“Illegal migrants really degrade the environment. I’ve seen pictures of human waste, garbage, discarded bottles and other human artifact in pristine areas,” Chertoff said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “And believe me, that is the worst thing you can do to the environment.”
To curb illegal immigration, the U.S. government plans to complete 670 miles of fencing on the southwest border by the end of 2008.
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But this has drawn complaints about damaging the cross-border economy and hurting the environment. Wildlife enthusiasts fear the natural wonders of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas could be spoiled by fences and barriers and could harm some animals by cutting them off from the only source of fresh water.
Chertoff said the department has been able to satisfy most environmental concerns and will continue to address them. But if someone goes to court to slow construction, he said the department will use the environmental waiver authority Congress authorized.
For now, he said, everything is on track and the department exceeded its goal to complete 150 miles of fencing along the Mexican border by the end of the 2007 fiscal year, which was Sunday. Chertoff also said apprehensions of illegal migrants at the border have gone down about 20 percent in the past year.
“I was really driving these guys hard to make sure that we were getting this done,” Chertoff said of the fence. “This is one of those deals where we made a promise, and we’ve lived up to that promise.”
This claim was met with raised eyebrows from a local watchdog group, the American Border Patrol.
“We’re skeptical that he’s even completed 70 miles of new fencing,” Glenn Spencer, the group’s president, said Monday. “I have flown the border. I am analyzing our data right now.”
American Border Patrol says it regularly flies the border from El Paso, Texas, to San Diego and collects high-definition videotape of all terrain features, including government infrastructure.
Spencer said Naco was supposed to have an additional five miles of fence by now.
“It isn’t done,” Spencer told the Herald/Review.
Last month, Chertoff said there was glitch in a “virtual fence” — a 28-mile stretch of surveillance technologies near the border southwest of Tucson — and he would not pay the contractor, Boeing Co., until that was resolved. The glitch was that the technologies were not all working together so that images caught on radar could be sent to a Border Patrol agent monitoring the system, Chertoff said Monday.
But he also said the problem “appears to be getting fixed” and Chertoff said the program will undergo its final testing phase this month.
“I’ve seen this kind of system work in other settings, so it’s not a novel or a technologically difficult task,” he said. “But because it is complicated, and because it’s a demanding environment, we just weren’t comfortable that we were happy with the way it was working.”
