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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Photo by Google Earth; labels by Andrew Collison, Philip Williams & Associates
Smuggler's Gulch and the Tijuana River tributary, on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Homeland Security is using newfound power to wall off Tijuana from San Diego. Critics warn it will destroy protected lands and lead to the death of immigrants.
Dec 12, 2005 | On a cloudy November morning along San Diego County's border with Mexico, the Tijuana River is a bubbling, greenish-brown stream peppered with trash. It trickles into a 300-foot gully known as Smuggler's Gulch, a well-worn illegal immigration route. Up the hill from the gulch is a dilapidated fence that continues a few miles west to the Pacific Ocean, a combination of hole-ridden rusting metal and chain-link that reaches into the water. The area isn't exactly picturesque, but this stretch of the U.S. border is at the center of a controversy pitting the Department of Homeland Security against a coalition of environmentalist groups.
Homeland Security plans to finish a job begun in 1996: building a 14-mile-long wall, 10 to 15 feet high and three layers deep, stretching east from the Pacific Ocean to the foothills of the San Ysidro Mountains. Construction on the remaining three and a half miles closest to the ocean has been held up by environmentalists, who have sued to stop it. U.S. officials say the border wall is essential for protecting national security. According to environmentalists, if the Department of Homeland Security prevails in a U.S. District Court hearing Monday, 2,500 acres of federally protected wetlands near the border could be destroyed.
In order to have the lawsuit dismissed and proceed with construction, the Department of Homeland Security is counting on the sweeping power of a new waiver passed into law by Congress in May. The waiver, part of the Real I.D. Act, allows Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to override any law he feels stands in the way of plans for border security, without judicial review. Environmental groups say that by circumventing existing legal protections, the wall will devastate the Tijuana Estuary, home to some of the rarest plants, birds and coastal land in the country. Other opponents, including immigration experts and human rights advocates, argue that the real issue is flawed immigration policy, not terrorism. They say the wall is a waste of nearly $60 million: History has shown that walls don't work; they just push migrants into more dangerous crossing areas where they are more likely to die. If Homeland Security succeeds in having the lawsuit thrown out, critics say, it could also set a precedent with far-reaching impact.
"Homeland Security is starting with environmental laws because we stood up to them first," says Cory Briggs, the attorney representing the environmental groups in San Diego. "If our case is dismissed, environmental laws will be just the first domino to fall. The next person that opposes them on a border security issue, they'll waive other laws too."
In this case, protections from the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act will be cast aside. "All the rules for protecting wetlands, for protecting our drinking water, are disregarded with this waiver," says Jim Peugh, Conservation Committee chair of the San Diego Audubon Society.
Homeland Security's plan includes carving off the tops of two nearby mesas, filling in Smuggler's Gulch with more than 2 million cubic yards of dirt, and building a road across it. An underground pipe will re-route a Tijuana River tributary that now flows through the area. Environmentalists say sediment from the filled-in gulch will flow into the estuary and choke the life out of it. It will also overburden a water treatment system that is already often overwhelmed with sediment during rainstorms. Homeland Security disputes those assessments, but critics say federal officials haven't taken the issue of environmental impact seriously. Andrew Collison is a geomorphologist with the San Francisco environmental hydrology consulting firm Philip Williams & Associates, which produced a review of the potential impact in September 2003. "It looked like the analysis was not very thoroughly reviewed" by government officials, Collison says. The concerns raised by the study, he says, such as rerouting of the Tijuana tributary and types of excessive erosion, were largely ignored. "They just blew it off," he says.
The California Coastal Management Program, a state agency that reviews federal activities affecting the coast, also opposed Homeland Security's plan and offered a more environmentally prudent one in Februry 2004. It was rejected. "We had many, many conversations with Homeland Security, but we couldn't convince them there was a better way for them to do this," says Mark Delaplaine, a CCMP supervisor. "When you give someone a reasonable alternative, you expect they will listen to you. But Homeland Security was just throwing their weight around, saying they could use the waiver."
The waiver was a little-noticed footnote to the Real I.D. Act, which was itself tacked on to an $82 billion spending bill for U.S. troops in Iraq. The purpose of Real I.D. was to implement some of the recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, such as counterfeit-proof driver's licenses and tighter asylum laws. But some conservative congressional Republicans, frustrated in part by the environmentalists' lawsuit to halt construction of the wall, added language exempting the Homeland Security secretary from existing laws and the court system when it came to building barriers at the border. "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of barriers and roads," reads Section 102 of the Real I.D. Act.
"I think it's very dangerous to be suspending laws like this, using blanket waivers," says Doris Meissner, the INS commissioner from 1993 to 2000 and now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. Waivers available on a "case-by-case basis" are more reasonable, she says. "You don't come to an accommodation by simply abandoning laws."
