Greg Janzen was reacting to the death of Mavis Otuteye, a 57-year-old woman believed to be from the African country of Ghana, whose body was found late last week near Noyes, Minn.

“We were always expecting to find someone in the ditch when the snow melted, which we never did,” he said. “(Then) the Red River didn’t flood nearly as much as we expected so we thought it would be clear sailing, but now we have this.”

The Kittson County sheriff’s department said an initial autopsy concluded the cause of death was possible hypothermia, though a final autopsy is still pending.

The police said they believe Otuteye had been heading to Emerson, which is just across the border from Noyes.

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Though the two communities are very close together, Janzen said it had been cold and rainy that night, and there were two other weather-related medical calls involving border crossings on the weekend. He said those who travel in the middle of the night can also become disoriented, and the area is sparsely populated.

There has been a spike in asylum seekers since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, with the most recent RCMP figures showing 859 people were stopped between official border points in April.

For the year so far, there have been 1,993 interceptions in Quebec, 477 in Manitoba and 233 in British Columbia.

Janzen has long been a critic of the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, under which people who have made refugee claims first in the U.S. are turned back at official Canadian entry points.

However, it does not apply to people who get onto Canadian soil first, resulting in many crossing fields and ditches and avoiding the official border posts.

Those asylum seekers are allowed to follow normal refugee-claim procedures and are usually released and cared for by a non-profit agency until their case is heard.

“Until they close this loophole, this is going to keep happening,” Janzen said of the agreement. “What scares me is next winter again.

“We’re still getting women and children. What’s going to happen to the children? One of these times the kids aren’t going to make it.”

He said he also fears for the safety of his community.

“So far our residents haven’t been assaulted, but that’s going to happen yet, too.”

Otuteye’s case is currently under investigation by the Kittson County Sheriff’s Office and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

The comic apologized later for the video image, saying it was “too disturbing” and wasn’t funny.

“I sincerely apologize,” she said in a second video. “I went way too far. The image is too disturbing. I understand how it offends people.”

The first video showed a straight-faced Griffin slowly lifting the bloody head. She originally described the project with photographer Tyler Shields as an “artsy fartsy statement” mocking the commander in chief.

Many online called for Griffin to be jailed.

In her apology video, Griffin begs her fans for forgiveness and says she has asked the photographer to remove the images.

“I made a mistake, and I was wrong,” she says.

The video had apparently been removed from Shields’ blog by late Tuesday.
CNN, whose New Year’s Eve coverage Griffin has co-hosted, called the images “disgusting and offensive.”

“We are pleased to see she has apologized,” CNN said in a statement. “We are evaluating New Year’s Eve and have made no decisions at this point.”

Squatty Potty, a Utah-based bathroom products company, said in a statement Tuesday that it has suspended an ad campaign featuring Griffin.

A publicist for Shields did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has urged leaders of Canada and Mexico to reach him on his cellphone, according to former and current U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the practice. Of the two, only Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has taken advantage of the offer so far, the officials said.

Trump also exchanged numbers with French President Emmanuel Macron when the two spoke immediately following Macron’s victory earlier this month, according to a French official, who would not comment on whether Macron intended to use the line.

All the officials demanded anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal the conversations. Neither the White House nor Trudeau’s office responded to requests for comment.

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The notion of world leaders calling each other up via cellphone may seem unremarkable in the modern, mobile world. But in the diplomatic arena, where leader-to-leader calls are highly orchestrated affairs, it is another notable breach of protocol for a president who has expressed distrust of official channels. The formalities and discipline of diplomacy have been a rough fit for Trump – who, before taking office, was long easily accessible by cellphone and viewed himself as freewheeling, impulsive dealmaker.

Presidents generally place calls on one of several secure phone lines, including those in the White House Situation Room, the Oval Office or the presidential limousine. Even if Trump uses his government-issued cellphone, his calls are vulnerable to eavesdropping, particularly from foreign governments, national security experts say.

“If you are speaking on an open line, then it’s an open line, meaning those who have the ability to monitor those conversations are doing so,” said Derek Chollet, a former Pentagon adviser and National Security Council official now at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

A president “doesn’t carry with him a secure phone,” Chollet said. “If someone is trying to spy on you, then everything you’re saying, you have to presume that others are listening to it.”

The caution is warranted even when dealing with allies. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s learned in 2013, when a dump of American secrets leaked by Edward Snowden revealed the U.S. was monitoring her cellphone, good relations don’t prevent some spycraft between friends.

“If you are Macron or the leader of any country and you get the cellphone number of the president of the United States, it’s reasonable to assume that they’d hand it right over to their intel service,” said Ashley Deeks, a law professor at the University of Virginia who formerly served as the assistant legal adviser for political-military affairs in the U.S. State Department.

The practice opens Trump up to charges of hypocrisy. Throughout last year’s presidential campaign, he lambasted Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for using a private email server while she was secretary of state, insisting she should not be given access to classified information because she would leave it vulnerable to foreign foes.

Presidents’ phone calls with world leaders often involve considerable advance planning. State Department and National Security Council officials typically prepare scripted talking points and background on the leader on the other end of the line. Often an informal transcript of the call is made and circulated among a select group – sometimes a small clutch of aides, sometimes a broader group of foreign policy officials. Those records are preserved and archived.

The White House did not respond to questions on whether the president is keeping records of any less-formal calls with world leaders.

Trump’s White House is already facing scrutiny for apparent efforts to work outside usual diplomatic channels.

The administration has been fending off questions about a senior aide’s alleged attempt to set up a secret back channel of communication with Moscow in the weeks before Trump was took office. White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, met in December with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. and discussed whether a secret line of communication could be used to facilitate sensitive policy discussions about the conflict in Syria, according to a person familiar with the talks. The person demanded anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the sensitive conversation by name.

The White House has said such back channel communications are useful and discreet.

Trump has struggled more than most recent presidents to keep his conversations with world leaders private. His remarks to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Russian diplomats have all leaked, presumably after notes of the conversations were circulated by national security officials.

It was unclear whether an impromptu, informal call with a foreign leader would be logged and archived. The Presidential Records Act of 1981, passed in response to the Watergate scandal, requires that the president and his staff to preserve all records related to the office. In 2014, the act was amended to include personal emails.

But the law contains “blind spots” – namely, record-keeping for direct cellphone communications, said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, who specializes in public interest and national security law.

Under Barack Obama, the first cellphone-toting president, worries about cyber intrusions – particularly by foreign governments – pulled the president’s devices deep into the security bubble. Many of the functions on Obama’s BlackBerry were blocked, and a very small handful of people had his phone number or email address, according to former aides.

“Government sometimes looks like a big bureaucracy that has stupid rules, but a lot of these things are in place for very good reasons and they’ve been around for a while and determine the most effective way to do business in the foreign policy sphere,” said Deeks. “Sometimes it takes presidents longer to figure that out.”

Associated Press writer Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

The priorities were laid out in a report, released by the federal government Monday, summarizing eight months of consultations held with Canadians from coast to coast.

It says participants wanted to see laws that would help lower stubbornly high unemployment rates for those with disabilities, reduce the number of buildings inaccessible to those with physical and intellectual disabilities, and remove accessibility barriers for the country’s air, rail, ferry and bus transportation systems.

Those consulted also named government program and service delivery, information and communications and procurement of goods and services as key areas of focus.

The report also says Canadians have voiced a strong preference for the government to set up an independent body to oversee compliance with the new laws, which are expected to come before the House of Commons in early 2018.

Minister for Sport and Persons with Disabilities Carla Qualtrough said the consultations have laid the groundwork for her to begin crafting the legislation.

“It’s definitely marching orders for me in terms of what Canadians want to see in accessibility legislation,” Qualtrough said in an interview. “My goal now is to figure out how we write into law these concepts and these principles and these specific ideas.”

The prospective act, which disability rights advocates have been seeking for years, would govern areas that fall under federal jurisdiction, such as banks, telecommunications, and interprovincial transportation.

The report currently estimates one in seven Canadians has some form of disability and projects that number will increase as the population ages.

Those are not confined to visible conditions such as blindness or paralysis, but include mental health disorders, learning disabilities, and episodic ailments such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis.

The sweeping new legislation will attempt to eliminate barriers for this growing demographic, taking an equally broad view of what a barrier entails.

“My definition of ‘barrier’ is anything that impairs or prevents access, physically or mentally, to any physical movement, learning and/or acceptance by others,” the report quotes one contributor as saying.
“Ergo, ‘accessibility’ successfully counters or eliminates the barriers.”

The report said 6,000 Canadians participated in the consultations between June 2016 and February 2017. An additional 90 organizations also offered input.

Employment issues were the top priority identified by the report.

Data has long shown that Canadians with disabilities are greatly under-employed compared to their non-disabled counterparts. Two years ago, Statistics Canada released figures putting the employment rate for disabled Canadians at 49 per cent, compared to 79 per cent for the general population.

Qualtrough noted that many smaller issues are also contained within the broad categories highlighted by the report, citing immigration as an example.

Current legislation effectively bars many people with disabilities from securing long-term status in the country, and Qualtrough said the government is looking to make changes. Such efforts, she said, would fall under the umbrella of programs and services.

So could policies such as those in place at Passport Canada, which currently forbid staff from helping a person with a disability complete their forms.

Transportation regulations could help address situations such as one that arose at Via Rail and culminated in a federal agency ruling that the company had to allow more than one mobility device at a time to be tied down on its trains.

Advocates, however, are hoping the government’s plans become more concrete as the legislation takes shape.

James Hicks, National Co-ordinator of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, said the consultations were more an airing of grievances than a forum for tabling ideas on how to bring about change.

He said the process was important, but hoped the legislation will go beyond aspirational statements.

To that end, the council is joining other community-based groups that will continue soliciting feedback from Canadians. Hicks said the government is paying for the additional feedback and will hopefully put it to good use.

He said one suggestion the government will hear involves forcing provinces to consider disability issues when applying for federal funds.

He said all proposals submitted to cabinet today must include a gender analysis to account for the impact on women, adding he’d like to see the new law require something similar for the disabled.

“Why is there not a disability lens that has to be done on every single request for funding that goes to cabinet?” he said. “That way every department has to look at it and has to say ‘this is what we need to do to ensure equal access for people with disabilities.”

Qualtrough said the report was firm on one concrete measure — once the law is in place, an independent body must be set up to ensure people are complying with it.

Currently, discrimination complaints come before provincial or federal human rights commissions only after an offence has taken place.

“We shouldn’t have to wait until someone’s discriminated against to help them,” Qualtrough said. “It’s not enough. Loud and clear I heard that it’s not enough.”