Ecology Report Backs Planned Border Ditch

A federal environmental report strongly endorsed a planned ditch to thwart smuggling along a four-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday, removing a potentially significant obstacle to the project and also 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 of San Diego.

“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.”

Foresees Child Trap

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 at that point, dooming their occupants. “That’s the history of the border,” Torres said.

The INS proposed the controversial project in January as a way of combatting smugglers who drive across the border from Mexico carrying drugs and illegal immigrants and as a way of solving drainage problems afflicting the area.

The report said that U.S. border officials 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 the 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 that 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.

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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.

The 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 they expect the project to be completed by late summer. The International Boundary and Water Commission is scheduled to construct the ditch at a cost of about $2 million.

Several immigrant rights advocates assailed the plan Thursday, as did the Mexican government, which already has filed a formal protest with 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 likened the earthen channel to the Berlin Wall, calling it a symbol of oppression and calling 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 bargained for, 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.

In its assessment, the INS said it had considered several options before settling on the four-mile-long earthen ditch that would cover an area extending more than a mile east of the Otay Mesa port of entry to about three miles west of the port.

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 Russian thistle, yellow sweet clover, wild mustard, side-blotched lizards, gopher snakes, western meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds and black-tailed jack rabbits.