Texas Observer
September 7, 2011
by Melissa del Bosque
The Department of Homeland Security is pushing for 14 miles of border wall to be built through Hidalgo and Starr counties even though it could flood U.S. towns and violate a treaty with Mexico.
In 2006, Congress passed its Secure Fence Act mandating the construction of 700 miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of Texas landowners were sued and their land seized by the Department of Homeland Security.
Residents in the communities of Roma, Los Ebanos and Rio Grande City got a reprieve from construction, however, because of “engineering and hydraulic problems,” according to U.S. Congressman Henry Cuellar, who said in a 2008 McAllen Monitor story: "Realistically and practically, they're basically passing this decision (on the border fence) to the next administration. Certainly, for my constituents, we have a victory."
The “engineering and hydraulic problems” the Congressman alluded to was the fact that the 18-foot impermeable fence would have to be constructed in a floodplain to fulfill the congressional mandate. Building a fence that costs approximately $4.5 million a mile in a floodplain sounds like a joke. And it would be if taxpayers weren’t paying for it, and if it weren’t common practice for the Department of Homeland Security to build fences in washes, floodplains and riverbeds along the border.
Recently, 40 feet of steel border fence washed away during a flash flood in the Arizona desert. This was after the U.S. Border Patrol had been warned by Arizona park officials that the fence would be washed away during the summer monsoon season. Despite their warnings, Border Patrol issued an environmental assessment saying that the fence “would not impede the natural flow of water or cause flooding.”
The destroyed fence constructed by Kiewit Western Co. cost taxpayers $21.3 million to build, according to the Arizona Daily Star.
When it comes to the border wall, the Department of Homeland Security has a history of avoiding scientific data and environmental impacts when it stands in the way of constructing border fence.
The 14-mile section of border fence through Roma, Los Ebanos and Rio Grande City is no different. Several hydrological studies conducted by a private firm Baker Engineering hired by U.S. Customs and Border Protection have shown that an 18-foot impermeable fence in a floodplain will either push floodwaters into Mexico – violating a 1970 international treaty or it will worsen flooding on the U.S. side of the border.
Despite the findings, government documents reveal that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (the DHS agency) which oversees construction of the fence is pushing the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), which has jurisdiction over the Rio Grande to sign off on building the 14-mile fence in the floodplain.
In a February 2010 letter, David Aguilar, CBP’s deputy commissioner applied pressure to IBWC’s Commissioner Ed Drusina to approve the project despite his agency and Mexico’s opposition to constructing the fence.
“Because the Mexican Section of the IBWC has opposed all proposed border fencing
within the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers’ floodplains since the enactment of the
Secure Fence Act (regardless of the expected floodplain impacts), Commissioner Ruth
was not optimistic that the Mexican Commissioner would agree to support the proposed
fencing and indicated during the January 6th meeting that an unilateral decision would
likely be needed to construct the fence segments. We understand that the Mexican
Commissioner did in fact recently inform Commissioner Ruth that Mexico would oppose
the fence segments if formally submitted to them for consideration.
For the numerous reasons stated above, we respectfully request that the USIBWC and
Department of State reconsider your position and approve a unilateral decision to allow
us to proceed with the design and construction of the O-1, O-2 and O-3 fence segments.”
The IBWC was not persuaded, however. “Until other analysis can demonstrate that the fence will not deflect flows or increase water elevation above our criteria we must again deny our support for the proposed alignment of the fence…” wrote Commissioner Drusina to Alan Bersin, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.
Bersin wrote back asking for a meeting with high level officials from the State Department, the IBWC and USCBP to talk about “challenges” to building the border fence segments “which are urgently needed to secure this area of the border.” One challenge Bersin listed was “Mexico’s recent opposition to border fencing regardless of hydraulic modeling results.”
IBWC met with U.S. Customs and Border Protection two more times. The end result was that CBP paid Baker Engineering to create yet another flood model, to try and prove that a wall in a floodplain was a good idea, says border resident Scott Nicol, a Sierra Club volunteer and author of the No Border Wall blog. Nicol learned of this during a conference call with IBWC officials. He also learned that the Baker Engineering report will be turned over to IBWC any day. If the agency signs off on it CBP could begin construction of the fence. The Department of Homeland Security has already seized several properties in these cities and is making an effort to speed up lawsuit settlements with landowners.
Nicol started looking into the new fence construction after he saw a brief mention of it in a government report last spring. “I thought they’d given up,” he says. “But apparently they were really pushing to get it done.”
Nicol worries that the new fence segments will flood the U.S. communities. He's examined the various Baker Engineering flood models and is especially concerned about the Los Ebanos wall.
“It could have serious implications for local residents,” he says. “There at the split point the river takes a sharp southward bend, while the wall runs due east. There could conceivably be a dry space between the community, which would have water sent towards it by the wall, and the river to its south (near the hand-drawn ferry). Even worse, the wall abruptly turns to the north at the end of town. This could bottle up waters that have been split off from the river, trapping flood water in the community.”
The question for these border communities now is will the IBWC be steamrollered by the Department of Homeland Security? It’s happened before and it could happen again. And if it does, once again U.S. taxpayers and border communities will pay the price.
http://www.texasobserver.org/lalinea/dhs-pushes-for-more-border-fence-in-floodplain#
Showing posts with label water. Show all posts
Showing posts with label water. Show all posts
Friday, September 9, 2011
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Bond issue could help fix county's drainage system
Rio Grande Guardian
September 8, 2011
by Steve Taylor
McALLEN, Sept. 8 - Concerns have been raised as to whether Hidalgo County Commissioners can be trusted to spend money in the right areas if it is raised on the bond market for drainage projects.
Those showing concern, such as Alton Mayor Salvador Vela, point to the fact that $60 million raised in 2006 was spent not on fixing drainage problems in the Delta region, which is where voters were told the money would go, but was siphoned off to build a border wall near the McAllen Foreign Trade Zone.
“County commissioners changed their minds because of politics, to favor one group, a certain part of McAllen. They did not care about the poverty stricken people in the Delta. That really gets me,” Vela told the Guardian.
Asked if the people of Alton would vote for a bond issue if the money was used to fix the drainage system, Vela said no. “They would not. I would tell them. I would tell them not to vote for it. If I tell them, don’t vote for it they won’t. They know me,” he said.
Vela made his comments at the end of a meeting of the Hidalgo County Advisory Committee, which met at the McAllen Chamber of Commerce offices on Wednesday. The 25-member committee was set up by Hidalgo County Commissioners Court to advise on drainage matters and to disseminate information to the general public.
Hidalgo County Drainage District No. 1 Director Godfrey Garza defended the actions of county commissioners in a lively exchange with Ann Cass, executive director of Proyecto Azteca. “The money went to build the border wall, not the levees that were most vulnerable,” Cass said.
Not so, said Garza. He said that by leveraging the $60 million from the bond issue, county commissioners were able to “merge” their funds with $200 million from the Department of Homeland Security in order to reconstruct levees in the interior floodway.
Garza said if the levees had not been repaired, FEMA would have decertified them, leaving Hidalgo County residents and businesses unable to buy flood insurance. “We saw the need or the (Commissioner’s) Court saw the need. They said, ‘hey, this (decertification) could kill the economy of the county as a whole’,” Garza said.
Discussion on whether Hidalgo County Commissioners should go to the bond markets again to pay for the renovation of the county’s drainage system was initiated at Wednesday’s meeting by Sharyland businessman Joe Phillips.
Phillips said a one cent tax effort across Hidalgo County could generate approximately $2.6 million a year. That money could be used as collateral for a bond issue, he said.
“If we were to do a 30 year or 40 year bond issue going out, one penny, just a penny, could basically resolve our issues in the western part of the county, resolve our issues in Edcouch-Elsa, resolve our issues in the other part of Precinct 1,” Phillips said.
“I am a marketer. From a marketing perspective, selling one penny to resolve our drainage issues to me is a no brainer and very easy to sell.”
Phillips said he hoped Hidalgo County leaders would “think big” when it comes to raising the funds to fix the county’s drainage issues.
“Hidalgo County is growing tremendously. I think people are aware of the recent floods and what can happen. I think people in the metropolitan area of McAllen are aware of the fact that some of the monies were originally destined to go to Edcouch-Elsa came in to protect the industrial base. But that does not mean we do not need to very quickly get in and make that right. With record low interest rates, now is the time, probably to think big rather than small,” Phillips said.
Garza said the board of Drainage District No. 1, which comprises Hidalgo County Judge Ramon Garcia and the four county commissioners, agree with such an approach. He said the board was looking to find the best financing mechanism and that he could come back to the advisory committee in three or four months with such a plan.
Phillips said he has spoken to many business owners in Hidalgo County and he detects no opposition to a tax increase if the money is used to resolve the county’s drainage issues.
“I have heard people are say it may take three or four cents and that’s nothing to make sure we never get flooded out. There is a lot of sympathy, I think, within the business community of the whole Valley. It is not just the McAllen area or Mission area. We’ve got to make sure Edcouch-Elsa does not flood. We’ve got to make sure other parts of Precinct 1 do not flood. Everybody understands. The colonias were built, people bought because land was cheap. It does not matter. We’ve got to take care of them,” Phillips said.
Giving an overview of Hidalgo County’s efforts to improve the drainage system over the decades, Garza said the federal government has hardly ever come through for the county. He said in the absence of federal help, county leaders were taking the initiative. He said county commissioners are about to issue a ‘Request for Qualifications’ to hire a firm to begin updating of the county’s master drainage plan. He said the plan has not been updated for the last 14 years.
Asked by a reporter how much it would cost to develop a quality drainage system in Hidalgo County, one that would safeguard all residents, Garza said: “You are probably looking at anywhere between $500 million to $700 million.” Asked how much money the county has for such a project, Garza said: “Zero.” Asked how it could be financed, Garza said: “It is going to be a combination of state money, bond money, a project to recapture water where we would sell water and use the money to offset bonding needs so that we do not need to raise so much from taxes. We are looking at a bunch of different avenues that are out there.”
Fixing the levees and building a border wall is supposed to be the responsibility of the federal government. Drainage Advisory Committee member Virginia Townsend said she would like to see Hidalgo County recover the $60 million it spent on the levee-wall project. Garza replied that county commissioners are about to hire a firm that will seek to recover the funds.
One of the co-chairs of the Drainage Advisory Committee is Dr. Francisco Guajardo, a professor at the University of Texas-Pan American. When discussion turned to whether county commissioners were right to move drainage money earmarked for the Delta to the McAllen Foreign Trade Zone, Guajardo said: “I appreciate the business community… but San Carlos and Edcouch don’t feel good about the $100 million (bond issue) that was passed previously.”
“I do not blame them,” Phillips responded.
Guajardo said he would like to see more documentation about the state of the county’s drainage system posted online. “Let’s begin to post stuff that can help our community understand what this is,” he told the committee.
Guajardo also said that he and the other co-chair of the committee, McAllen City Commissioner Jim Darling, will be meeting with County Judge Garcia and the county commissioners within the next few days to ascertain the exact function of the advisory committee.
“There needs to be a clear communication between this committee and the elected officials. We need to understand what their thinking is. I see this as a reciprocal kind of communication. I do not think it will be a one sided thing,” Guajardo said.
http://www.riograndeguardian.com/rggnews_story.asp?story_no=20
September 8, 2011
by Steve Taylor
McALLEN, Sept. 8 - Concerns have been raised as to whether Hidalgo County Commissioners can be trusted to spend money in the right areas if it is raised on the bond market for drainage projects.
Those showing concern, such as Alton Mayor Salvador Vela, point to the fact that $60 million raised in 2006 was spent not on fixing drainage problems in the Delta region, which is where voters were told the money would go, but was siphoned off to build a border wall near the McAllen Foreign Trade Zone.
“County commissioners changed their minds because of politics, to favor one group, a certain part of McAllen. They did not care about the poverty stricken people in the Delta. That really gets me,” Vela told the Guardian.
Asked if the people of Alton would vote for a bond issue if the money was used to fix the drainage system, Vela said no. “They would not. I would tell them. I would tell them not to vote for it. If I tell them, don’t vote for it they won’t. They know me,” he said.
Vela made his comments at the end of a meeting of the Hidalgo County Advisory Committee, which met at the McAllen Chamber of Commerce offices on Wednesday. The 25-member committee was set up by Hidalgo County Commissioners Court to advise on drainage matters and to disseminate information to the general public.
Hidalgo County Drainage District No. 1 Director Godfrey Garza defended the actions of county commissioners in a lively exchange with Ann Cass, executive director of Proyecto Azteca. “The money went to build the border wall, not the levees that were most vulnerable,” Cass said.
Not so, said Garza. He said that by leveraging the $60 million from the bond issue, county commissioners were able to “merge” their funds with $200 million from the Department of Homeland Security in order to reconstruct levees in the interior floodway.
Garza said if the levees had not been repaired, FEMA would have decertified them, leaving Hidalgo County residents and businesses unable to buy flood insurance. “We saw the need or the (Commissioner’s) Court saw the need. They said, ‘hey, this (decertification) could kill the economy of the county as a whole’,” Garza said.
Discussion on whether Hidalgo County Commissioners should go to the bond markets again to pay for the renovation of the county’s drainage system was initiated at Wednesday’s meeting by Sharyland businessman Joe Phillips.
Phillips said a one cent tax effort across Hidalgo County could generate approximately $2.6 million a year. That money could be used as collateral for a bond issue, he said.
“If we were to do a 30 year or 40 year bond issue going out, one penny, just a penny, could basically resolve our issues in the western part of the county, resolve our issues in Edcouch-Elsa, resolve our issues in the other part of Precinct 1,” Phillips said.
“I am a marketer. From a marketing perspective, selling one penny to resolve our drainage issues to me is a no brainer and very easy to sell.”
Phillips said he hoped Hidalgo County leaders would “think big” when it comes to raising the funds to fix the county’s drainage issues.
“Hidalgo County is growing tremendously. I think people are aware of the recent floods and what can happen. I think people in the metropolitan area of McAllen are aware of the fact that some of the monies were originally destined to go to Edcouch-Elsa came in to protect the industrial base. But that does not mean we do not need to very quickly get in and make that right. With record low interest rates, now is the time, probably to think big rather than small,” Phillips said.
Garza said the board of Drainage District No. 1, which comprises Hidalgo County Judge Ramon Garcia and the four county commissioners, agree with such an approach. He said the board was looking to find the best financing mechanism and that he could come back to the advisory committee in three or four months with such a plan.
Phillips said he has spoken to many business owners in Hidalgo County and he detects no opposition to a tax increase if the money is used to resolve the county’s drainage issues.
“I have heard people are say it may take three or four cents and that’s nothing to make sure we never get flooded out. There is a lot of sympathy, I think, within the business community of the whole Valley. It is not just the McAllen area or Mission area. We’ve got to make sure Edcouch-Elsa does not flood. We’ve got to make sure other parts of Precinct 1 do not flood. Everybody understands. The colonias were built, people bought because land was cheap. It does not matter. We’ve got to take care of them,” Phillips said.
Giving an overview of Hidalgo County’s efforts to improve the drainage system over the decades, Garza said the federal government has hardly ever come through for the county. He said in the absence of federal help, county leaders were taking the initiative. He said county commissioners are about to issue a ‘Request for Qualifications’ to hire a firm to begin updating of the county’s master drainage plan. He said the plan has not been updated for the last 14 years.
Asked by a reporter how much it would cost to develop a quality drainage system in Hidalgo County, one that would safeguard all residents, Garza said: “You are probably looking at anywhere between $500 million to $700 million.” Asked how much money the county has for such a project, Garza said: “Zero.” Asked how it could be financed, Garza said: “It is going to be a combination of state money, bond money, a project to recapture water where we would sell water and use the money to offset bonding needs so that we do not need to raise so much from taxes. We are looking at a bunch of different avenues that are out there.”
Fixing the levees and building a border wall is supposed to be the responsibility of the federal government. Drainage Advisory Committee member Virginia Townsend said she would like to see Hidalgo County recover the $60 million it spent on the levee-wall project. Garza replied that county commissioners are about to hire a firm that will seek to recover the funds.
One of the co-chairs of the Drainage Advisory Committee is Dr. Francisco Guajardo, a professor at the University of Texas-Pan American. When discussion turned to whether county commissioners were right to move drainage money earmarked for the Delta to the McAllen Foreign Trade Zone, Guajardo said: “I appreciate the business community… but San Carlos and Edcouch don’t feel good about the $100 million (bond issue) that was passed previously.”
“I do not blame them,” Phillips responded.
Guajardo said he would like to see more documentation about the state of the county’s drainage system posted online. “Let’s begin to post stuff that can help our community understand what this is,” he told the committee.
Guajardo also said that he and the other co-chair of the committee, McAllen City Commissioner Jim Darling, will be meeting with County Judge Garcia and the county commissioners within the next few days to ascertain the exact function of the advisory committee.
“There needs to be a clear communication between this committee and the elected officials. We need to understand what their thinking is. I see this as a reciprocal kind of communication. I do not think it will be a one sided thing,” Guajardo said.
http://www.riograndeguardian.com/rggnews_story.asp?story_no=20
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
July proved deadly month for migrants
Arizona Daily Star
August 3, 2010
by Brady McCombs
July was the second-deadliest month on record for illegal immigrants crossing in Southern Arizona, with 59 bodies ending up at the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office.
The month's total ranks second only to the 69 deaths recorded by the office in July 2005.
The death toll began early in the month and continued at such a fast pace the office had to bring in additional storage space to house the bodies.
• On July 2, the office handled the bodies of five illegal immigrants who died in Arizona's desert.
• Thirteen more bodies came in over the next eight days. Then, six July 11 and four more bodies a day later.
• July 15 was the worst day, with seven bodies: five men and two women.
The deadly month brings the calendar year-to-date total through July for the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office to 153, ahead of the past two years at the same time and only slightly behind the 159 handled through the same date in the 2007, a record-breaking year.
"I hope that people - no matter which side of the immigration debate they are on - agree that individuals dying in our community is an absolute tragedy and that something needs to be done about," said Kat Rodriguez of Coalición de Derechos Humanos.
The Medical Examiner's Office has handled the bodies of more than 1,650 illegal border crossers found since 2001 on the Tohono O'odham Nation, and in Pima, Santa Cruz and Pinal counties.
The Cochise County Medical Examiner's Office reported two bodies in July, bringing its yearly total to 19, compared with 21 at the same time last year.
More than two-thirds of the dead illegal immigrants who ended up at the Pima County office this past month had died recently, said Dr. Bruce Parks, chief medical examiner. All but nine were men, and 46 of the 59 remained unidentified.
The busy month filled the medical examiner's two refrigerated storage spaces, prompting officials to put a 55-foot refrigerated trailer in service to house additional bodies, Parks said.
It's difficult to track exactly how much taxpayer money is spent handling the illegal border crossers because the 27 employees fit the recoveries, autopsies and investigations in with the rest of their work. One way to estimate is by multiplying the average cost of an autopsy, about $2,000, times the number of bodies, which this year would total $306,000.
It's unclear exactly why this July was so deadly, but heat obviously was a factor: At least 32 of the 59 people died from hyperthermia or exposure to the heat, medical examiner records show. Most of the other causes of death are pending or undetermined.
In terms of the average temperature recorded at Tucson International Airport, July was the seventh-warmest on record for the metro area, said meteorologist John Glueck of the National Weather Service. The month also had 18 days of 100 degrees or higher temperatures in Tucson, with the highs in the desert usually much hotter than the recorded highs in Tucson.
The increase in deaths doesn't track with the Border Patrol's apprehensions, which are down for the sixth straight year. Agents in the Tucson Sector made 184,000 apprehensions from Oct. 1 through June 30, compared with 185,500 at the same time last fiscal year, said Border Patrol spokesman Omar Candelaria. The agency didn't have figures through July available yet.
The Border Patrol believes these numbers show fewer people are crossing, Candelaria said. With 3,200 permanent agents and 400 more here temporarily from other sectors, the agency has more areas under control than before, he said.
Many experts believe the massive buildup of agents, fences and technology along Arizona's stretch of U.S.-Mexico border has forced illegal immigrants into walking longer distances in more treacherous terrain.
"People are being pushed into more and more isolated areas," Rodriguez said.
Candelaria agrees that illegal immigrants are crossing in more remote areas because of the increased presence. "The smugglers are trying to find the places where we are not at," he said.
But the blame should be on the smugglers, not the Border Patrol, he said.
"To lay the blame on the Border Patrol for this is just not right," Candelaria said. "What we are doing is to protect the nation. The smugglers are the ones taking them to these far-out areas and not preparing them."
The Border Patrol - with 48 agents assigned to its search, trauma and rescue team and 200 others who are trained EMTs - has rescued 390 illegal border crossers in the Tucson Sector from Oct. 1 to June 30. That's up from the 300 rescued through the same time period the year before.
With one of the hottest months over and rain more frequent, the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office hopes the death toll will slow, although there have already been two bodies brought in during the first two days of August.
"It will slow down," Parks said. "I can't imagine it getting any worse."
On StarNet: Search an online database of people who have died attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, at go.azstarnet.com/borderdeaths
http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/article_e2da2bc8-9e08-55a5-bce6-bd16db7f3599.html
August 3, 2010
by Brady McCombs
July was the second-deadliest month on record for illegal immigrants crossing in Southern Arizona, with 59 bodies ending up at the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office.
The month's total ranks second only to the 69 deaths recorded by the office in July 2005.
The death toll began early in the month and continued at such a fast pace the office had to bring in additional storage space to house the bodies.
• On July 2, the office handled the bodies of five illegal immigrants who died in Arizona's desert.
• Thirteen more bodies came in over the next eight days. Then, six July 11 and four more bodies a day later.
• July 15 was the worst day, with seven bodies: five men and two women.
The deadly month brings the calendar year-to-date total through July for the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office to 153, ahead of the past two years at the same time and only slightly behind the 159 handled through the same date in the 2007, a record-breaking year.
"I hope that people - no matter which side of the immigration debate they are on - agree that individuals dying in our community is an absolute tragedy and that something needs to be done about," said Kat Rodriguez of Coalición de Derechos Humanos.
The Medical Examiner's Office has handled the bodies of more than 1,650 illegal border crossers found since 2001 on the Tohono O'odham Nation, and in Pima, Santa Cruz and Pinal counties.
The Cochise County Medical Examiner's Office reported two bodies in July, bringing its yearly total to 19, compared with 21 at the same time last year.
More than two-thirds of the dead illegal immigrants who ended up at the Pima County office this past month had died recently, said Dr. Bruce Parks, chief medical examiner. All but nine were men, and 46 of the 59 remained unidentified.
The busy month filled the medical examiner's two refrigerated storage spaces, prompting officials to put a 55-foot refrigerated trailer in service to house additional bodies, Parks said.
It's difficult to track exactly how much taxpayer money is spent handling the illegal border crossers because the 27 employees fit the recoveries, autopsies and investigations in with the rest of their work. One way to estimate is by multiplying the average cost of an autopsy, about $2,000, times the number of bodies, which this year would total $306,000.
It's unclear exactly why this July was so deadly, but heat obviously was a factor: At least 32 of the 59 people died from hyperthermia or exposure to the heat, medical examiner records show. Most of the other causes of death are pending or undetermined.
In terms of the average temperature recorded at Tucson International Airport, July was the seventh-warmest on record for the metro area, said meteorologist John Glueck of the National Weather Service. The month also had 18 days of 100 degrees or higher temperatures in Tucson, with the highs in the desert usually much hotter than the recorded highs in Tucson.
The increase in deaths doesn't track with the Border Patrol's apprehensions, which are down for the sixth straight year. Agents in the Tucson Sector made 184,000 apprehensions from Oct. 1 through June 30, compared with 185,500 at the same time last fiscal year, said Border Patrol spokesman Omar Candelaria. The agency didn't have figures through July available yet.
The Border Patrol believes these numbers show fewer people are crossing, Candelaria said. With 3,200 permanent agents and 400 more here temporarily from other sectors, the agency has more areas under control than before, he said.
Many experts believe the massive buildup of agents, fences and technology along Arizona's stretch of U.S.-Mexico border has forced illegal immigrants into walking longer distances in more treacherous terrain.
"People are being pushed into more and more isolated areas," Rodriguez said.
Candelaria agrees that illegal immigrants are crossing in more remote areas because of the increased presence. "The smugglers are trying to find the places where we are not at," he said.
But the blame should be on the smugglers, not the Border Patrol, he said.
"To lay the blame on the Border Patrol for this is just not right," Candelaria said. "What we are doing is to protect the nation. The smugglers are the ones taking them to these far-out areas and not preparing them."
The Border Patrol - with 48 agents assigned to its search, trauma and rescue team and 200 others who are trained EMTs - has rescued 390 illegal border crossers in the Tucson Sector from Oct. 1 to June 30. That's up from the 300 rescued through the same time period the year before.
With one of the hottest months over and rain more frequent, the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office hopes the death toll will slow, although there have already been two bodies brought in during the first two days of August.
"It will slow down," Parks said. "I can't imagine it getting any worse."
On StarNet: Search an online database of people who have died attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, at go.azstarnet.com/borderdeaths
http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/article_e2da2bc8-9e08-55a5-bce6-bd16db7f3599.html
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Arizona's Immigrant Death Spiral
The Daily Beast
July 29, 2010
by Bryan Curtis
Diego Gutierrez, a 25-year-old man Mexican man, illegally crossed the border into Arizona sometime around last Friday. Gutierrez was handsome and well built, with big eyes and a head of thick, black hair. In a photo taken by a Pima County medical examiner, he appeared to have a Roman nose. After trudging through the desert on days when temperatures at a nearby airfield reached 106 degrees, Gutierrez began to complain of stomach cramps. He vomited. Gutierrez’s father, who had crossed the border with him, left his son and flagged down a Border Patrol officer. The officer later reported that he and the father found Gutierrez’s body in the wee hours of Monday morning, July 26. Gutierrez was lying on his back under a tree; his head, fittingly enough, was pointed north.
Until a federal judge intervened Wednesday, Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 was set to go into effect with much talk of death. Explaining why the state’s police officers should ask anyone they deem suspicious to produce proof of citizenship, Gov. Jan Brewer spoke vividly of immigrant crime, drug cartels, “bodies in the desert.” In fact, authorities are finding many dead bodies in the Arizona desert these days, but they are not the victims of immigrant murderers. They are the immigrants themselves. What 1070 misses is that it’s far more dangerous to sneak into Arizona than it is to live here.
This month, there have been 58 dead migrants, including Diego Gutierrez, delivered to the medical examiner of Pima County, the large southern Arizona county that stretches from Tucson south to the border. One hundred and fifty-two dead border crossers have turned up in the office since January. To compare that number to much-fussed about immigrant crime statistics, 152 is more than the total number of people murdered in Phoenix, by anyone, in all of 2009. And if July’s migrant death toll won't reach the record total of July 2005, when the remains of 68 dead border-crossers turned up, Dr. Bruce Parks, the county’s chief medical examiner, told me he was concerned enough that he ordered a refrigerated truck to be parked outside his office to store the overflowing bodies.
Parks is a trim, balding man, and when I met him in his office Tuesday he was listening to jazz standards. When he performed on autopsy on Gutierrez's body the day before, Parks found him sadly unremarkable. Gutierrez had on blue jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers, and he was carrying a Mexican voter registration card. He had scratches on his wrist, maybe from a cholla cactus or from sleeping under a mesquite tree. Parks showed me two photographs of Gutierrez’s body. The first was taken out in the desert, a body bag unzipped to reveal Gutierrez’s still-vital face. The second photo was taken by Parks himself some hours later at his office. Gutierrez’s face had turned a greenish-red color, and his chest and shoulders were marbled with blue lines. When Parks touched Gutierrez’s skin, he recalled, it gave way easily, because his body had filled with gas. There were no signs of trauma, which means Gutierrez had almost certainly died of hyperthermia. He was too hot.
Gutierrez is far away from the debate over 1070, but maybe he shouldn’t be. It’s a longstanding gambit of politicians—especially Arizona politicians—to say it’s easy for an immigrant to cross into the United States. But it’s probably harder to cross into Arizona and stay here than ever. After border-security pushes in California and Texas redirected migrant traffic to Arizona, the feds beefed up defenses in border cities like Nogales, built parts of a border wall—and Barack Obama has ordered more than 500 National Guardsmen sent to the Arizona border on August 1. Those measures, in turn, have pushed the migrant traffic into remote desert, into the Altar Valley to the east or the sprawling Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation to the west. It's telling that while the number of border crossers into Arizona has decreased in recent years due to the recession, the number of migrant deaths has gone up.
For an Arizona politician, the border is everything. For an immigrant, it is merely a starting line. After crossing the border, an immigrant in Arizona enters a dangerous neutral zone full of Border Patrol agents, jittery locals, and dangerous plants and reptiles. According to Dan Millis, a volunteer with No More Deaths, a group that provides water and food for immigrants in the desert, this zone can stretch for 30 miles depending on which of the spider web of migrant trails the immigrant follows toward a city or a highway.
Diego Gutierrez died in the neutral zone, and Millis and I drove out to the spot where his father flagged down the Border Patrol to get a sense of what he experienced. The Sonoran Desert has become such a reliable morgue that No More Deaths volunteers are always prepared to stumble upon bodies, Mills said, and “everybody thinks about it.” Millis is tall and bearded with twinkling eyes that disguise a thoughtful demeanor. He told me that he, too, discovered a body. In 2008, Millis and three friends were taking food to a migrant trail in the Altar Valley when they came upon the decomposing remains of a 14-year-old Mexican girl. The girl was lying on her back and her feet were floating in a puddle.
The remains matched the description of a girl named Josseline Janiletha Hernandez Quinteros who had gone missing three weeks before. She was easily identified because her sweatpants had “Hollywood” written on the seat. It had pleased Mills to provide closure for Hernandez’s family, some of whom would later come to the site to mark it as a memorial. But the act of discovery also weighed heavily on him. “It’s sort of a curse to find somebody dead,” he said.
After a two-hour drive through the reservation, past border patrolmen peeking into cars and scanning the horizon with binoculars, we came to the appointed spot, the 15th milepost on Route 21. Despite the lingering pall of death, the place was quite beautiful. The sun was making its final approach in the west, turning that part of the sky chalk-white and the eastern sky a deep, marine blue. Millis and I could hear bullfrogs burbling in some distant pool. The desert was both more ordinary and more cartoonish than what you see in the movies—an ugly, dusty track would be interrupted by a towering Saguaro cactus. You only had to take a few steps away from the car to feel desperately alone.
To think about the dreadful final moments of migrants like Gutierrez was to remove Arizona's immigration debate from rhetorical abstraction. There is no wave of immigrant crime in Arizona. Phoenix, according to the FBI, has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the country. No Arizona county coroner has reported a beheaded crime victim in the desert, as Jan Brewer ominously charged. And yet when confronted with a bona fide epidemic in its southern desert, Arizona has chosen to punt.
As we looked around, I recalled something Bruce Parks, the medical examiner, had told me. When the truck bearing Gutierrez’s body came into his office, it was also carrying the bodies of three Guatemalan immigrants. Two of them had probably died like Diego, due to the hyperthermia. According to the field report, the third immigrant, adrift in a vast, hot desert, had hanged himself.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-28/arizonas-real-immigration-problem-migrant-deaths/
July 29, 2010
by Bryan Curtis
Diego Gutierrez, a 25-year-old man Mexican man, illegally crossed the border into Arizona sometime around last Friday. Gutierrez was handsome and well built, with big eyes and a head of thick, black hair. In a photo taken by a Pima County medical examiner, he appeared to have a Roman nose. After trudging through the desert on days when temperatures at a nearby airfield reached 106 degrees, Gutierrez began to complain of stomach cramps. He vomited. Gutierrez’s father, who had crossed the border with him, left his son and flagged down a Border Patrol officer. The officer later reported that he and the father found Gutierrez’s body in the wee hours of Monday morning, July 26. Gutierrez was lying on his back under a tree; his head, fittingly enough, was pointed north.
Until a federal judge intervened Wednesday, Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 was set to go into effect with much talk of death. Explaining why the state’s police officers should ask anyone they deem suspicious to produce proof of citizenship, Gov. Jan Brewer spoke vividly of immigrant crime, drug cartels, “bodies in the desert.” In fact, authorities are finding many dead bodies in the Arizona desert these days, but they are not the victims of immigrant murderers. They are the immigrants themselves. What 1070 misses is that it’s far more dangerous to sneak into Arizona than it is to live here.
This month, there have been 58 dead migrants, including Diego Gutierrez, delivered to the medical examiner of Pima County, the large southern Arizona county that stretches from Tucson south to the border. One hundred and fifty-two dead border crossers have turned up in the office since January. To compare that number to much-fussed about immigrant crime statistics, 152 is more than the total number of people murdered in Phoenix, by anyone, in all of 2009. And if July’s migrant death toll won't reach the record total of July 2005, when the remains of 68 dead border-crossers turned up, Dr. Bruce Parks, the county’s chief medical examiner, told me he was concerned enough that he ordered a refrigerated truck to be parked outside his office to store the overflowing bodies.
Parks is a trim, balding man, and when I met him in his office Tuesday he was listening to jazz standards. When he performed on autopsy on Gutierrez's body the day before, Parks found him sadly unremarkable. Gutierrez had on blue jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers, and he was carrying a Mexican voter registration card. He had scratches on his wrist, maybe from a cholla cactus or from sleeping under a mesquite tree. Parks showed me two photographs of Gutierrez’s body. The first was taken out in the desert, a body bag unzipped to reveal Gutierrez’s still-vital face. The second photo was taken by Parks himself some hours later at his office. Gutierrez’s face had turned a greenish-red color, and his chest and shoulders were marbled with blue lines. When Parks touched Gutierrez’s skin, he recalled, it gave way easily, because his body had filled with gas. There were no signs of trauma, which means Gutierrez had almost certainly died of hyperthermia. He was too hot.
Gutierrez is far away from the debate over 1070, but maybe he shouldn’t be. It’s a longstanding gambit of politicians—especially Arizona politicians—to say it’s easy for an immigrant to cross into the United States. But it’s probably harder to cross into Arizona and stay here than ever. After border-security pushes in California and Texas redirected migrant traffic to Arizona, the feds beefed up defenses in border cities like Nogales, built parts of a border wall—and Barack Obama has ordered more than 500 National Guardsmen sent to the Arizona border on August 1. Those measures, in turn, have pushed the migrant traffic into remote desert, into the Altar Valley to the east or the sprawling Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation to the west. It's telling that while the number of border crossers into Arizona has decreased in recent years due to the recession, the number of migrant deaths has gone up.
For an Arizona politician, the border is everything. For an immigrant, it is merely a starting line. After crossing the border, an immigrant in Arizona enters a dangerous neutral zone full of Border Patrol agents, jittery locals, and dangerous plants and reptiles. According to Dan Millis, a volunteer with No More Deaths, a group that provides water and food for immigrants in the desert, this zone can stretch for 30 miles depending on which of the spider web of migrant trails the immigrant follows toward a city or a highway.
Diego Gutierrez died in the neutral zone, and Millis and I drove out to the spot where his father flagged down the Border Patrol to get a sense of what he experienced. The Sonoran Desert has become such a reliable morgue that No More Deaths volunteers are always prepared to stumble upon bodies, Mills said, and “everybody thinks about it.” Millis is tall and bearded with twinkling eyes that disguise a thoughtful demeanor. He told me that he, too, discovered a body. In 2008, Millis and three friends were taking food to a migrant trail in the Altar Valley when they came upon the decomposing remains of a 14-year-old Mexican girl. The girl was lying on her back and her feet were floating in a puddle.
The remains matched the description of a girl named Josseline Janiletha Hernandez Quinteros who had gone missing three weeks before. She was easily identified because her sweatpants had “Hollywood” written on the seat. It had pleased Mills to provide closure for Hernandez’s family, some of whom would later come to the site to mark it as a memorial. But the act of discovery also weighed heavily on him. “It’s sort of a curse to find somebody dead,” he said.
After a two-hour drive through the reservation, past border patrolmen peeking into cars and scanning the horizon with binoculars, we came to the appointed spot, the 15th milepost on Route 21. Despite the lingering pall of death, the place was quite beautiful. The sun was making its final approach in the west, turning that part of the sky chalk-white and the eastern sky a deep, marine blue. Millis and I could hear bullfrogs burbling in some distant pool. The desert was both more ordinary and more cartoonish than what you see in the movies—an ugly, dusty track would be interrupted by a towering Saguaro cactus. You only had to take a few steps away from the car to feel desperately alone.
To think about the dreadful final moments of migrants like Gutierrez was to remove Arizona's immigration debate from rhetorical abstraction. There is no wave of immigrant crime in Arizona. Phoenix, according to the FBI, has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the country. No Arizona county coroner has reported a beheaded crime victim in the desert, as Jan Brewer ominously charged. And yet when confronted with a bona fide epidemic in its southern desert, Arizona has chosen to punt.
As we looked around, I recalled something Bruce Parks, the medical examiner, had told me. When the truck bearing Gutierrez’s body came into his office, it was also carrying the bodies of three Guatemalan immigrants. Two of them had probably died like Diego, due to the hyperthermia. According to the field report, the third immigrant, adrift in a vast, hot desert, had hanged himself.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-28/arizonas-real-immigration-problem-migrant-deaths/
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Feds: Plants There, Just Look Harder
Voice of San Diego
December 3, 2009
by Rob Davis
The barren, vegetation-free hillsides in Border Field State Park created by a new 3.5-mile section of the U.S.-Mexico border fence are neither barren nor vegetation-free, the federal government claims.
In a recent letter to U.S. Rep. Susan Davis, D-San Diego, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's chief says the denuded hills near the Tijuana Estuary have plants growing on them.
You just can't see them, he wrote.
Because the plants being grown on the new hillsides are native species, wrote Jayson Ahern, the agency's acting chief, "the existing re-vegetated areas are currently dormant and brown ... and, thus, difficult to see from afar."
That does not accurately reflect what I've seen in the park. When I visited in mid-October, I saw a few plants growing on a single hill. Other new hills were barren, save for rows of straw bales.
It was easy to see from afar that no plants were growing. It was even easier to see up close. I stood on the hills. Plants were not growing. Federal contractors working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had sprayed a wet, pulpy seed mix -- called "hydroseed" -- on the ground, but never irrigated.
I called Clay Phillips, superintendent of Border Field State Park, to check whether plants had suddenly grown in the last month.
"Nothing magical has happened," he said. "There is a native plant seed mix (on the ground), but we've never seen any growth there."
Ahern, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection official, wrote in his letter that "moderate revegetation has actually occurred and is progressing well." He said the federal government purposely didn't water the seeds it spread on the hills so it could mimic normal climatic conditions -- dry summers, wet winters.
I asked Bruce Hanson, a restoration ecologist for Edaw, a local consulting firm, whether that was a good idea. He said it is. Unless a full-fledged irrigation system was installed, Hanson said it's better to wait for natural rainfall, which helps seeds germinate better. The salt content is lower in rain than in water sprayed from trucks, which the government is now using.
But using seeds alone is "window-dressing," Hanson said. The best way to restore degraded habitat is to use a mix of seeds and transplant already-established plants and cactus, he said.
"A lot of species" -- such as the Baja birdbush, a plant whose northern range extends only to the border -- "never come up from seed," he said. Instead, generic shrubs grow, such as purple needlegrass, which is found throughout the state.
"You end up with a different plant community than what should be there," Hanson said. "Hydroseed is not going to be representative of what was out there."
http://voiceofsandiego.org/environment/muck/article_f7c322e6-e070-11de-91d3-001cc4c03286.html
December 3, 2009
by Rob Davis
The barren, vegetation-free hillsides in Border Field State Park created by a new 3.5-mile section of the U.S.-Mexico border fence are neither barren nor vegetation-free, the federal government claims.
In a recent letter to U.S. Rep. Susan Davis, D-San Diego, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's chief says the denuded hills near the Tijuana Estuary have plants growing on them.
You just can't see them, he wrote.
Because the plants being grown on the new hillsides are native species, wrote Jayson Ahern, the agency's acting chief, "the existing re-vegetated areas are currently dormant and brown ... and, thus, difficult to see from afar."
That does not accurately reflect what I've seen in the park. When I visited in mid-October, I saw a few plants growing on a single hill. Other new hills were barren, save for rows of straw bales.
It was easy to see from afar that no plants were growing. It was even easier to see up close. I stood on the hills. Plants were not growing. Federal contractors working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had sprayed a wet, pulpy seed mix -- called "hydroseed" -- on the ground, but never irrigated.
I called Clay Phillips, superintendent of Border Field State Park, to check whether plants had suddenly grown in the last month.
"Nothing magical has happened," he said. "There is a native plant seed mix (on the ground), but we've never seen any growth there."
Ahern, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection official, wrote in his letter that "moderate revegetation has actually occurred and is progressing well." He said the federal government purposely didn't water the seeds it spread on the hills so it could mimic normal climatic conditions -- dry summers, wet winters.
I asked Bruce Hanson, a restoration ecologist for Edaw, a local consulting firm, whether that was a good idea. He said it is. Unless a full-fledged irrigation system was installed, Hanson said it's better to wait for natural rainfall, which helps seeds germinate better. The salt content is lower in rain than in water sprayed from trucks, which the government is now using.
But using seeds alone is "window-dressing," Hanson said. The best way to restore degraded habitat is to use a mix of seeds and transplant already-established plants and cactus, he said.
"A lot of species" -- such as the Baja birdbush, a plant whose northern range extends only to the border -- "never come up from seed," he said. Instead, generic shrubs grow, such as purple needlegrass, which is found throughout the state.
"You end up with a different plant community than what should be there," Hanson said. "Hydroseed is not going to be representative of what was out there."
http://voiceofsandiego.org/environment/muck/article_f7c322e6-e070-11de-91d3-001cc4c03286.html
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Bare Dirt Along New Border Fence A Flood Worry
KPBS San Diego
October 13, 2009
by Amy Isackson
State parks officials are worried the federal government's failure to grow plants on slopes where it built new sections of the border fence could mean floods on both sides of the US Mexico border this rainy season. Smuggler's Gulch is a major area of concern.
About four years ago, the US federal government waived all environmental laws along the US Mexico border in order to build the border fence. The head of the Department of Homeland Security promised, even so, the government would control erosion to protect the Tijuana River Valley and estuary.
Clay Phillips is with the California Parks Department and manages the estuary reserve. He says the bare slopes that run the length of the new fence construction are a stark contrast to the promise.
"You wouldn't find a Jack In the Box where they're adding a parking lot that would be left in this condition."
The federal government has tried to grow plants on the slopes to control erosion without success. Phillips says moderate rain will erode the bare dirt. That could clog the Tijuana Estuary and cause floods in Tijuana and San Diego.
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2009/oct/13/bare-dirt-along-new-border-fence-flood-worry/
October 13, 2009
by Amy Isackson
State parks officials are worried the federal government's failure to grow plants on slopes where it built new sections of the border fence could mean floods on both sides of the US Mexico border this rainy season. Smuggler's Gulch is a major area of concern.
About four years ago, the US federal government waived all environmental laws along the US Mexico border in order to build the border fence. The head of the Department of Homeland Security promised, even so, the government would control erosion to protect the Tijuana River Valley and estuary.
Clay Phillips is with the California Parks Department and manages the estuary reserve. He says the bare slopes that run the length of the new fence construction are a stark contrast to the promise.
"You wouldn't find a Jack In the Box where they're adding a parking lot that would be left in this condition."
The federal government has tried to grow plants on the slopes to control erosion without success. Phillips says moderate rain will erode the bare dirt. That could clog the Tijuana Estuary and cause floods in Tijuana and San Diego.
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2009/oct/13/bare-dirt-along-new-border-fence-flood-worry/
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Disorder on the Border: Trashing the Law in the Name of Immigration Deterrence
Common Dreams
September 8, 2009
by Randall Amster
In two recent criminal cases in the United States, defendants received similar sentences for very different sorts of actions. In the first, a young man was convicted of negligent homicide for texting while driving and killing two scientists in the process. The New York Times reported on the case and the sentence meted out to the young man:
"He pleaded guilty to two counts of negligent homicide, but his record will be cleared if he fulfills the sentence imposed by the judge. It included 30 days in jail, 200 hours of community service, and a requirement that he read Les Misérables to learn, like the book's character Jean Valjean, how to make a contribution to society."
In the second case, another young man received a sentence of 300 hours of community service, one year of probation, and a one-year ban from a large swath of land on the U.S.-Mexico border. His crime? Leaving jugs of water in the desert for would-be border crossers, in an attempt to help prevent deaths. Walt Staton, 27, was convicted in June of this year and sentenced in August on federal littering charges in an absurd scenario reminiscent of something straight out of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant":
"And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n ugly 'n nasty 'n horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, 'Kid, whad'ya get?' I said, 'I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage.' He said, 'What were you arrested for, kid?' And I said, 'Littering.' And they all moved away from me on the bench there...."
The prosecution in Staton's case had actually pushed for five years of probation and a $5000 fine, arguing (as reported on CNN.com) that he had "knowingly littered" and that the inscription on the plastic jugs of "buena suerte" ("good luck") evidenced an intention "to aid illegal aliens in their entry attempt." The prosecution's Sentencing Memorandum went further in its rhetoric, making thinly-veiled allusions to themes suggestive of the so-called "war on terror" and fanning the flames of racialized fear-mongering:
"The collateral damage the plastic water jugs cause is also severe. The defendant intended the water jugs to be used by illegal immigrants crossing through the [Buenos Aires National Wildlife] Refuge. His intent and purpose was to give the illegal immigrant the capability to go further into the interior of the country, and into the Refuge.... The defendant left full, plastic water jugs on the Refuge with the intent to aid illegal immigrant traffic. This enhances the range of illegal immigrants and other smuggling activity by sustaining their efforts to move further north. This is evidenced by exhibit 4, in which [Border Patrol Agent] Baron states that he has seen water jugs discarded in the northern section of the Refuge. He also makes clear that not all illegal immigrant traffic are people whose sole purpose is to find a better life in the United States. Many of them are drug smugglers and, according to exhibit 5, approximately 16% of illegal aliens arrested have significant criminal histories, to include murder, assault, rape, and sexual offenses with minors. These are the people that the defendant intended to assist when he committed the offense on December 4, 2008. Instead of targeting people with a legitimate medical need, he haphazardly left water for illegal aliens, drug smugglers and/or dangerous felons, all of whom are in the country without permission...."
Recall that the charge in this case was littering, not aiding and abetting or drug smuggling or terrorism. These sorts of rhetorical and juridical machinations undermine the spirit of the law, if not the letter of it, and create untenable outcomes in which homicide and littering are given comparable sentences. Moreover, it is estimated that the U.S. government spent at least $50,000 (a figure that the prosecution did not dispute) to try Staton, a clean-cut young man who was described by the LA Times as a "web designer and soup kitchen volunteer [who has worked] for five years with the faith-based aid group No More Deaths" (NMD), promoting humanitarian relief in the perilous desert "during often-sweltering days, offering food, water and medical help to anyone they find." Spurred by repeated abuses of migrants and the deaths of thousands of border crossers, NMD formed in 2004 with volunteers from among diverse faith communities, social activist groups, and concerned individuals like Staton. In the Tucson sector alone this year, it is estimated that nearly 200 people may have died trying to cross the border.
Now beginning seminary school at the Claremont School of Theology in California, Staton was characterized by his lawyer Bill Walker as "the kind of guy you'd want to have as your next door neighbor." Indeed, I first met Staton when we traveled to New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina as part of a grassroots group seeking to provide food and assistance to the people of the region. Staton's positive outlook, good humor, and dedication to human rights were integral to the ability of our small group of volunteers being able to make our way into the storm-ravaged region and set up relief networks for people who had been ignored by the official organizations. As with most of NMD's volunteers, Staton's compassion is genuine and he is willing to place himself at risk to promote respect for the wellbeing of others.
Still, during sentencing the government tried to portray him as an unrepentant criminal who "does not care about the environmental impact of his actions." In response, environmental organizations like the Sierra Club wrote to the judge on Staton's behalf:
"[W]e do not believe that preserving imperiled species and the lands that support them is at odds with the efforts of border humanitarian groups such as No More Deaths. Flooding, erosion, sedimentation, habitat loss and fragmentation all pose legitimate and serious threats to those species we seek to protect. We do not regard individuals leaving jugs of clean water as a comparable threat, or frankly, as much of a threat at all.... The Sierra Club supports the actions of Walt Staton and other humanitarian groups who attempt to save the lives of undocumented migrants in the desert by leaving jugs of clean water at strategic locations along known migrant trails. They later return to check on the water and to remove garbage. These lifesaving actions do not constitute a threat to the environmental integrity of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, but rather are of benefit to it. Mr. Staton is a first-time offender who sought no personal gain in his attempts to save life and remove trash from the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding areas. A lifelong Arizona resident, longtime humanitarian volunteer and former employee of an Arizona environmental conservation organization, Mr. Staton understands the environmental and humanitarian crisis facing our borderlands. As much leniency as possible would be appropriate when considering a sentence."
The Center for Biological Diversity concurred, in a July 27, 2009 letter to the judge:
"The Center has been particularly alarmed in recent years at the impacts of activities in the borderlands related to illegal immigration. However, we see the problem of trash left along migrant trails to be a relatively minor problem in the grand scheme of things. The pernicious effects of border wall construction and other enforcement activities threaten to sacrifice the integrity of our precious border ecosystems for a policy that not only fails to solve the problem, but in fact demonstrably worsens it. Migrants continue to be pushed further into remote, environmentally sensitive areas such as the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and enforcement activities follow, with disastrous results for border species and habitats. The last thing we wish to see is human rights pitted against environmental concerns in this matter.... We support the work of humanitarian groups and determined volunteers such as Walt Staton who work to save human lives in the midst of the failure of the federal government to produce such a policy reform. We are intimately familiar with the work of No More Deaths, and it is our understanding that they regularly remove more discarded materials from the areas they patrol than they leave behind in the form of life-saving water bottles.... Trash is ephemeral -- it can be cleaned up, as No More Deaths volunteers demonstrate -- and it really is just a small part of the damage being done to our nation's natural resources as a result of a misguided and failed federal policy."
The perversity of federal immigration policy is well-documented on the NMD website and in other places, so I won't belabor it here except to note that the strategy of deterrence that drives both border enforcement and crackdowns on humanitarians is fundamentally flawed. People compelled by immiseration and displacement to seek a better life by risking the one they have in the process are not going to be dissuaded by border walls and stringent punishments. Likewise, those who feel called by faith or humanism to put themselves at risk to help others will not let pretextual littering charges deter them from manifesting their compassion. And so, during the course of Staton's ordeal, thirteen more NMD volunteers were issued littering citations for engaging in the same behavior that had literally resulted in a jug of water being turned into a federal case.
This open defiance actually got the attention of Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and in July a delegation of NMD volunteers met with him in Washington, D.C. "Secretary Salazar came in about 15 minutes after the meeting started and talked about his concern with what's happening to the migrants in the desert," Ed McCullough told the Tucson Weekly. "He said he's had a general concern about immigration problems for a very long time. He also said there were laws among the various government agencies, and anyone proposing what we're proposing would have to work within the law." McCullough said that the volunteers left the meeting feeling "that they wanted to work something out with the humanitarian groups." This led to a proposed Memorandum of Understanding between NMD and the Department of the Interior about the placement of food and water in the desert, but it has not warded off the littering prosecutions currently underway, and the thirteen humanitarian activists are scheduled to be tried in Tucson later this year.
Our legal system contains a provision dating back to the common law that essentially says a violation of the law may be excused in cases where a greater harm is sought to be averted. Called the "necessity defense," the classic example is a person who sees a house on fire and commits a trespass in order to rescue someone from the inferno. In a manner analogous to this textbook illustration, NMD volunteers seek to aid those caught in a metaphorical and literal desert inferno by (at least in the government's eyes) committing the minor offense of littering. Under this basic principle of justice, a small illegal act should be excused in the name of preventing a far greater harm -- so when Secretary Salazar says that the activists should "work within the law," they already are. Forcing them through the gauntlet of American criminal justice is a waste of time, energy, and resources that could be better spent on both the social and environmental issues that pervade U.S. immigration policies.
Walt Staton and his fellow humanitarians working on the border are about the only thing that makes sense in this exercise in absurdity. "The border has been built in the most intentional way to use the desert as a deterrent, as a weapon that has cost thousands of lives," Staton told IPS News in July. The border wall itself may be the most extreme form of environmental degradation in the region, and the collateral damage it yields has resulted in the desert being littered with corpses that have succumbed to the unforgiving terrain. Perhaps those who approved the wall and crafted the proto-genocidal policies of deterrence ought to be charged with "knowingly littering" and/or "negligent homicide," since both crimes apparently carry similar consequences in our Kafkaesque system.
In a world where justice seems to be buried in the bowels of bureaucracy, it is time to finally declare that "humanitarianism is not a crime." What needs to be cleaned up in this case are not merely a few plastic water jugs in the desert, but rather the litter of the law that has brought us to this ominous juncture in the first place.
Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., teaches Peace Studies at Prescott College, and is the Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. His most recent book is Lost In Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB Scholarly 2008).
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/08-2
September 8, 2009
by Randall Amster
In two recent criminal cases in the United States, defendants received similar sentences for very different sorts of actions. In the first, a young man was convicted of negligent homicide for texting while driving and killing two scientists in the process. The New York Times reported on the case and the sentence meted out to the young man:
"He pleaded guilty to two counts of negligent homicide, but his record will be cleared if he fulfills the sentence imposed by the judge. It included 30 days in jail, 200 hours of community service, and a requirement that he read Les Misérables to learn, like the book's character Jean Valjean, how to make a contribution to society."
In the second case, another young man received a sentence of 300 hours of community service, one year of probation, and a one-year ban from a large swath of land on the U.S.-Mexico border. His crime? Leaving jugs of water in the desert for would-be border crossers, in an attempt to help prevent deaths. Walt Staton, 27, was convicted in June of this year and sentenced in August on federal littering charges in an absurd scenario reminiscent of something straight out of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant":
"And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n ugly 'n nasty 'n horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, 'Kid, whad'ya get?' I said, 'I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage.' He said, 'What were you arrested for, kid?' And I said, 'Littering.' And they all moved away from me on the bench there...."
The prosecution in Staton's case had actually pushed for five years of probation and a $5000 fine, arguing (as reported on CNN.com) that he had "knowingly littered" and that the inscription on the plastic jugs of "buena suerte" ("good luck") evidenced an intention "to aid illegal aliens in their entry attempt." The prosecution's Sentencing Memorandum went further in its rhetoric, making thinly-veiled allusions to themes suggestive of the so-called "war on terror" and fanning the flames of racialized fear-mongering:
"The collateral damage the plastic water jugs cause is also severe. The defendant intended the water jugs to be used by illegal immigrants crossing through the [Buenos Aires National Wildlife] Refuge. His intent and purpose was to give the illegal immigrant the capability to go further into the interior of the country, and into the Refuge.... The defendant left full, plastic water jugs on the Refuge with the intent to aid illegal immigrant traffic. This enhances the range of illegal immigrants and other smuggling activity by sustaining their efforts to move further north. This is evidenced by exhibit 4, in which [Border Patrol Agent] Baron states that he has seen water jugs discarded in the northern section of the Refuge. He also makes clear that not all illegal immigrant traffic are people whose sole purpose is to find a better life in the United States. Many of them are drug smugglers and, according to exhibit 5, approximately 16% of illegal aliens arrested have significant criminal histories, to include murder, assault, rape, and sexual offenses with minors. These are the people that the defendant intended to assist when he committed the offense on December 4, 2008. Instead of targeting people with a legitimate medical need, he haphazardly left water for illegal aliens, drug smugglers and/or dangerous felons, all of whom are in the country without permission...."
Recall that the charge in this case was littering, not aiding and abetting or drug smuggling or terrorism. These sorts of rhetorical and juridical machinations undermine the spirit of the law, if not the letter of it, and create untenable outcomes in which homicide and littering are given comparable sentences. Moreover, it is estimated that the U.S. government spent at least $50,000 (a figure that the prosecution did not dispute) to try Staton, a clean-cut young man who was described by the LA Times as a "web designer and soup kitchen volunteer [who has worked] for five years with the faith-based aid group No More Deaths" (NMD), promoting humanitarian relief in the perilous desert "during often-sweltering days, offering food, water and medical help to anyone they find." Spurred by repeated abuses of migrants and the deaths of thousands of border crossers, NMD formed in 2004 with volunteers from among diverse faith communities, social activist groups, and concerned individuals like Staton. In the Tucson sector alone this year, it is estimated that nearly 200 people may have died trying to cross the border.
Now beginning seminary school at the Claremont School of Theology in California, Staton was characterized by his lawyer Bill Walker as "the kind of guy you'd want to have as your next door neighbor." Indeed, I first met Staton when we traveled to New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina as part of a grassroots group seeking to provide food and assistance to the people of the region. Staton's positive outlook, good humor, and dedication to human rights were integral to the ability of our small group of volunteers being able to make our way into the storm-ravaged region and set up relief networks for people who had been ignored by the official organizations. As with most of NMD's volunteers, Staton's compassion is genuine and he is willing to place himself at risk to promote respect for the wellbeing of others.
Still, during sentencing the government tried to portray him as an unrepentant criminal who "does not care about the environmental impact of his actions." In response, environmental organizations like the Sierra Club wrote to the judge on Staton's behalf:
"[W]e do not believe that preserving imperiled species and the lands that support them is at odds with the efforts of border humanitarian groups such as No More Deaths. Flooding, erosion, sedimentation, habitat loss and fragmentation all pose legitimate and serious threats to those species we seek to protect. We do not regard individuals leaving jugs of clean water as a comparable threat, or frankly, as much of a threat at all.... The Sierra Club supports the actions of Walt Staton and other humanitarian groups who attempt to save the lives of undocumented migrants in the desert by leaving jugs of clean water at strategic locations along known migrant trails. They later return to check on the water and to remove garbage. These lifesaving actions do not constitute a threat to the environmental integrity of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, but rather are of benefit to it. Mr. Staton is a first-time offender who sought no personal gain in his attempts to save life and remove trash from the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding areas. A lifelong Arizona resident, longtime humanitarian volunteer and former employee of an Arizona environmental conservation organization, Mr. Staton understands the environmental and humanitarian crisis facing our borderlands. As much leniency as possible would be appropriate when considering a sentence."
The Center for Biological Diversity concurred, in a July 27, 2009 letter to the judge:
"The Center has been particularly alarmed in recent years at the impacts of activities in the borderlands related to illegal immigration. However, we see the problem of trash left along migrant trails to be a relatively minor problem in the grand scheme of things. The pernicious effects of border wall construction and other enforcement activities threaten to sacrifice the integrity of our precious border ecosystems for a policy that not only fails to solve the problem, but in fact demonstrably worsens it. Migrants continue to be pushed further into remote, environmentally sensitive areas such as the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and enforcement activities follow, with disastrous results for border species and habitats. The last thing we wish to see is human rights pitted against environmental concerns in this matter.... We support the work of humanitarian groups and determined volunteers such as Walt Staton who work to save human lives in the midst of the failure of the federal government to produce such a policy reform. We are intimately familiar with the work of No More Deaths, and it is our understanding that they regularly remove more discarded materials from the areas they patrol than they leave behind in the form of life-saving water bottles.... Trash is ephemeral -- it can be cleaned up, as No More Deaths volunteers demonstrate -- and it really is just a small part of the damage being done to our nation's natural resources as a result of a misguided and failed federal policy."
The perversity of federal immigration policy is well-documented on the NMD website and in other places, so I won't belabor it here except to note that the strategy of deterrence that drives both border enforcement and crackdowns on humanitarians is fundamentally flawed. People compelled by immiseration and displacement to seek a better life by risking the one they have in the process are not going to be dissuaded by border walls and stringent punishments. Likewise, those who feel called by faith or humanism to put themselves at risk to help others will not let pretextual littering charges deter them from manifesting their compassion. And so, during the course of Staton's ordeal, thirteen more NMD volunteers were issued littering citations for engaging in the same behavior that had literally resulted in a jug of water being turned into a federal case.
This open defiance actually got the attention of Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and in July a delegation of NMD volunteers met with him in Washington, D.C. "Secretary Salazar came in about 15 minutes after the meeting started and talked about his concern with what's happening to the migrants in the desert," Ed McCullough told the Tucson Weekly. "He said he's had a general concern about immigration problems for a very long time. He also said there were laws among the various government agencies, and anyone proposing what we're proposing would have to work within the law." McCullough said that the volunteers left the meeting feeling "that they wanted to work something out with the humanitarian groups." This led to a proposed Memorandum of Understanding between NMD and the Department of the Interior about the placement of food and water in the desert, but it has not warded off the littering prosecutions currently underway, and the thirteen humanitarian activists are scheduled to be tried in Tucson later this year.
Our legal system contains a provision dating back to the common law that essentially says a violation of the law may be excused in cases where a greater harm is sought to be averted. Called the "necessity defense," the classic example is a person who sees a house on fire and commits a trespass in order to rescue someone from the inferno. In a manner analogous to this textbook illustration, NMD volunteers seek to aid those caught in a metaphorical and literal desert inferno by (at least in the government's eyes) committing the minor offense of littering. Under this basic principle of justice, a small illegal act should be excused in the name of preventing a far greater harm -- so when Secretary Salazar says that the activists should "work within the law," they already are. Forcing them through the gauntlet of American criminal justice is a waste of time, energy, and resources that could be better spent on both the social and environmental issues that pervade U.S. immigration policies.
Walt Staton and his fellow humanitarians working on the border are about the only thing that makes sense in this exercise in absurdity. "The border has been built in the most intentional way to use the desert as a deterrent, as a weapon that has cost thousands of lives," Staton told IPS News in July. The border wall itself may be the most extreme form of environmental degradation in the region, and the collateral damage it yields has resulted in the desert being littered with corpses that have succumbed to the unforgiving terrain. Perhaps those who approved the wall and crafted the proto-genocidal policies of deterrence ought to be charged with "knowingly littering" and/or "negligent homicide," since both crimes apparently carry similar consequences in our Kafkaesque system.
In a world where justice seems to be buried in the bowels of bureaucracy, it is time to finally declare that "humanitarianism is not a crime." What needs to be cleaned up in this case are not merely a few plastic water jugs in the desert, but rather the litter of the law that has brought us to this ominous juncture in the first place.
Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., teaches Peace Studies at Prescott College, and is the Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. His most recent book is Lost In Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB Scholarly 2008).
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/08-2
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