The Resista
Jul 30
|13:02
After three years of cleanups, the federal government has achieved
no better than a 1 percent solution for the problem of trash left in
Southern Arizona by illegal border-crossers.
Cleanup crews from various agencies, volunteer groups and the
Tohono O'odham Nation hauled about 250,000 pounds of trash from
thousands of acres of federal, state and private land across Southern
Arizona in 2002 to 2005, says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
But that's only a fraction of the nearly 25 million pounds of trash thought to be out there.
Authorities estimate the 3.2 million-plus entrants caught by the
Border Patrol dropped that much garbage in the Southern Arizona desert
from July 1999 through June 2005. The figure assumes that each illegal
entrant discards 8 pounds of trash, the weight of some abandoned
backpacks found in the desert.
The trash is piling up faster than it can be cleaned up.
Considering that the Border Patrol apprehended more than 577,000
entrants in 2004-05 alone, the BLM figures that those people left
almost 4 million pounds of trash in that same year.
That's 16 times what was picked up in three years. And that
doesn't include the unknown amounts of garbage left by border-crossers
who don't get caught.
Diverse trash found all over
"We're keeping up with the trash only in certain locations, in
areas that we've hit as many as three times," said Shela McFarlin,
BLM's special assistant for international programs.
The trash includes water bottles, sweaters, jeans, razors, soap,
medications, food, ropes, batteries, cell phones, radios, homemade
weapons and human waste.
It has been found in large quantities as high as Miller Peak,
towering more than 9,400 feet in the Huachuca Mountains, as well as in
low desert such as Organ Pipe National Monument and Cabeza Prieta
National Wildlife Refuge.
It's even started turning up in smaller amounts in hiking areas
closer to Tucson, such as Josephine Saddle in the Santa Rita Mountains
on the route to Mount Wrightson, says the Southern Arizona Hiking Club.
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| In the Buenos Aires National WildlifeRefuge near Arivaca, No More Deaths volunteer Mark Kelso picks his way through a trash-laden area that is a pickup site for illegal entrants, an illustration of the nearly 25 million pounds of garbage thought to have been dropped in Southern Arizona. |
"In the Huachucas, you are almost wading through empty gallon
water jugs," said Steve Singkofer, the Hiking Club's president.
"There's literally thousands of water jugs, clothes, shoes. You could
send 1,000 people out there and they could each pick up a dozen water
jugs, and they couldn't get it all."
Cleanup not cheap, easy
While nobody has an exact cost estimate for removing all the
garbage, it's clearly not cheap. But McFarlin agrees with several
advocacy groups that without a tightening of controls on illegal
immigration, a guest-worker program or other reform of federal border
policy, the trash will just keep coming regardless of what's spent.
The financial details:
● In 2002, the U.S. estimated that removing all litter from lands
just in Southeast Arizona — east of the Tohono Reservation — would cost
about $4.5 million over five years. This count didn't include such
trash hotbeds as Ironwood Forest National Monument, the Altar Valley,
Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta.
● Since then, Congress appropriated about $3.4 million for a wide
range of environmental remediation measures in all of Southern Arizona.
This includes repairing roads, building fences and removing abandoned
cars.
● The five-year tab is $62.9 million for all forms of
environmental remediation for immigration-related damage across
Southeast Arizona, including $23 million for the first year.
Waste unhealthy, unsightly
Most of the garbage is left at areas where entrants wait to be
picked up by smugglers. The accumulation of disintegrating toilet
paper, human feces and rotting food is a health and safety issue for
residents of these areas and visitors to public lands, a new BLM report
says.
"It's particularly serious in areas where there are livestock,"
said Robin Hoover, pastor of the First Christian Church in Tucson and
president of Humane Borders, a group that puts water tanks in the
desert for the entrants and coordinates monthly cleanups of Ironwood
Monument and other sites.
"I've even found injectable drugs in the desert," he said. "It's
rare when we find that kind of stuff, but there's tons of
over-the-counter medication out there. If some cow comes along and eats
a bunch of pills, that would be a real sick cow."
The trash also isn't good for wildlife, said Arizona Game and Fish
spokesman Dana Yost. Birds and mammals can get tangled up in it or eat
it, causing digestive problems, Yost said. It's not at all uncommon to
find the trash in bears' stomachs, he said. Plastic bags, foil wrappers
and certain foods are all problems.
Remote areas need more help
But clear inroads are being made into the trash problem, said
BLM's McFarlin. Using the U.S. money, various local and federal
agencies, the Tohono O'odham Tribe, the conservationist Malpais
Borderlands Group and student youth corps remove trash from the most
obvious and accessible areas, she said.
What needs tackling now are more remote areas such as wilderness,
mountains and deserts far from major roads, she said. A couple of
times, authorities have had to use helicopters or mules to haul stuff
out of such areas.
This summer, with Border Patrol apprehensions of entrants down,
the Tohono O'odham Tribe is seeing less trash on the ground than usual,
said Gary Olson, the tribe's solid-waste administrator.
"I don't know whether they're hiding their trash or whether they are just not coming," Olson said.
But only six weeks ago, No More Deaths, an advocacy group that
looks for injured, sick and lost entrants, came across a
10,000-square-foot area five miles west of Arivaca littered with
hundreds and hundreds of backpacks.
"I've never seen anything that size. It's unbelievable," said Steve Johnston, who coordinates the group's camp near Arivaca.
Other activists from Derechos Humanos, Defenders of Wildlife and
No More Deaths say the trash piles show what happens when the feds
deliberately drive the entrants into the desert, by sealing the borders
in cities.
"If you were going to cities, you wouldn't need to carry three
days' worth of food," said Kat Rodriguez, a coordinator-organizer for
Derechos.
But a Cochise County activist who has been photographing garbage
and other signs of damage from illegal immigration for five years said
she is appalled the federal government is spending tax dollars to pick
this garbage up.
Illegal entrants should pick up the trash themselves, said Cindy Kolb, who helped found the group Civil Homeland Defense.
"Our mothers did not pay someone to pick up our trash," Kolb said.
"We were taught to pick it up ourselves and to practice civic pride as
law-abiding citizens."
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