Four men who are definitely, absolutely, 100% just British hikers out for a lovely spring stroll through the Maine wilderness were apprehended by Border Patrol last week after illegally crossing into the United States from Canada. Their names? Ali Mohammed Ali Abdullah, Hameed Mohammed Nagi, Ibrahim Ayyub Khan, and Mohammed Sultan Saleh. You know — your typical group of lads from Liverpool out for a bit of fresh air in the Somerset County woods.

And look, I’m not saying the mainstream media is going to memory-hole this story faster than a Clinton email server, but if these four guys had been named Chad, Bryce, Hunter, and Tanner and were wearing MAGA hats, CNN would have already commissioned a twelve-part documentary and Rachel Maddow would be doing a dramatic reenactment with sock puppets.

Here’s what actually happened. On April 3rd, two maple sugar workers — God bless these guys, by the way, because they’re out there doing actual work while Congress is on vacation — were heading into Canada along the Golden Road, which is a 96-mile private logging road in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Maine. And they spot four men of apparent Middle Eastern descent walking south along the road near mile marker 90.

Now, if you’ve ever been to this part of Maine, you know that nobody is out there hiking for fun. This isn’t the Appalachian Trail. This is dense, remote forest where the only things walking south are moose and people who don’t want to be found. The maple workers flagged down a Customs and Border Protection officer at the St. Zacharie Port of Entry at about 9:15 in the morning.

Border Patrol followed fresh footprints — because apparently our highly trained illegal border crossers didn’t think about the mud — and found all four men hiding in roadside vegetation about an hour later. Hiding. In bushes. Like hikers do.

But here’s where it gets really good.

One of these gentlemen, Mohammed Sultan Saleh, had been recording the entire crossing on a GoPro camera. He narrated the footage like he was filming a nature documentary about himself. On the video, Ali Mohammed Ali Abdullah asks, “I’m on US soil?” And Saleh pulls up the GPS coordinates on screen, confirms their location, and declares — and I am not making this up — “Now, we are in the US. We just made it, baby.”

“We just made it, baby.”

That’s not what hikers say when they reach a scenic overlook. That’s what people say when they’ve pulled off something they know they’re not supposed to be doing. They filmed their own crime, narrated it, and included GPS evidence. These guys are either the world’s worst criminals or the world’s most dedicated vloggers. Possibly both.

But wait — there’s more. Federal agents went through Saleh’s phone and found a series of Google searches from April 3rd that paint a very interesting picture of a man who was definitely just out enjoying nature:

“Is St. Zacharie border crossing still used the one near Quebec Golden Road.”

“Bangor from my location.”

“Boston from Bangor.”

“New York from Boston.”

So let me get this straight. This man Googled how to find a remote, barely-used border crossing, then immediately started mapping his route from the middle of the Maine woods to Bangor to Boston to New York City. That’s not a hiking itinerary. That’s a smuggling pipeline. These guys weren’t trying to see Acadia National Park. They were trying to disappear into the American interior, one bus ticket at a time.

And it gets worse. Two additional individuals were arrested in a separate vehicle — a gray Nissan that was waiting at a pickup location to whisk our “hikers” away. Under the driver’s seat? A loaded handgun. Cell phone records linked the people in the car to at least one of the four border crossers.

So we’ve got four foreign nationals illegally entering the country through a remote forest crossing, a pre-positioned getaway car with a loaded weapon, coordinated communications, a planned route to New York, and the whole thing filmed on a GoPro like a trophy video. But sure, they were just hiking.

All four men have been charged with entry without inspection in U.S. District Court in Bangor. They all pleaded not guilty on Tuesday and are being held without bail. Which is the correct answer, by the way. You don’t give bail to people who crossed an international border through the woods with a film crew and a armed chauffeur waiting on the other side.

Now here’s what should bother every single one of us. We spend billions of dollars and thousands of man-hours focused on the southern border — and we should, because that’s where the volume is. But this story is a screaming reminder that the northern border is 3,987 miles of mostly unguarded wilderness, and the bad guys know it.

These four didn’t wade across the Rio Grande. They didn’t climb a wall. They walked through the Maine woods on a Thursday morning while two maple syrup guys happened to be driving by. If those workers had left fifteen minutes later, or taken a different route, these men would have been in a car headed for New York before lunch.

How many others have made this walk and nobody was there to see it?

That’s the question that should keep you up at night. Not because we need to panic, but because we need to pay attention. The southern border gets all the headlines, but Canada’s border is a sieve, and the people exploiting it aren’t coming here to tap maple trees.

We got lucky this time. Two hardworking Americans with good instincts saw something wrong and said something. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But we can’t run border security on luck and syrup workers. We need cameras, sensors, patrols, and the political will to admit that threats come from every direction — not just the one that’s convenient to talk about.

Four men with Middle Eastern names, British passports, a GoPro full of evidence, a getaway car with a gun, and a mapped route to New York City just walked into America through the trees.

But don’t worry. They told the judge they were just hiking.