United States: Jean-Enice Frederic is looking to get arrested.

‘I have lots of family in Haiti and wanted to bring them to the United States, but I don’t have residency,’ Frederic says. ‘I thought about them every day, my wife and kids.’

At a dead end called Roxham Road, Frederic is crossing a narrow ditch that separates the United States and Canada, reports CNN.

Canadian police wait patiently on the other side. They warn anyone who approaches that what they’re about to do is illegal, that they’ll be arrested.

But that’s the first step. Once arrested, Frederic, and the thousands of others who have made this journey across to Quebec in the past few weeks, can apply for asylum in Canada. He hopes that would mean a chance at uniting with his family that remains in Haiti after 17 years apart. Then, he hopes, his family could apply to for asylum to become Canadian residents too.

In the past month, Greyhound and other bus lines have been packed with immigrants—primarily Haitians—making this exact trip from the United States into Canada. They have taken trains, buses, often multiple, to get to Plattsburgh, New York.

From there, they hail a taxi to the border. On this day, Frederic is one of a stream of almost 300 crossing, dragging whatever belongings they can with them. Haitians flooded to the United States after a cholera outbreak in 2010, as well as after the devastating earthquake the same year.

Frederic, like 59,000 other Haitians in the United States, has ‘temporary protected status,’ known as TPS, given to Haitians after the earthquake.

But the gradual exodus from the U.S. over the past two months has been accelerated, infused with new urgency: the Trump administration has warned it will not renew the TPS, which is currently set to expire in January 2018.

Frederic is fearful that means he would be kicked out of the US.

‘I’m scared because every day I hear different news,’ Frederic says. ‘That’s why I’m leaving the United States for Canada.’

Canadian authorities have scrambled to manage an ‘unprecedented’ surge of asylum seekers coming over the border into Quebec province. So many people have been fleeing in the past few months that Canadian police have set up tents for processing and background checks. It has created bottleneck at the border with more than 1,000 people waiting to be processed in Red Cross tents, according to the RCMP.

‘We’ve never seen those numbers,’ said Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) spokesman Claude Castonguay. ‘Even though our officers are patrolling 24 hours a day all year long, we’ve never seen such numbers coming in.’