Smuggler

“In Smuggler, Reece Jones and Greg Boos have crafted something rare: a page-turner of car chases, gang deals and Supreme Court battles that is also, at its heart, a penetrating, empathetic meditation on conscience, complicity, and how hard it is to do the right thing when the law and your humanity push in opposite directions. Timely, stranger-than-fiction, and impossible to put down - truly a book for our dizzying moment.” –Greg Grandin, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning The End of the Myth and America, América“Smuggler is a must-read true story of a larger-than-life man grappling with the moral complexities of his actions. Reece Jones and Greg Boos offer a fascinating glimpse into migration in the era of asylum and lay bare the complicated reality of border law enforcement, revealing how accountability for federal misconduct can be elusive.” –Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Senior Fellow, American Immigration Council“Smuggler is a truth-stranger-than-fiction story that captures all of the complexity of American border security and immigration politics. Packed with unforgettable characters, Reece Jones and Greg Boos help shine an important spotlight on the little-understood and little-covered challenges of the northern border, where some of the nation’s oddest crimes have long occurred.”–Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of Watergate: A New History“Smuggler is a gripping and timely account that shatters the myth of a benign northern frontier, revealing the Canada-US border as a site of violence, impunity, and refuge. It offers an unforgettable portrait of Bob Boulé and the Smuggler’s Inn, where asylum seekers, drug networks, and security agencies collide in the most ordinary of spaces. By weaving together gangland hits, confidential informant files, and midnight crossings through a Blaine backyard, the book traces Bob’s deepening compassion for the refugees fleeing persecution at his door, even as the Safe Third Country regime forecloses the very pathways to protection they seek.”–Sharry Aiken, Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University, Canada“An engrossing legal thriller. Bob Boulé’s story demonstrates how the enforcement of border and immigration laws - from the front line all the way to the Supreme Court - is violent, deceptively characterizing people as criminals, threats, and unsavory beings. Smuggler explains how ICE and Border Patrol agents have incredibly wide powers and broad immunity for their brutal behavior and forces us to ask what kind of society we want to live in and what rules should govern us.”–Jamie Chai Yun Liew, immigration lawyer, law professor, and author of Ghost Citizens and Dandelion.“Smuggler is a gripping crime thriller that compels readers to keep turning the pages. But it tells a much bigger story about how the United States has morphed from a country that once opened its arms to those fleeing persecution and violence into one that now targets them, and those like Bob Boule brave enough to help.”–Edward Alden, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; author of The Closing of the American Border and When the World Closed Its Doors“Smuggler is a real-life thriller that proves the adage that fact is stranger than fiction. Jones and Boos deliver a hard-edged story about one man’s survival on the longest undefended border in the world. Bob Boule and his Smuggler’s Inn provide a vivid setting for the personal, cultural, and legal struggles swirling around our so-called ‘forgotten’ U.S.-Canadian border. Highly recommended!” –Margaret Stock, MacArthur Fellow and leading national security and immigration attorney

Reece Jones is the author of the award-winning books Nobody is Protected, White Borders, Violent Borders, and Border Walls. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a lifetime Fellow of the American Association of Geographers. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and CNN. He is a Professor of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawaiʻi and he lives in Honolulu with his family.

Greg Boos is the founder of Cascadia Cross-Border Law and a dual US-Canadian citizen. He has forty years of experience in immigration law and he represented Bob Boulé since 2015. Greg served as an external advisor to the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University for almost two decades and is recognized internationally for research on the Jay Treaty and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. He and his spouse live in Bellingham, WA.