Court Applies Environmental Law to Biden-Harris Border Disaster

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality estimates that each border crosser leaves approximately six to eight pounds of trash in the desert during his or her journey. If you do the rough math, the total amount of strewn garbage caused by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas greenlighting millions of illegal migrants, all trampling their way across the southern frontier, is stunning.

Americans have probably wondered why federal environmental law does not prevent, or at least slow, Mayorkas from bringing about this mess. After all, the Biden-Harris administration has done much more than simply benignly tolerate or mildly encourage this massive human movement. {snip}

On our southern frontier, the resulting chaotic human activity—clandestine camping, trekking, consuming, and disposing—has had a profound impact on the natural environment as well as on towns, ranches, and small communities. Yet Biden-Harris environmental and health officials are silent about the countless heaps and tons of garbage, plastic, and abandoned human junk all over the border region.

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Astonished and disappointed by such a transformational sellout of America’s great traditions of protecting the country’s natural bounty, one astute writer for The American Conservative explained:

For some time, environmentalists accepted that caring about population growth in the United States required caring about immigration policy. In 1989, the Sierra Club’s board adopted the policy position that “migration to the United States should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the United States.” However, by the mid-1990s, political and donor pressure convinced the Sierra Club to declare first neutrality on the immigration issue and finally, in 2013, support for amnesty.

That writer was Julie Axelrod, who is director of litigation at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Today, Axelrod is leading the CIS federal court lawsuit that asserted that the Biden administration’s open-border policies have unlawfully ignored the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Under NEPA, any federal agency considering a “major federal action” must comprehensively evaluate its “environmental effects.” Axelrod’s lawsuit argued, correctly, that DHS did not do any such evaluation before encouraging, facilitating, and subsidizing millions of illegal migrants to “surge to our border.”

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In Axelrod’s lawsuit, known as Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform v. Department of Homeland Security, a federal district court judge ruled on September 30 that DHS has indeed violated NEPA by failing to conduct the statutorily required environmental impact analysis before opening the border. For the first time, a court has applied NEPA in a way that can help to slow Washington’s massive and extreme migration policies.

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The judge ruled that “Presidential administrations enjoy significant discretion in the enforcement of our Nation’s immigration laws and protection of our borders. But this latitude does not license violations of other laws.”

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