Hansboro/Cartwright Border Crossing, North Dakota

The Hansboro/Cartwright crossing is one of a dozen small boundary crossings with Canada along the top of the North Dakota, which are among the least used out of the 118 or so crossings along the continental border. Despite this, most of the Port of Entry buildings in North Dakota are new, among the more than 35 US Ports of Entry that were modernized with the $420 million given to the Department of Homeland Security for this purpose as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. There are three basic sizes, depending on traffic volume, and some variation in architectural style, though quite a few are identical. Costs ranged from $6-15 million. They are generally LEED certified institutional sheds with offices, stainless steel bathroom fixtures, bulletproof windows, and access corridors that buzz visitors in through hallways with locked doors on either end. Also common are re-routed roads feeding traffic through the new station, and leaving the original road abandoned and gated, sometimes with visible vestiges of where the old Port of Entry once stood, and, sometimes, an abandoned duty free store.