Border Ditch Won’t Harm Environment, Report Says

A federal environmental report Thursday strongly endorsed a planned ditch to thwart smuggling along a 4-mile stretch of the U. S.-Mexico border in San Diego, removing a potentially significant obstacle to the project and setting off a new round of protests against it.

In its most detailed explanation of the plan to date, the Immigration and Naturalization Service declared that the construction would not harm air, water, wildlife or vegetation in the Otay Mesa area.

“All construction activity would be conducted to minimize destruction” of plant life as well as to minimize “degradation of air and water quality,” the environmental impact assessment said.

“We’re pleased that the environment will be safe for natural resources,” said Arnoldo Torres, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, “but the environment is not going to be made safe for human resources.”

Concern Expressed

Torres predicted that the proposed ditch, 14 feet wide and 5 feet deep, would turn into a trap for children at play and ensnare automobiles attempting to cross illegally, dooming their occupants. “That’s the history of the border,” Torres said.

But, the report stated, “the potential for human and wildlife drowning or entrapment is minimal.”

The INS proposed the controversial ditch--known formally as the Border Security Enhancement Project--in January as a way of combatting smugglers who drive across the border from Mexico carrying drugs and illegal immigrants, and as a means of solving drainage problems afflicting the area.

Since the plan became known, the ditch has become a lightning rod of criticism from those who say it will likely fail to deter illegal immigration but will become a kind of Berlin Wall between north and south.

“Symbolically, this is absolutely the wrong thing to do,” said Jess D. Haro, chairman of the board of the Chicano Federation in San Diego.

The ditch would cut a swath through grassy flatlands on either side of the port of entry at Otay Mesa, an area that has been undergoing a transformation from an agricultural backwater to a booming center for international trade.

The area is also an important path for undocumented border-crossers from neighboring Tijuana. The report said that U. S. border agents have counted “as many as 369 unauthorized vehicle entries” in the area in a single month. Many, the report said, “necessitated hot pursuits” that “resulted in accidents with multiple serious injuries to undocumented aliens and at least one accidental death.”

Some critics had thought that the environmental impact assessment, conducted by INS in consultation with other federal agencies, would give the government a graceful way to abandon the project in the face of opposition, but the document expresses no significant objections to the ditch on environmental grounds.

Making a case for the ditch, the 28-page report said it “will curtail increasing unauthorized vehicle entries and increasing violence” at the border. “To take no action would aggravate the unauthorized vehicle crossings in the area” and leave drainage problems intact, the study asserted.

Anticipating an outpouring of protests, however, the INS also plans to advertise the impact assessment in West Coast newspapers this weekend, advising the public on how to comment on the project during a 30-day period.

INS will evaluate the comments and “make an assessment on how to go forward” with construction. INS officials do not envision any comments that could persuade them to halt the project, although some opponents have threatened to protest at the construction site and to file suit against the project.

An INS spokesman said construction could start this spring. Officials have said that they expect the project to be completed by late summer. The International Boundary and Water Commission, a Texas-based agency composed of U. S. and Mexican representatives entrusted with resolving certain border issues, is scheduled to construct the ditch at a cost of about $2 million.

Although a number of area legislators have called for a public hearing in San Diego on the matter, it remains unclear whether federal officials intend to hold one. Such hearings are common for a range of development projects.

Several immigrant-rights advocates assailed the plan Thursday, as did the Mexican government, which already has filed a formal protest to the United States.

“It’s preposterous; it’s ludicrous to think a ditch will stop people,” said Mario Moreno, associate counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “If the INS thinks the ditch will have a marked effect on the number of people coming across the border, it has another thought coming. People have endured more dangerous conditions than that to get to the border.”

Moreno and others characterized the ditch as a symbol of oppression and called on U. S. officials to work with governments in Mexico and Central America to help remove the causes of illegal immigration, such as poverty and war.

At the Mexican Embassy here, Press Secretary Enrique Berruga called the ditch “a bad symbol” to the people of Mexico, who, he said, have nicknamed it “the Berlin ditch.”

A drainage ditch to dispose of rainwater was what Mexico had expected, Berruga asserted, not “a triple-purpose project” to stop drugs, illegal immigrants and poor drainage. In February, his government made that point in a communique, saying that “in the spirit of cooperation and friendship that characterizes the relations between the two nations that option (the ditch) must be discarded.”

Before that protest, INS Commissioner Alan C. Nelson had said: “We obviously don’t ask Mexico’s permission to build a ditch on our side to stop vehicles.”

Thursday, Berruga acknowledged that there is no legal restriction against construction of the ditch, which would begin 4 feet inside U. S. territory. “The United States can pave all of California if it wants,” he said, “but it is a little puzzling because it is not something that was agreed upon,” he said.

The report acknowledges that only the swath of ditch to the east of the port of entry at Otay Mesa, about one-quarter of the total 4.1-mile length, would provide drainage assistance, channeling water to a natural drainage course that flows south into Mexico. The larger, 3-mile strip of ditch to be scooped out to the west of the port of entry at Otay Mesa will serve “mainly” as a vehicle barrier, the document stated, as that part of the channel will not lead to a natural drainage flow.

Several Options

In its assessment, INS said it had considered several options before settling on the 4-mile, earthen ditch.

The agency rejected partly concrete versions, as well as the installation of concrete “Jersey barriers” like those that divide highways.

The preferred ditch--trapezoidal, 14 feet wide at the top and 4 feet wide at the bottom--would be scooped out of an area designated as “disturbed grassland” because of traffic and development, the report said. The area is home to assorted flora and fauna, including Russian thistle, yellow sweet clover, wild mustard, side-blotched lizards, gopher snakes, Western meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds and black tailed jack rabbits.

“Impacts to wildlife in the proposed project area are not expected to be significant,” said the report. “Animals should quickly reinvade the area following construction.”

Times staff writer Patrick McDonnell contributed to this report from San Diego.