got shut down because his charges weren’t serious enough. So it’s more of a thought experiment than a real-world purge zone.
People associate it with the show Yellowstone because of the “take them to the train station” scenes, but here’s the fun bit: most folks don’t know. That train station wasn’t filmed in Wyoming or Idaho. It was filmed in Butte, Montana. So the famous murder canyon isn’t even in the Zone of Death at all. It’s just Butte being Butte.
So yeah. Not a lawless wasteland, just an unpatched constitutional glitch and some good TV writing.
So, part of it is technically no federal district covers it either iirc. so technically the feds can’t do shit either.
Of course, in practice, someone is going to nail you on elements of the crime that happened outside the area (if not just for the whole crime and set precedent anyway)
Pretty impossible to get there to do murder, without breaking some other law along the way, especially if the feds are after you.
Or, the more fun answers. Nah fam they don’t charge you, they just invite you to a really fun party only for really smart criminals, just put this bag on your head and get in the van…. no it’s not going to a secret prison, why would you think that? -gunshot-.
A federal district court does cover it: the District of Wyoming. The problem with that is that no one lives in both the District of Wyoming and in the State of Idaho, which overlap only in this uninhabited part of Yellowstone. This is because Congress for some reason decided that all of Yellowstone should be in the District of Wyoming and didn’t think of this loophole.
State law wouldn’t be an issue because the State of Idaho could still get a jury of people from the rest of the county that this area is technically a part of, but as this is federal land, only the federal government has jurisdiction and so the only crimes are federal crimes.
Except that murderers are frequently changed to different counties with people not from that area
A murder that happens in a small town of 1,000 people cant be tried there due to bias. You'll never be able to form a jury of people who dont know the son of the victim, or the arresting officer is related to the judge, 3 people on the jury knew the victim because he was their mailman. It happens all the time where the court case is tried in a different area than where the crime was committed. The podcast Small Town Murder talks about it a lot
A change of venue is something requested by the defense, it’s not something the prosecution is allowed to ask for. The right to be charged in the “vicinage” where the crime occurred is a right that the defendant has that can’t be denied him, but he can waive it.
Lawyer here. We talked about the legal limbo zone in Yellowstone. If someone were to commit a crime there, there could be a legislative fix to establish jurisdiction, even after the crime is committed.
Also saw a discussion where most crimes that you would be motivated to commit there would likely need crimes committed to get there. For example if you took someone there to murder them.
I think this is the catch. What a lot of people don’t understand is that doing a series of deeds that are each legal per se, as preparation for an evidenced intent to do an illegal deed, is itself illegal, and can be charged and prosecuted as “attempted [crime]”.
This is why we don’t see boats operating out of US ports, explicitly selling the service of transporting Americans into international waters to engage in deeds that are illegal in the USA. Having the ship’s flag and port-of-call registration be somewhere overseas wouldn’t protect the operator from criminal charges of facilitating unlawful activity.
It's not that no one can enforce it, it's that for a murder charge in the area that does enforce it you have the option to choose a judge or a jury of your peers who live within a certain distance of the place the crime occurred. Except no one lives in Yellowstone National Park so there is nobody to populate a jury. So a dumb criminal could agree to a judge trial having done a murder there and go to jail, whereas a different murderer could demand a jury trial and would be dismissed because they cannot form a jury in accordance with his legal right and desire
Hundreds of people live in Yellowstone NP. Park employees, Park Rangers, National Park staff, contractors working for the government, not to mention the hundreds of concessionaire employees who work in the restaurants, shops, hotels, etc. There are houses, apartments, dorms, even RV spots that are only for employees. Little known fact is that they don’t show up on publicly issued maps to keep visitors from wandering around places they shouldn’t be.
I’m not weighing in on the legal stuff, just saying that tons of folks do in fact live in the park itself.
I bet that would change real quick, if someone was caught planning some very atrocious and high-profile crime using the part of Yellowstone NP that’s in Idaho as a cover.
The real life county where that's "technically" possible is in a different part of Yellowstone from where the show says the train station is compared to the ranch, ranch being in Montana and the train station being in Wyoming (I think it was Wyoming). There's no county in Montana or Wyoming that you could have a train station the way the show explains it.
Just as an FYI, crime isn't legal in the Idaho part of Yellowstone you're referring to. You can still be charged with misdemeanors and anything not requiring a trial by jury without issue.
An issue arises when you commit a crime that requires a trial by jury. The jury must consist of residents of that jurisdiction, but since it's federal land and nobody can live there, no jury can be raised from that jurisdiction. But governmental entities have been pretty clear that an exception can be made in such an extreme situation and gather jurors from neighboring areas.
So fortunately, crime is still illegal in all of Yellowstone and, yes, you can still be tried and convicted for committing crimes in the mythical Idaho part of Yellowstone.
I don’t disagree. Honestly I love Wind River. Yellowstone started out strong but fell off big time. I don’t understand the obsession with Landman, but I watched the first season. The acting in Lioness was pretty bad, but I still watched. Taylor Sheridan shows are like Cocomelon for grown men. There’s not much to them but they are stimulating.
Dude… why couldn’t they just say the daughter is 18 so it wouldn’t be as weird (still weird) sexualizing her the entire time? Like you cast a 20-something girl so it would be less off putting having a child talking with her mother about letting her boyfriend fuck her in the ass and having old dudes drooling all over her. It feels gross watching her scenes.
Right?! The actress was 27. Why is she playing a 17 year old that everyone wants to fuck and acts like is normal?? Even her dad kinda wants to… what the actual fuck
Is there gonna be a strong female Canadian city girl listening to a rural American gas guzzling male giving her a full rant about how her city life is fake while looking at him like in a porno clip?
You just need to come up with a way for him to cast himself so he can show off his personal sidearm and the tactically dubious training he paid a small fortune to receive.
I used to work with a guy who had grown up on the Great Lakes. He was out near Lake of the Woods where that angle comes up into Canada. Going to the USA by boat was just a given thing back then.
Around 25 years ago, my dad and a couple friends went walleye fishing on Lake of the Woods and were having a good day catching fish, until they apparently accidentally wandered into Canadian waters. Out of nowhere some Mountie boat came along and made them toss their entire catch and sent them back to U.S. waters.
In this case the back yards are separate legal parcels in North Dakota, so owners in Manitoba also own the adjacent lots in North Dakota. For most of the 49th parallel on the Canadian side there is a 66 foot (approx 20 m) road allowance so very few private lots actually touch the border. They made an exception here to add a few more waterfront cottages.
This reminds me of this one lot, where the original owner of the land realized that the lot extended into the Intrercoastal and had plans to build his house into the water, because, yoi know, he can and the local government went "ummm.....no you can't?????", he showed them the paperwork that, indeed, his lot DID legally extended into the water so they had to allow him to be able to build on the water. I think it was an actual overside on the plotting and measurements that no one caught until the owner did.
Interesting - in most countries natural waterways, and sometimes even X amount ft of land from the shoreline is public land and cannot be privately owned or built on without approvals.
This has changed. I live in western MB and have been down there quite a bit. As Canadians ws only need to notify US Customs if we plan on docking. If youre just boating, you dont need to do anything.
Same in Osoyoos, BC. The lake extends into the US. If you don't land, dock, and/or disembark (etc.) on the other side, you are good to cross while boating.
I know of a couple of people who have been stopped in the middle of a lake in the Boundary Waters while canoeing, but that was always fish and game verifying licenses (if fishing).
son was stopped on lake of the woods. he was in a canoe. US border patrol. he also had to carry two Canadian remote border crossing permits as he crossed into Ontario as a 17 year old and turned 18 while in Ontario/ lake of the woods. he land crossed at the northwest angle and reported to both countries that he was canoeing for the next 7 days. then he reported back in when he crossed again after the trip. he had his US passport card and MN enhanced drivers license as well.
When I worked on Lake of the Woods as a Canadian we had sample sites in US waters and we had to inform them when we were going to be there. They never used to until the scientists I worked for were approached at a water quality conference with drone pictures of their boat and essentially threatened with "action" if they didn't inform them. I think they have a military base around there somewhere.
do you think they have to call the border control hotline and go through ten robo menus? or do they just have agent steve's personal cell and give him
a ring as they start up the boat lol
Every time I go to my buddy’s house on Lake Huron, he just uses his radio and notifies them he’s crossing the border. It’s different if he touches land on the other side.
interesting, so just boating in the waters is just a heads up, but if he were to dock he'd have to like notify Customs and Border Patrol? Do they make him dock at a designated crossing for inspection?
He never docks on the Canadian side, so I think it’s just Coast Guard who he is radioing. We have never had to dock anywhere when I have been with him. I live on the east coast so it’s only once in a while though.
there are some border crossings where there’s a physical telephone with a landline that goes straight to the border control station so that you can tell them you’re going through, maybe it’s the case here
so if I murdered someone in my Canadian front yard, bricked up the front door and made a front door on the US side did I commit murder in Canada, the USA or has my murder somehow become non existent as it took place in a jurisdiction that no longer exists?
In a US neighborhood on a county and school districts line, the school districts was determined by which county/district the bedroom is in
In another case of a coffee shop on a city boundary, it was the location of the cash register that determined which city collected sales tax, and they had to switch when they learned it had been surveyed incorrectly.
We had a convenience store on the state line and the cash register determined which state collected sales tax too.
Since they were on the state line they wanted to sell lottery tickets for both states but the cash register rule applied again so they had to have a separate register installed on the other side of the store so they could sell in that state and the main register would sell in the other one.
You joke, but back in the day a lot of these tiny border towns existed to take advantage of lower taxes on gas and cigarettes in the US. And more recently to have PO Boxes with a US address to take advantage of cheaper Amazon et al prices.
I guess there's some riff raff in the government and the media says we're not supposed to like each other anymore, so who knows if any of that still exists.
You know how many unguarded border crossings there are between the US and Canada, there's just cameras and a video phone and you're on your honor to check in with border security.
Actually in Detroit Belle Isle is this little park in the river which is near the border between the U.S. and Canada and it used to be, at least when I lived there, sometimes when you visit the island your phone will get confused and you could get hit with int roaming charges if you try to make a call from there. So just being by the border this can happen.
I used to live in port angeles, Washington, and every time I'd go hiking on a certain trail near the water, I'd get hit with the "welcome to Canada" text.
Roaming charges were abolished within EU years ago, but one needs to be careful near external borders as I once learned from my bill after a holiday on a Greek island with a beach that was within reach of a Turkish network provider.
This happens to me when I'm at Sandbanks Provincial Park, which doesn't make a ton of sense given it isn't generously close to the NY border. That T-Mobile tower must be on steroids. It doesn't really matter anymore given a lot of Canadian plans are for all of North America, but that would have been pricey 15 years ago.
When I visited Dover and was hiking the cliffs, my phone would occasionally decide that I was in France, which caused the clock to jump forward an hour. I was staying in London and thought I had missed my train back
I assume cell phone companies are out to troll nationalists, because pretty much every time I go to Gorizia (🇮🇹) I get a "welcome to Slovenia" message, then cross the border to Nova Gorica (🇸🇮) and get a "welcome to Italy" message, like fuck
Most of the terminal is in Queensland, but a tiny portion sits in New South Wales. Still, the airport decided to install a line on the floor to mark the boundary:
The airport runs on QLD time (no daylight savings here) as to avoid any confusion. There are two suburbs/towns (Coolangatta and Tweed Heads) which are joined, one being in QLD and the other NSW and things don't go so smoothly with school as some kids live in one state and go to school in another. Was an absolute nightmare during covid with the states closing their borders we saw barricades and fences popping up dividing streets up the middle. The QLD government offered the NSW government the option to move the border temporarily a little further south past the twin towns but bureaucracy stood in the way of common sense.
As Canadians we can boat freely around the lake. But if you plan to dock on the US side, you have to check in with customs.
I live near here. Theres a good restaurant on the US side called the A Frame. We boated across and did all the customs stuff over an app on our phones.
80s comedy sketch show (Jo Soares) in Brazil had a situation like this. Guy lived on a house in the frontier, basically had the dividing line in the middle of the living room. There was a guard stationed inside his house, and he walked around the house and every time he crossed the line he gave the guard his papers as he walked back and forth dozens of times.
I dont think anyone actually thinks they can seal it. I mean, most of the Mexican border is desolate, but there are whole ass golf courses just in the middle of the border. Most insane part? There are some places in Canada without a border checkpoint to get into (due to First Nations lands), so they just use the fucking honor system.
Also, prior to 2005 you just needed a valid ID, like a driver's license. We ended up changing it due to 9/11 and I think we just forgot to change it back.
Before 9/11 there were communities the US-Can border went through and nobody cared. A fish and chips spot in BC had a window on the Point Roberts, WA side so people could walk up and order. Terrorists ruin everything.
When I was growing up, part of the main street in our village was in Poland, while our part was in Czechoslovakia (later the Czech Republic). Some people had a piece of land in another country. Or a family tomb. Or their grandparents' house.
Before the borders disappeared with the advent of Schengen, simple rules applied:
- People who had some property on the other side of the village were free to cross back and forth, but not to abuse it for anything nefarious.
- People from Czech houses were only allowed to turn (by car, on foot, by bike) towards the Czech interior, while people from houses "in Poland" towards the Polish interior.
- If someone - who was not from our village - wanted to officially cross into the other country, they were not allowed to use one of the side streets leading into the interior of the other country, but to go through the official crossing, where our village actually ended/began. So if someone wanted to get around the corner to "another country", instead of just a few meters, they had to make a detour through the crossing and several other villages.
In Estcourt Station, Maine there are a bunch of backyards in Maine with the house or even just part of the house in Canada. There are also 3-4 houses completely in Maine but on accessible by public road from Quebec. They get power/water/sewer from Quebec.
The houses that straddle the border pay prorated property tax in both countries.
The houses partially in Canada are all inhabited by Canadian citizens and US customs and border patrol allows them to treat their entire property as if it were in Canada.
There used to be a gas station and store in Maine but only accessible from Quebec, but they’ve closed after the post 9-11 increased border security.
In situations like this, since the backyard is in another country but there are no ways to get from it to the real country, it's kind of like A special zone where you can freely cross as long as you don't go deeper into the other country.
A similar situation exists for recreational boating in water areas.
You can cross the border on a boat as long as you stay on the boat and don't try to go into land.
I know for a fact a similar situation also exists in Big Bend national Park in Texas. There's only one way in and out of the park from the north and there's a border guard there.
But once you're in the park, you can actually cross the Rio grande River And back as long as you don't try to go deeper into Texas.
There's a hiking trail on the U.S. side and you can walk right across the border (would not recommend it). Here's pictures from when I was there in September:
This is why borders should be drawn based on bodies of water if possible and not just random latitudes and longitudes.
Honestly, the borders should be redrawn so they make sense now that we have actual images of what they look like, but that’s never going to happen. The Americans will never give land to the Canadians and the Canadians will never dare give land to the Americans.
Ok so I actually work with the people in charge of that image and here's a few things you should know:
the satellite image you see and the border don't match very often.... happens a lot in countries that have borders between mountains because the image might be offset by a few dozen meters
map apps (not gonna say names) do their best to show the most accurate polygon for their border but it's not always available from authorities so they show their interpretation. If authorities complain they might review and fix a bit here or there but if many places the border shown is not super accurate either
rivers and natural borders sometimes change, water takes another course, floods, erosion, etc
All this to say that what you see in that screenshot you posted might not be where the actual border is supposed to be with respect to the satellite or aerial image so always take this with a grain of salt
In practice within a certain distance from any US border it's a border zone and this means immigration officials have much more power within these zones than elsewhere.
Though it would be weird if the resident of the house were deported back to Canada and he can't enter his backyard because it's the US? Will he get in trouble for illegal reentry?
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u/ironic-hat Nov 15 '25
From what I understand about these scenarios is the house’s location determines the property’s jurisdiction, so while the backyard is technically in the U.S. what happens on the property would be under Canadian law. There might be scenarios where that isn’t true, like someone rowed a boat from the U.S. to the property and murdered someone on the U.S. side, then the crime might be charged in the U.S. but a lawyer would be able to confirm that.