Op-ed: Court Applies Environmental Law to Biden-Harris Border Disaster

The Biden administration unlawfully failed to perform the required environmental impact analysis before admitting millions of illegals

By Phillip Linderman on October 11, 2024

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality estimates that each border crosser leaves approximately six to eight pounds of trash in the desert during his or her journey. If you do the rough math, the total amount of strewn garbage caused by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas greenlighting millions of illegal migrants, all trampling their way across the southern frontier, is stunning.

Americans have probably wondered why federal environmental law does not prevent, or at least slow, Mayorkas from bringing about this mess. After all, the Biden-Harris administration has done much more than simply benignly tolerate or mildly encourage this massive human movement. The president and his cabinet have not only loudly proclaimed that they “welcome” the arrival of these illegals, but made it clear that this unprecedented immigration was central to their foreign and domestic policy. They have pushed their legal authorities beyond the limit, inventing out of thin air new immigration programs, mobilizing thousands of federal officers, and spending and reprogramming billions of dollars to make it all happen.

On our southern frontier, the resulting chaotic human activity—clandestine camping, trekking, consuming, and disposing—has had a profound impact on the natural environment as well as on towns, ranches, and small communities. Yet Biden-Harris environmental and health officials are silent about the countless heaps and tons of garbage, plastic, and abandoned human junk all over the border region.

These illegal immigrants have thrown up makeshift encampments wherever they wanted, trampled through private property, disrupted normal activities and—lacking adequate sanitary facilities—deposited human waste all along extremely vulnerable waterways, like the Rio Grande, that are already too inadequate fully to serve the desert-like region.

In normal times, in the wake of such violent human attacks on land and water, the American environmental protection community would have been on the warpath. But groups like the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, indeed the entire establishment environmental community, have all remained silent and done nothing to respond to the Biden-Harris reckless immigration policy.

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[Read the rest at The American Conservative]