We saw this first hand
Illegal immigrants burying border in garbage
The Associated Press/ AZCentral.com
Jun. 3, 2007 11:30 AM
Excerpt:
TUCSON - After three years of cleanups, the federal government has achieved no better than a 1 percent solution for the problem of trash left in southern Arizona by illegal border-crossers.
Cleanup crews from various agencies, volunteer groups and the Tohono O'odham Nation hauled about 250,000 pounds of trash from thousands of acres of federal, state and private land across southern Arizona from 2002 to 2005, says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
But that's only a fraction of the nearly 25 million pounds of trash thought to be out there.
Authorities estimate the 3.2 million-plus immigrants caught by the Border Patrol dropped that much garbage in the southern Arizona desert from July 1999 through June 2005. The figure assumes that each illegal immigrant discards eight pounds of trash, the weight of some abandoned backpacks found in the desert.
The trash is piling up faster than it can be cleaned up. Considering that the Border Patrol apprehended more than 577,000 illegal immigrants in 2004-05 alone, the BLM figures that those people left almost four million pounds of trash that same year.
That's 16 times what was picked up in three years. And that doesn't include the unknown amounts of garbage left by border-crossers who don't get caught.
"We're keeping up with the trash only in certain locations, in areas that we've hit as many as three times," said Shela McFarlin, BLM's special assistant for international programs.
The trash includes water bottles, sweaters, jeans, razors, soap, medications, food, ropes, batteries, cell phones, radios, homemade weapons and human waste.
It has been found in large quantities as high as Miller Peak, towering more than 9,400 feet in the Huachuca Mountains, as well as in low desert such as Organ Pipe National Monument and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0603bordertrash-ON.html