Note: re; ironwood, no doubt that hunters and shooters are being
blamed for much of this also.
Illegal immigrants burying border in garbage
The Associated Press
Jun. 3, 2007 11:30 AM
TUCSON - 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 from
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 immigrants 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 immigrant discards eight 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 illegal
immigrants in 2004-05 alone, the BLM figures that those people left
almost four million pounds of trash 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.
"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.
"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."
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.
In 2002, the United States 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 remediating 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
remediating for immigration-related damage across southeast Arizona,
including $23 million for the first year.
Most of the garbage is left at areas where immigrants 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 immigrants 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.
But clear inroads are being made into the trash problem, said BLM's
McFarlin. Using 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 illegal immigrants
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 seven weeks ago, No More Deaths, an advocacy group that
looks for injured, sick and lost immigrants, 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 federal
government deliberately drives the immigrants 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 Humanos.
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 up the garbage.
Illegal immigrants 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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