EPA Wouldn’t Rubber Stamp Border Wall
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Not even the Environmental Protection Agency was buying the border fence, according to documents released today by the Sierra Club.
In a 23-page document written in the past year about the Rio Grande Valley section of the fence, John Blevins, an EPA official, details the various reasons as to why the agency can’t rubber stamp Chertoff’s border fence plan. The first paragraph, titled “Purpose and Need,” highlights just about every question border residents have been asking for the past year.
Blevins writes:
“There is no text, studies, etc. that provide support for the Purpose and Need. There should be a section describing the amount of drug traffic that occurs along this sector, the number of illegal crossings, the number of Border Patrol responses, decreases in land values over time along the border, crime statistics, maps showing common interdiction locations, or the like. There are none in this document.”
Homeland Security officials should be answering these questions — especially when they plan on condemning private properties. Landowners such as Brownsville Resident Eloisa Tamez, 72, deserve an explanation why her land is targeted for the fence and not the River Bend Resort down the street.
But Chertoff wasn’t about to let something like a federal regulatory agency get in his way. In April — on April Fool’s Day, no less — Chertoff issued his imperial waiver of 36 federal laws — and thus bypassed agencies like the EPA and U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
In the current Observer issue, we highlight the story of Ken Merritt who worked at U.S. Fish and Wildlife for 31 years, but left the agency after refusing to sign off on Chertoff’s plan.
A U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist recently told me that Homeland Security has created its own sham environmental assessments, since Chertoff waived the National Environmental Policy Act.
These new assessments are called the Environmental Stewardship Plan and the Biological Resource Plan. In this way, Chertoff is trying to create a patina of democracy and environmental stewardship for his border-fence boondoogle.
