Thread: AZ: Illegal immigrants burying border in garbage

Illegal immigrants burying border in garbage
June 3, 2007

TUCSON, Ariz. -- 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."

http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=6604393

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.

Before we deport them, each illegal alien should be required to do trash pick-up duty for a minimum of 10 hours.....with no pay. They left the trash, they can damned well pick it up.

I think somebody (some camera crew) should go out there and film the piles of this garbage and spread pictures of it all over the media. Ordinary American citizens need to see this. I've seen it firsthand in Southern California's deserts (near the San Diego/Mexico border. I went on a hike with the Sierra Club in that section of the desert, and I've never seen anything like it in my life. Piles and piles and piles of garbage....everything from clothes, to empty water bottles, shoes, food cans, diapers, feminine napkins, toilet paper, etc. etc. It was HORRIBLE.

To Sierra Club,

When your organization was bought off by David Gelbaum to not say anything about how immigration damages the environment, did that include illegal immigration, too? I was wondering because you could not be missing this enormous issue by mistake. For example:

http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=6604393

[quote:ryhs8pmm]"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."

You know your credibility has been deeply damaged by this, don't you?

In addition to litter, illegal immigration has contributed to urban sprawl and other pollution.

Your silence is deafening, but telling.[/quote:ryhs8pmm]

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.

Oh great....blame everybody but the pigs who actually dump the trash. The fact is that the illegals don't give one hoot about the damage they do in their stampede to get into the U.S. And it's not anybody's fault but their's.

Illegal immigrants burying border in garbage

Gee, from the looks of many cities in my state of California, I just assumed the illegals brought all their trash with them.

If they could only "come out of the shadows" they wouldn't have to worry about traipsing through the ol' hot desert! Blah, blah, blah

I have always wondered why the greenies are so silent on this issue. Although I did see somewhere where one environmentalist complained about the damage that border patrol was doing to the desert with their quads.

By the way, what they are doing to our desert is the same that they do to the cities they move in to. Just have a look at Huntington Park, South Gate, Maywood, Santa Ana...And the list goes on.

Those of you that aren't from southern California, I have seen your future, I live in your future. Trust me when I say you must fight as hard as you are able to stop this invasion and preserve the American way of life.

Here is the web page for Cindy Kolb, the woman mentioned in the article.

There are lots of photographs on the site.

http://www.desertvisions.us/

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oldsalt wrote:

By the way, what they are doing to our desert is the same that they do to the cities they move in to. Just have a look at Huntington Park, South Gate, Maywood, Santa Ana...And the list goes on.

You are SO RIGHT oldsalt. I just moved from San Diego, and the stories I could tell you. For instance....in Spring Valley (a suburb of San Diego), many many of the illegals couldn't afford trash pick-up service (because Spring Valley is unincorporated and is in the county, trash pick-up is a private service that homeowners have to get themselves; unlike the city of San Diego where trash pick-up is included in your water bill). Anyway....so what do you think the illegals did with their trash? They dumped it ANYWHERE they damn well wanted to, that's what!!

They took their trash to dumpsters behind grocery stores and filled them to the point where the were overflowing. Once there was no more room in the dumpsters, they'd just toss it in the parking lot. The companies who emptied the dumpsters wouldn't pick the trash up from the parking lot, so it just sat there....in piles.

And furthermore, the lazier ones wouldn't bother to go ALL THE WAY to the grocery store to dump their trash; instead, they simply dumped it on the sidewalk.

Oooooh, and another thing (geez...memories are flooding back of my life in Spring Valley), they owned CHICKENS!! Livestock is not permitted in Spring Valley, but they had them anyway. And the roosters would crow all day long. ALL DAY. And they stunk.

It was HORRIBLE to see what happened to Spring Valley once the illegals moved in. They completely trashed the place. And it was even worse to see how gross and filthy these illegals live. My ex-husband told me that on a few occasions he would see one or more of the illegals next door to us pooping in their backyard. They had about 25 people living in a 1-bathroom house, so I guess when they had to go....they had to go.

Once, an illegal Mexican teenager down the street from us was running from the police (somebody had called the police on her because she was running a prostitution business in the house she lived in....anyway, I guess she was drunk or something, because she actually had the nerve to run into OUR backyard to hide, and she puked all over our lawn. Ugh. It was just HORRIBLE. Absolutely horrible. Those nightmare years of my life will haunt me for a long long time. Thank goodness I'm out of there. And I'll NEVER go back.

I lived in Downey, California for 32 years. It is close to Huntington Park, Bell, Bell Gardens, South Gate, Maywood and so on. My wife, a school principal and I could write a book on the terrible effects illegal aliens, in massive numbers, have on once decent communities. Pamper diapers full of feces thrown out of car windows into the street, sidewalks completely covered with chewing gum. gang graffiti EVERYWHERE. Car radio's blaring mexican music day and night. Hoards of people living in houses meant for only 3 or 4 people (we called them clown houses). People living in garages and using buckets for toilets. Chickens running around the streets and yards and roosters crowing at 5:00 AM. These people are constantly eating, and eating everywhere, in stores, in their cars, walking down the street, and so on. Every piece of glass in all the stores are etched with gang slogans and other filth. Signs on their cars which read, "Fu*k you gringo, this is now Mexico".

I am growing tired of typing this material and it depresses me. but I could regale you with stories which would curl your hair. The fools in Washington have no idea these things exist and, if they did, they wouldn't give a damn because they are always protected from it.

I gave up and moved out of Downey seven years ago, swearing I would puke if I heard another word of Spanish.