Bush Policy: Quick Border Fence Trumps the Environment

Fear not, America: the Bush administration is not giving up on its immigrant-blocking border fence.

On Tuesday, it declared that it's going to ignore some 30 environmental laws and regulations in order to accelerate its project to build a wall separating the United States from Mexico. Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, issued the order, with an ominous warning. "Criminal activity at the border does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation," he said. Cutting through the legal red tape "will enable important security projects to keep moving forward."

Like fear-mongering, flouting the law is part of the daily grind in the Bush administration -- but in this case, Chertoff is doing nothing illegal. The power to waive the law in the name of national security was granted to him specifically by Congress in 2005. The "REAL ID Act," passed as a rider to an Iraq funding bill, declared that the head of the Department of Homeland Security could waive any laws standing in the way of "expeditious construction of … barriers and roads" along the border.

It was not the first time Chertoff has invoked such a waiver -- DHS has used them before to push through fencing in Arizona and San Diego -- but it was definitely his most sweeping order to date. It advances DHS's proposal to erect towers and high-tech surveillance equipment along a sprawling 470-mile span of the border in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Originally, such action was supposed to be a last resort, but, as Tuesday's order demonstrates, this is hardly proving to be the case.

Aside from the troubling implications of the DHS Secretary overriding the law to push politically-motivated agendas, many critics of this measure are the same who have long argued that a border fence would have a devastating impact on the environment in border areas. Among them is the Sierra Club, which last year took DHS to federal court to try to get Chertoff's special powers revoked. (They lost. Aside from the fact that the REAL ID law included a provision essentially insulating it from court review, in December, a federal judge found nothing unconstitutional about Chertoff's power's, since he can only exercise them on a case-by-case basis.) "Secretary Chertoff chose to bypass stakeholders and push through this unpopular project on April Fools' Day," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope on Tuesday. "We don't think the destruction of the borderlands region is a laughing matter."

Chertoff's response to environmentalists has been to turn around and say that, in fact, it is illegal immigration that is bad for the environment. "I've seen pictures of human waste, garbage, discarded bottles and other human artifact in pristine areas," Chertoff said last fall. "And believe me, that is the worst thing you can do to the environment."

Current controversy aside, the border "fence" is one of those harebrained schemes that might be funny if it weren't so cynical and racist. A perennial favorite of the anti-immigrant right, the idea to construct a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico has been afloat for decades. More recently, historic immigration levels and the post-9/11 political landscape have legitimized the project in the name of national security. Part of a broad emphasis on border control by the Bush administration, which likes to boast about its success keeping out "illegals" -- under Bush, the budget for border security has more than doubled, from $4.6 billion in 2001 to $10.4 billion -- the border fence was officially codified in the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Passed by the House and Senate in September 2006, the Secure Fence Act mandated the construction of a barrier stretching along a 700-mile portion of the 1,969-mile U.S.-Mexico border. The measure was a bipartisan effort; with the midterm elections weeks away, many lawmakers considered it a political imperative. As Texas Republican John Cornyn put it, bluntly: "The choice we were presented was: Are we going to vote to enhance border security, or against it?" The bill passed 80 to 19 in the Senate. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted for it.