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WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Almost three months after Bashir Yussuf watched Donald Trump win the presidential election, he made his way to Noyes, Minnesota, where he set off at night into the snow-filled woods and crawled across the unmarked border into Canada.

“I saw what was coming,” said Yussef, 28, who fled his home in Somalia in 2013 to make a circuitous, five-month voyage to San Diego, where he applied for asylum but was rejected. “I knew Trump was going to deport me.”

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After a three-hour walk, much of it through deep drifts, Yussuf arrived in Emerson, a small farming town in sight of the snow-swept border with both North Dakota and Minnesota.

Emerson’s 700 inhabitants have long known “border hoppers,” often offering them lifts to the nearby Canadian Border Services Agency office. But they have never seen them coming in these numbers.

The morning before Yussuf arrived with another Somali last Sunday night, 19 other Africans had emerged on the Canadian side of the border, cold and hungry after walking much of the night across frozen farm fields. There were too many to fit into the small border office for processing, so the people of the town rushed to open the community hall, where the new arrivals could get warm, doze on sleeping mats and refuel on Nutella sandwiches, tea and coffee.