CANAAN, Vt. — As he drove north along the Connecticut River, Sheriff Trevor Colby nodded toward rambling farmhouses and worn trailers, ticking off the incidents he’d encountered at each one.
“We’re now coming into a territory where we’ve got a homicide, where we’ve got a burglary, grand larceny, drug case, stolen guns,” he said, steering his white department-issued pickup around a river bend on a rainy autumn day. “Burglary, stolen copper.”
Colby, 55, has seen plenty in 14 years policing Essex County, the most rural stretch of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, bordering New Hampshire and Canada. Long before that, at age 15, he got a taste of law enforcement when his father, Amos, was elected county sheriff, and Colby found himself answering emergency calls at the kitchen table.
But in recent years, this fixture of local policing has found himself increasingly at odds with Vermont’s law enforcement leadership over a state policy limiting cooperation with the federal government on immigration matters.
Proponents of the Fair and Impartial Policing Policy say it’s designed to prevent discrimination and keep Vermont officers from being dragged into the federal government’s deportation agenda. Colby, on the other hand, says it violates federal law, compromises border security, and damages his relationships with US Border Patrol officers he relies on to respond to emergencies in this remote jurisdiction.
“It makes it hard when you’re in a small, little community for a policy to come out and say, ‘Hey, we can’t work with you,’” Colby said. In his view, the officials who have crafted it are “moving toward creating a sanctuary state and protecting people who are here illegally.”
That’s a position shared by the Trump administration, which deems Vermont a “sanctuary jurisdiction.”
Vermont law requires its law enforcement agencies in the state to adopt a model Fair and Impartial Policing Policy or design one that hews closely to it. Colby has twice submitted draft policies to the Vermont Criminal Justice Council, which oversees the process, and the council has rejected both, saying they insufficiently limit cooperation with federal authorities.
In one draft, for instance, Colby sought to give his deputies full discretion to share “intelligence on suspicious persons or circumstances” with federal officers, which the council said was “in direct contradiction” to the model policy.
Colby has raised the prospect of suing the council, though he says he’d rather avoid litigation. The council’s executive director, Christopher Brickell, noted state law permits him to deny training opportunities to the Essex County Sheriff’s Department if it fails to comply.
“That’s never a position we want to be in,” said Brickell, who also runs the Vermont Police Academy, adding the council is “trying to work collaboratively” with Colby to reach an agreement.
The dispute illuminates some unusual aspects of policing along the northern border.
Perched just northeast of St. Johnsbury, the closest population center, Essex County extends about 45 miles north to Canada and is not much wider than 20 miles. With just 6,000 residents, it has the smallest population of any county in New England. Its largest town, Lunenburg, has no more than 1,260 inhabitants, and most of its municipalities number in the hundreds.
Since the Champion International paper company sold off more than 130,000 acres of timberland in the late 1990s, vast stretches of the county have become conserved wilderness, accessible only by old logging roads. It has few schools, no hospitals, and just a handful of employers. It’s a prime destination for hunting, fishing, and ATV recreation.
“Vermont, to many, is what America used to be. And Essex County is what Vermont used to be,” said Vince Illuzzi, the county prosecutor and a former longtime state senator.
In most parts of Vermont, elected sheriffs play a secondary role to local and state police, mainly transporting prisoners, guarding courthouses, and directing traffic. But in Essex County, Colby’s department is the only game in town.
Essex is the lone county in the state without a single municipal police department. Though the Vermont State Police is charged with covering towns without their own officers, its two closest barracks, in Derby and St. Johnsbury, are roughly an hour’s drive from Canaan.
Colby and his five full-time sheriff’s deputies try to fill the void, but the department’s headquarters in Guildhall is also an hour from Canaan. So when someone in town calls 911, it’s often a US Border Patrol officer who gets there first.
“They’re our first line of defense to be able to stabilize the situation,” Colby said as he pulled into the parking lot of Border Patrol’s Beecher Falls Station, a low-slung building across a state highway from a Christmas tree farm.
The station’s officers patrol a roughly 60-mile stretch of the border straddling Vermont and New Hampshire — a hot spot for illegal southbound crossings.
Michael Daley, chair of the Canaan Selectboard, said he typically encounters two or three Border Patrol vehicles on the 10-minute drive from his home to the grocery store he owns across the Connecticut River in Stewartstown, N.H. When an alarm goes off at his business, he said, Border Patrol typically answers the call.
“They’re there before you are,” he said. “They’re a great asset to the area in many ways. There’s a ton of them around.”
The cooperation goes both ways. Colby’s department takes part in Operation Stonegarden, a federal program that allows him and his deputies to share in a pool of $70,000 in overtime pay to patrol the border. Though he won’t discuss the specifics of that work, the sheriff wrote in an application for the program that Essex County is “a prime location for cross-border trafficking to go unchecked because of the lack of local resources.”
A Border Patrol spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment during the government shutdown.
In the past, when Colby encountered suspicious activity near the border, he hadn’t hesitated to call his federal partners. But the state’s policy, he said, makes him think twice.
Among other prohibitions, it bars Vermont officers from enforcing federal civil immigration law, and it deprioritizes enforcing criminal immigration law. It prevents officers from prolonging traffic stops until immigration authorities can arrive, and it limits the information officers can share with federal agents. It makes “proximity to the border” insufficient cause to investigate a matter.
Colby and Illuzzi, the county prosecutor, both say the state policy was authored by officials from more populated areas who don’t understand the challenges of rural law enforcement.
“The needs of this area are different than they are for more urban parts of Vermont,” Illuzzi said.
Though Colby says the policy conflicts with federal law, its proponents say it was designed to comply.
“He’s entitled to that opinion, but the overwhelming majority of other law enforcement entities are of the opposite opinion — and we’re all at the table working on that policy,” said Timothy Lueders-Dumont, executive director of the Vermont Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs.
Colby’s public comments have put him in the crosshairs of groups that support the policy. When he told a reporter in 2023 that he’d relayed about 20 cases to immigration authorities over the previous year, the ACLU of Vermont sought records from his office and then sued when he did not provide them.
Lia Ernst, legal director for the ACLU of Vermont, said Colby’s words indicate he’s violated the state policy, and potentially the constitutional rights of those he turned over.
“Vermonters, through their elected representatives, have said they do not want state and local police integrated into and supporting the machinery of mass deportation,” she said.
Colby, who previously ran a local social services agency and a hospital in remote Alaska, worries about being caricatured as “a Trump-supporting racist who is out here after all the illegal people of Essex County.” Though he’s run for sheriff as a Republican, Colby sees himself as an independent and said he voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but not since. He bemoans the national political divide over immigration policy — and says he’s simply trying to enforce the law and keep his communities safe.
“I’ve been arguing this since before Trump,” Colby said. “This isn’t a Trump-aligned argument I’m trying to make.”
