Sick Uncertainty: How Executive Threats to Epa Programs for the U.S.-Mexico Border Threaten Environmental Justice

Abstract

The U.S.-Mexico Border is in the midst of a decades-long environmental health crisis. Unsafe and discriminatory land use practices, pollution, and lacking infrastructure are among the problems causing Border residents to become sick. They suffer from “third world” health afflictions in the Southwest corner of the first world. Because residents of racial minority and low socio-economic status experience the brunt of environmental harm at the Border, this crisis is an obvious source of environmental injustice. Despite these well-documented, ongoing environmental injustices, two Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) programs aimed at solving problems along the Border consistently find themselves on the EPA’s budgetary chopping block. Those programs, Border 2020 and the U.S.- Mexico Border Water Infrastructure Grant Program, are relatively inexpensive programs targeted at improving some of the region’s most urgent environmental needs. This paper uses Professor Robert Kuehn’s four-part framework for exploring environmental justice issues to illustrate how a region in urgent need of environmental repair might suffer if its government makes good on the continued threat to environmentally divest from repairing the severe problems there.