B.C. business owner says roughly $20 border fee mistake cost her NEXUS privileges

A British Columbia small business owner is warning Canadians to be careful when transporting goods across the U.S. border. Suzanne Smith says a mistake involving a roughly $20 commercial vehicle fee resulted in her NEXUS privileges being revoked.

Smith once considered the United States a second home and operated several stores south of the border, including one in nearby Birch Bay, Washington. She says rising costs and fewer Canadian customers crossing the border eventually forced her to close those locations. “My business is the casualty of war,” she said, referring to the ongoing tariff and trade war between the two countries.

Until last month, Smith continued travelling to the U.S. to pick up goods for her Canadian location. On a recent trip back toward Canada, she says, she encountered a Homeland Security checkpoint. She recalled seeing eight officers on the roadside stopping vehicles headed into Canada. Smith thought her documents meant she would be fine, but said officers began questioning her rapidly.

Smith says she was told she should have entered the U.S. through a commercial lane rather than the NEXUS lane, and should have paid a commercial vehicle fee of roughly $20. A few days later, she says, her NEXUS privileges were revoked. “At the end of the day, I made a mistake, but it would normally come with a small warning,” she said.

U.S. immigration lawyer Len Saunders says NEXUS denials or revocations are typically associated with criminal activity or immigration violations. He believes the consequence in Smith’s case far outweighs the mistake. He compared it to being caught speeding and having a driver’s licence taken away for life instead of receiving a warning.

Saunders says another B.C. business owner recently brought him a similar account. He has practised immigration law in Blaine for 25 years and said he had never heard of this happening. The fee is typically associated with commercial vehicles, Saunders said, but the cases he encountered involved small business owners using personal vehicles to carry relatively small loads of goods.

There is an appeal process for revoked NEXUS privileges, but Saunders says reinstatement can be expensive and difficult, with no guarantee of success. “It’s definitely an uphill battle,” he said. Smith says she is not prepared to take on that fight for now. Instead, she wants other business owners to know what happened. “I want other business owners to be warned that it’s not business as usual in the U.S. anymore,” she said.

CTV News contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection for comment but had not received a response by deadline.