Patrols, crossers trash border's pristine desert
Conservationists fear impact deeper into wilderness
Mary Jo Pitzl
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 25, 2005 12:00 AM
The trail of environmental destruction along Arizona's border with Mexico is growing at increasingly rapid rates, overwhelming land managers and making a mockery of the wilderness designation those lands carry.
Vast stretches of borderland in southwestern Arizona, deemed pristine respites by Congress, are pockmarked with the debris of illegal immigration from rusting cars to the rutted trails they and their Border Patrol pursuers cut into the fragile desert crust.
When measured against the threats to homeland security or the real risk of imperiling human life, wilderness protections rank a distant third in priority.
This has roiled some conservationists, who complain that Border Patrol activities have pushed too far into the desert interior while intruding more and more on the natural environment.
They're especially critical of a Border Patrol plan that proposes to expand off-road operations, introduce towering stadium-style lights in critical enforcement areas and build more roads and fences.
The public-land managers who run these wilderness areas say they're in the difficult position of trying to protect natural resources and wildlife while acknowledging the needs of border security.
So wilderness advocates are now pushing to move control efforts closer to the border. They hope the Border Patrol can contain the illegal tide without lapping far into the desert, although they acknowledge it would take more money to get increased manpower and better technology.
"I think you can solve a lot of it by looking into Mexico," said Fred Goodsell, founder of an Ajo-based group he calls Sonoran Desert Protectors.
A volunteer for the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Goodsell argues that the Border Patrol should be equipped with detection devices that can be pointed south, instead of north, with the idea of intercepting undocumented immigrants as soon as they cross the international border.
The Border Patrol acknowledges that control efforts close to the border would stop much of the damage farther into the desert.
What's lacking, however, is money, not only for technology but for the increased manpower and other equipment needed to draw a tighter net around a porous border, said Joe Brigman, spokesman for the Border Patrol's Yuma sector.
The patrol agency tries to be environmentally sensitive, he said, by limiting its off-road usage as much as possible and relying on airplanes and helicopters for patrol.
But they've drawn scorn from some conservationists for the use of Humvees, a practice that Brigman defends as necessary to protect officer safety.
"The bad guys in this whole scenario are not the Border Patrol," he said. "It's the illegal-alien smugglers and the drug smugglers. They're the ones coming in illegally."
Land managers say the shifting trends in border policy have brought intensive and intrusive enforcement efforts to remote areas.
"Border Patrol does cause a lot of environmental damage, but imagine where we'd be if the Border Patrol were not out there," said Roger Di Rosa, manager of the Cabeza Prieta refuge.
Besides, he said, how do you argue against national security? The person who gets into the United States because the Border Patrol had its hands tied by environmental concerns could very well be the terrorist who will ignite the next Sept. 11-type attack, he said, citing a common concern.
There are ways to respect wilderness and the environmental protections it entails while still providing security, said Superintendent Kathleen Billings of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
A prime example is the vehicle-barrier fence along Organ Pipe's border with Mexico. So far, 18 miles of a steel-and-concrete fence are in place, blocking cars, SUVs and trucks, many of them carrying bulky loads of drugs. Billings said the results were immediate.
"It essentially has stopped all illegal-vehicle traffic," she said, pointing to the fence's hip-high steel crossbar.
"But it has increased the vehicles crossing at the edges."
And that is a metaphor for the larger problem along the border in southwestern Arizona.
Di Rosa calls it "shifting on your neighbor." Put up a barrier in one spot, he said, and the immigrant traffic simply moves to a less-restricted location.
There also are long stretches along the border where normal post-and-wire fencing have been stolen.
Even if the entire U.S.-Mexican border were equipped with the vehicle-barrier fence (a costly impossibility, given Organ Pipe plans to spend $17 million to build 29 miles of fence), there would still be foot traffic, the Border Patrol's Brigman says.
"There's tremendous amounts of problems caused by the walk-in traffic," he said.
A recent tour of the wilderness areas in southwestern Arizona gave ample proof of that. In Organ Pipe, rusting tin cans, shattered plastic water jugs, socks and human waste accumulate near popular watering holes. Spray-painted graffiti deface rocks and cactuses alike.
Last year, the National Parks Conservation Association named Organ Pipe one of the nation's 10 most-endangered national parks due to the stresses of border traffic.
Di Rosa is shopping around the idea that the cumulative effects of border problems, from safety concerns to terrorism prevention to environmental damage, amount to a disaster, and that such a disaster should qualify for emergency federal assistance.
"It would be a way for the land-management agencies here, which are way overtaxed, to get some kind of funding to deal with this," he said.