Interior Department officials have collected more than $50 million from the Department of Homeland Security to supposedly mitigate environmental damage caused by Border Patrol agents doing their jobs in sensitive wilderness areas along the nation’s southern border.
Fox News reports that an environmental impact study released last December indicates that Interior is using the Border Patrol’s construction of surveillance towers along a 30-mile section of the U.S./Mexican border as an excuse to pad its own budget, in effect transferring millions of dollars authorized by Congress for homeland security efforts to fund Interior’s pet projects, including:
-$1.9 million to study and restore the effect of “unauthorized vehicle routes” on the habitat of the endangered Sonoran pronghorn, in addition to the $811,000 Homeland Security paid for the antelope in 2006;
– $34,000 to monitor the pronghorn population by air and physically move them back to the Ajo Valley if they don’t migrate there themselves;
– $175,000 to study and monitor the roosts of lesser long-nosed bats.
Note that these expenditures have absolutely nothing to do with homeland security, but the Border Patrol is paying for them anyway.
One Republican staffer on the House Natural Resources Committee was quoted as saying that Interior’s shakedown was a “pay-to-play type of scheme.” Ranking member Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, was even more blunt, calling the payments “extortion.”
Rep. Bishop, who introduced a bill that would restrict Interior from any activities that “impede border security,” added that even after shelling out more than $50 million, BP agents still aren’t guaranteed access to certain wilderness areas.
But by handcuffing the Border Patrol, Interior employees are allowing border crossers to trash the same federal lands they are supposedly protecting. As The Examiner reported in February, drug cartel members, human traffickers and smugglers are entering these remote areas at will, and causing much more environmental degradation than the BP officers who are trying to keep them out.
