The border issue Trump avoids discussing
Both parties have allowed a deteriorating water pollution issue at the Mexico-California border to persist.
TroibNews 
California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the U.S.-Mexico border on Monday — but not for the reason you’d expect.
The border crisis that drew the Democrat was not immigration but sewage.
For nearly a century, billions of gallons of sewage have been flowing into Southern California from Mexico, turning coastal communities near San Diego into victims of a crisis that has remained largely under the radar.
These issues have disrupted daily life in America’s eighth-largest city, impacted military operations, and highlighted failures by generations of politicians in both Mexico and the U.S. to ensure adequate sanitation along the world’s busiest border. The wastewater has led to beach closures, polluted a major river, degraded air quality, disrupted local economies, interrupted Navy SEAL training, exacerbated environmental problems connected to dolphin deaths, sparked diplomatic conflicts, and prompted extensive research into its health effects on residents.
While a Donald Trump speech linking Mexican sewage to immigration might seem predictable, he has never publicly addressed the issue. Similarly, President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have not commented on it since assuming office.
Newsom’s visit comes amid mounting pressure from local mayors, state lawmakers, and San Diego’s congressional delegation for both him and Biden to declare states of emergency along the border.
However, the sewage problem has persisted for decades, perhaps too long to be regarded as an emergency, and has failed to receive the attention that other border issues have garnered.
“The good news is we’re making progress,” Newsom stated to reporters following his recent trip. “The difficult news and stubborn news is it’s not happening fast enough.”
Politicians attempting to elevate the sewage issue attribute its lack of visibility to geographical and demographic factors — the border's distance from D.C. and the fact that the hardest-hit communities are low-income and predominantly Hispanic.
“If this was in Chesapeake Bay or even the Great Lakes, it would be the talk of the town,” Rep. Scott Peters, a Democrat from California representing the affected area, remarked in a recent interview.
Paloma Aguirre, the mayor of a California beach town near the Mexican border, had to cancel a scheduled interview because she was in the emergency room, struggling to breathe amid noxious odors.
Aguirre’s town, Imperial Beach, is at the center of the sewage crisis.
The beaches of Imperial Beach — a warm community a few miles north of Tijuana — have been nearly continuously closed for the past three years. Bright yellow signs are posted in the sand stating, “KEEP OUT,” “SEWAGE CONTAMINATED WATER,” and “EXPOSURE MAY CAUSE ILLNESS.”
This summer, the issue escalated due to the unbearable smell. Local air officials received about 1,000 complaints regarding the odor in July and August and initiated plans to distribute air purifiers to residents living near the border.
“I am being woken up by the smell,” Aguirre expressed in a phone conversation after her late August hospital visit. “It smells like your bedroom is a Porta-Potty — like you’re inside a Porta-Potty.”
Though Aguirre considers herself quite healthy, she felt sensations akin to a heart attack.
"I'm a surfer. I don't smoke. I don't drink,” she noted. “So, I don't think it'd be a far-fetched idea to think that this is related to the exposure to these gases, right? And if it's happening to me, it's happening to dozens, if not hundreds of people that are being exposed to this."
Researchers from UC San Diego, San Diego State University, local and state health departments, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and the Centers for Disease Control are currently studying whether the airborne gases from the raw sewage pose public health risks.
Blame can be traced on both sides of the border; bureaucratic inefficiencies and political neglect are not confined to one nation. However, the primary cause is an inadequate sewer system in Tijuana and a similarly insufficient sewage treatment plant in San Diego.
Despite an emerging bipartisan push in Congress to address the issue, any solutions are still years away. Significant infrastructure improvements will require hundreds of millions of dollars and enhanced cooperation between officials in the U.S. and Mexico.
“The U.S. government has to put a lot more pressure on Mexico,” emphasized Phillip Musegaas, head of San Diego Coastkeeper, a prominent regional environmental organization.
For at least 90 years, officials on both sides of the border have been aware of the flow of wastewater from Mexico into the United States via the Tijuana River, which runs north from Tijuana, through San Diego, and into Imperial Beach before emptying into the ocean.
The situation worsened as San Diego's economy grew during World War II, accompanied by a parallel growth in Tijuana, whose sewer system did not develop accordingly.
Victor Hugo once described a sewer as a “city’s conscience.” He remarked, “Every time the city opens a new street, the sewer extends an arm.”
But that didn’t occur in Tijuana. Some homes were built without connections to a sewer system, a practice that continues today, allowing sewage to flow untreated into the river or directly into the Pacific.
Over the years, California politicians have attempted to tackle the Tijuana sewage issue.
Brian Bilbray, the Republican mayor of Imperial Beach, gained notoriety in 1980 for attempting to send sewage back into Mexico by using a bulldozer to dam the Tijuana River. This controversial tactic resulted in a physical confrontation — captured on local television — between supporters and opponents of his plan. Among the opponents was Serge Dedina, a local surfer and environmental activist who aimed to protect a wetland nourished by the river.
Despite debates over Bilbray's methods, Washington eventually took action: in 1997, the U.S. constructed the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant to treat sewage from Tijuana before discharging it into the ocean off San Diego.
Dedina, a Democrat who became mayor in 2014, spent much of his tenure battling what he described as a “tsunami” of sewage issues as problems persisted in Mexico and failures occurred in the American treatment plant as well. Unlike Bilbray’s direct approach, Dedina sought legal recourse, leading to a settlement between Imperial Beach and the federal government to address cleanup efforts.
Aguirre, who previously worked for the environmental nonprofit founded by Dedina, inherited this ongoing sewage challenge when she took office as mayor in 2022.
By that time, the sewage problem had expanded northward to the wealthier town of Coronado and its nearby naval base. Some officials note that it was only when a privileged community like Coronado experienced issues that the sewage crisis gained notice.
“If other parts of the state’s coastline were closed for that period of time, all hell would be breaking loose,” remarked state Sen. Steve Padilla, who represents the entire 140-mile border with Mexico.
Peters, who has a background as an attorney and served on the San Diego City Council, adopted a more aggressive stance: he began engaging in what he called “a lot of stuff that’s not Scott Peters-ish,” including delivering a speech in March next to a sign that read “THIS S#*!’S GOTTA STOP.”
The sewage issue transcends political lines — San Diego area Democrats have sought to engage Democratic presidents, while Republicans in the region have aimed to attract Republican leaders’ attention.
There was some progress during the Trump administration. A funding bill associated with a trade agreement Trump negotiated with Mexico and Canada allocated $300 million to improve the sewage treatment plant at the border.
Surprisingly, Trump did not seem to highlight the issue despite attempts to involve him directly. In May 2019, Coronado’s Republican mayor, Richard Bailey, met with Rudy Giuliani at the Trump Hotel to discuss the sewage crisis as part of a strategy to leave “no stone unturned.”
San Diego’s Republican mayor, Kevin Faulconer, was photographed in the Oval Office with Trump a month later. This sparked discussions over why the moderates met, though Faulconer stated his purpose was to discuss pressing issues, including the sewage crisis. The president claimed the mayor had thanked him for a border wall.
During a visit to the border in September 2019, Trump acknowledged the sewage situation but seemed to attribute responsibility to homeless individuals and Los Angeles's subway system rather than recognizing the broader accountability of the neighboring nation.
When posed with specific questions regarding the sewage issue, a Trump campaign spokesperson issued a general statement that did not directly address the problem: "President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country.”
In 2023, Peters and other bipartisan members of the region’s congressional delegation appealed to Biden to declare a state of emergency due to severe economic impacts and hazards affecting the Navy, which had reported over 20 canceled SEAL training sessions off Coronado because of water quality concerns in the previous fiscal year. In September, Democrats in the delegation pushed for a state of emergency declaration from both Biden and Newsom, citing “alarming levels of noxious gas” from the Tijuana River.
Biden’s top environmental official, EPA administrator Michael Regan, visited the region to discuss the crisis from an environmental justice perspective. A senior State Department official also inspected the troubled wastewater treatment facility over the summer. Meanwhile, Harris received updates on the matter in meetings with San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, a fellow Democrat.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican and former SEAL, stated that he has suffered from sinus infections for 15 years, attributing them to exposure while swimming and diving in “feces-laden water” off Coronado. He criticized the State Department, which under historical circumstances oversees the operation of the cross-border wastewater treatment plant in San Diego.
“If the State Department would get off their ass and do something, this wouldn’t be an issue,” he asserted.
Addressing the sewage crisis requires cross-border collaboration. Upgrading the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant is essential. Established in 1997, the facility has become part of the problem.
It is managed by the International Boundary and Water Commission, an obscure agency under the State Department that has allowed the plant to deteriorate. For years, the facility has intermittently violated the Clean Water Act due to equipment malfunctions and leaks.
“Obviously having a federal facility operated by the federal government not meeting federal law is deeply concerning,” Maria-Elena Giner, head of the boundary commission, recently told California water quality regulators during a meeting about the plant’s repairs.
In recent months, Giner’s agency has made strides, breaking ground on plant repairs and awarding contracts for necessary expansion designs. However, the current size of the plant is inadequate for the volume of wastewater crossing the border.
If both her agency and Mexican officials can undertake required upgrades, the boundary commission estimates that it could effectively manage 90 percent of the sewage. Yet, there have been years of unmet expectations, and cooperation remains challenging.
Giner recalled a recent meeting where Mexican officials “got a little defensive” and struggled to clarify the source of the vast quantities of wastewater filling the Tijuana River this summer, especially during a period when it should have been nearly dry. U.S. officials suspect that sewer lines in Tijuana may have collapsed during last year’s storms, which overwhelmed the American plant as well.
Giner noted that Ken Salazar, the American ambassador to Mexico, has been “highly engaged” in this matter.
However, others believe more proactive measures are warranted.
Nilmini Silva-Send, a professor at the University of San Diego specializing in border pollution issues, suggested considering international legal action, such as a historical case from the 1930s that successfully curtailed air pollution coming into the U.S. from Canada.
“The domestic approach cannot get the whole solution,” she stated. “There are limits.”
In recent years, Mexican authorities have initiated projects aimed at reducing the wastewater flowing into the U.S.
Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador mandated the military to rebuild a sewage treatment facility along the Tijuana coast. The current Mexican President, Claudia Sheinbaum, highlighted this project during her first visit to Baja California, the state where Tijuana is located. The state’s governor, Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda, has also advocated for this endeavor. Following her meeting with Newsom, she posted on social media that the new plant “will be a turning point for the water future of Baja California and California!!”
Construction at the plant was initially expected to be completed by the end of September. While there were challenges in acquiring equipment, officials now anticipate it will be operational by mid-December.
“We are doing what we have to do to solve this problem because, yes, we are embarrassed that those beaches are contaminated on both sides of the border,” stated Kurt Honold, the secretary of economy and innovation for Baja California, in an early September interview.
He also urged the U.S. to act more promptly to upgrade the international treatment facility it oversees.
“I can send you our workers,” he added.
Navid Kalantari contributed to this report for TROIB News
The border crisis that drew the Democrat was not immigration but sewage.
For nearly a century, billions of gallons of sewage have been flowing into Southern California from Mexico, turning coastal communities near San Diego into victims of a crisis that has remained largely under the radar.
These issues have disrupted daily life in America’s eighth-largest city, impacted military operations, and highlighted failures by generations of politicians in both Mexico and the U.S. to ensure adequate sanitation along the world’s busiest border. The wastewater has led to beach closures, polluted a major river, degraded air quality, disrupted local economies, interrupted Navy SEAL training, exacerbated environmental problems connected to dolphin deaths, sparked diplomatic conflicts, and prompted extensive research into its health effects on residents.
While a Donald Trump speech linking Mexican sewage to immigration might seem predictable, he has never publicly addressed the issue. Similarly, President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have not commented on it since assuming office.
Newsom’s visit comes amid mounting pressure from local mayors, state lawmakers, and San Diego’s congressional delegation for both him and Biden to declare states of emergency along the border.
However, the sewage problem has persisted for decades, perhaps too long to be regarded as an emergency, and has failed to receive the attention that other border issues have garnered.
“The good news is we’re making progress,” Newsom stated to reporters following his recent trip. “The difficult news and stubborn news is it’s not happening fast enough.”
Politicians attempting to elevate the sewage issue attribute its lack of visibility to geographical and demographic factors — the border's distance from D.C. and the fact that the hardest-hit communities are low-income and predominantly Hispanic.
“If this was in Chesapeake Bay or even the Great Lakes, it would be the talk of the town,” Rep. Scott Peters, a Democrat from California representing the affected area, remarked in a recent interview.
Paloma Aguirre, the mayor of a California beach town near the Mexican border, had to cancel a scheduled interview because she was in the emergency room, struggling to breathe amid noxious odors.
Aguirre’s town, Imperial Beach, is at the center of the sewage crisis.
The beaches of Imperial Beach — a warm community a few miles north of Tijuana — have been nearly continuously closed for the past three years. Bright yellow signs are posted in the sand stating, “KEEP OUT,” “SEWAGE CONTAMINATED WATER,” and “EXPOSURE MAY CAUSE ILLNESS.”
This summer, the issue escalated due to the unbearable smell. Local air officials received about 1,000 complaints regarding the odor in July and August and initiated plans to distribute air purifiers to residents living near the border.
“I am being woken up by the smell,” Aguirre expressed in a phone conversation after her late August hospital visit. “It smells like your bedroom is a Porta-Potty — like you’re inside a Porta-Potty.”
Though Aguirre considers herself quite healthy, she felt sensations akin to a heart attack.
"I'm a surfer. I don't smoke. I don't drink,” she noted. “So, I don't think it'd be a far-fetched idea to think that this is related to the exposure to these gases, right? And if it's happening to me, it's happening to dozens, if not hundreds of people that are being exposed to this."
Researchers from UC San Diego, San Diego State University, local and state health departments, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and the Centers for Disease Control are currently studying whether the airborne gases from the raw sewage pose public health risks.
Blame can be traced on both sides of the border; bureaucratic inefficiencies and political neglect are not confined to one nation. However, the primary cause is an inadequate sewer system in Tijuana and a similarly insufficient sewage treatment plant in San Diego.
Despite an emerging bipartisan push in Congress to address the issue, any solutions are still years away. Significant infrastructure improvements will require hundreds of millions of dollars and enhanced cooperation between officials in the U.S. and Mexico.
“The U.S. government has to put a lot more pressure on Mexico,” emphasized Phillip Musegaas, head of San Diego Coastkeeper, a prominent regional environmental organization.
For at least 90 years, officials on both sides of the border have been aware of the flow of wastewater from Mexico into the United States via the Tijuana River, which runs north from Tijuana, through San Diego, and into Imperial Beach before emptying into the ocean.
The situation worsened as San Diego's economy grew during World War II, accompanied by a parallel growth in Tijuana, whose sewer system did not develop accordingly.
Victor Hugo once described a sewer as a “city’s conscience.” He remarked, “Every time the city opens a new street, the sewer extends an arm.”
But that didn’t occur in Tijuana. Some homes were built without connections to a sewer system, a practice that continues today, allowing sewage to flow untreated into the river or directly into the Pacific.
Over the years, California politicians have attempted to tackle the Tijuana sewage issue.
Brian Bilbray, the Republican mayor of Imperial Beach, gained notoriety in 1980 for attempting to send sewage back into Mexico by using a bulldozer to dam the Tijuana River. This controversial tactic resulted in a physical confrontation — captured on local television — between supporters and opponents of his plan. Among the opponents was Serge Dedina, a local surfer and environmental activist who aimed to protect a wetland nourished by the river.
Despite debates over Bilbray's methods, Washington eventually took action: in 1997, the U.S. constructed the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant to treat sewage from Tijuana before discharging it into the ocean off San Diego.
Dedina, a Democrat who became mayor in 2014, spent much of his tenure battling what he described as a “tsunami” of sewage issues as problems persisted in Mexico and failures occurred in the American treatment plant as well. Unlike Bilbray’s direct approach, Dedina sought legal recourse, leading to a settlement between Imperial Beach and the federal government to address cleanup efforts.
Aguirre, who previously worked for the environmental nonprofit founded by Dedina, inherited this ongoing sewage challenge when she took office as mayor in 2022.
By that time, the sewage problem had expanded northward to the wealthier town of Coronado and its nearby naval base. Some officials note that it was only when a privileged community like Coronado experienced issues that the sewage crisis gained notice.
“If other parts of the state’s coastline were closed for that period of time, all hell would be breaking loose,” remarked state Sen. Steve Padilla, who represents the entire 140-mile border with Mexico.
Peters, who has a background as an attorney and served on the San Diego City Council, adopted a more aggressive stance: he began engaging in what he called “a lot of stuff that’s not Scott Peters-ish,” including delivering a speech in March next to a sign that read “THIS S#*!’S GOTTA STOP.”
The sewage issue transcends political lines — San Diego area Democrats have sought to engage Democratic presidents, while Republicans in the region have aimed to attract Republican leaders’ attention.
There was some progress during the Trump administration. A funding bill associated with a trade agreement Trump negotiated with Mexico and Canada allocated $300 million to improve the sewage treatment plant at the border.
Surprisingly, Trump did not seem to highlight the issue despite attempts to involve him directly. In May 2019, Coronado’s Republican mayor, Richard Bailey, met with Rudy Giuliani at the Trump Hotel to discuss the sewage crisis as part of a strategy to leave “no stone unturned.”
San Diego’s Republican mayor, Kevin Faulconer, was photographed in the Oval Office with Trump a month later. This sparked discussions over why the moderates met, though Faulconer stated his purpose was to discuss pressing issues, including the sewage crisis. The president claimed the mayor had thanked him for a border wall.
During a visit to the border in September 2019, Trump acknowledged the sewage situation but seemed to attribute responsibility to homeless individuals and Los Angeles's subway system rather than recognizing the broader accountability of the neighboring nation.
When posed with specific questions regarding the sewage issue, a Trump campaign spokesperson issued a general statement that did not directly address the problem: "President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country.”
In 2023, Peters and other bipartisan members of the region’s congressional delegation appealed to Biden to declare a state of emergency due to severe economic impacts and hazards affecting the Navy, which had reported over 20 canceled SEAL training sessions off Coronado because of water quality concerns in the previous fiscal year. In September, Democrats in the delegation pushed for a state of emergency declaration from both Biden and Newsom, citing “alarming levels of noxious gas” from the Tijuana River.
Biden’s top environmental official, EPA administrator Michael Regan, visited the region to discuss the crisis from an environmental justice perspective. A senior State Department official also inspected the troubled wastewater treatment facility over the summer. Meanwhile, Harris received updates on the matter in meetings with San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, a fellow Democrat.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican and former SEAL, stated that he has suffered from sinus infections for 15 years, attributing them to exposure while swimming and diving in “feces-laden water” off Coronado. He criticized the State Department, which under historical circumstances oversees the operation of the cross-border wastewater treatment plant in San Diego.
“If the State Department would get off their ass and do something, this wouldn’t be an issue,” he asserted.
Addressing the sewage crisis requires cross-border collaboration. Upgrading the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant is essential. Established in 1997, the facility has become part of the problem.
It is managed by the International Boundary and Water Commission, an obscure agency under the State Department that has allowed the plant to deteriorate. For years, the facility has intermittently violated the Clean Water Act due to equipment malfunctions and leaks.
“Obviously having a federal facility operated by the federal government not meeting federal law is deeply concerning,” Maria-Elena Giner, head of the boundary commission, recently told California water quality regulators during a meeting about the plant’s repairs.
In recent months, Giner’s agency has made strides, breaking ground on plant repairs and awarding contracts for necessary expansion designs. However, the current size of the plant is inadequate for the volume of wastewater crossing the border.
If both her agency and Mexican officials can undertake required upgrades, the boundary commission estimates that it could effectively manage 90 percent of the sewage. Yet, there have been years of unmet expectations, and cooperation remains challenging.
Giner recalled a recent meeting where Mexican officials “got a little defensive” and struggled to clarify the source of the vast quantities of wastewater filling the Tijuana River this summer, especially during a period when it should have been nearly dry. U.S. officials suspect that sewer lines in Tijuana may have collapsed during last year’s storms, which overwhelmed the American plant as well.
Giner noted that Ken Salazar, the American ambassador to Mexico, has been “highly engaged” in this matter.
However, others believe more proactive measures are warranted.
Nilmini Silva-Send, a professor at the University of San Diego specializing in border pollution issues, suggested considering international legal action, such as a historical case from the 1930s that successfully curtailed air pollution coming into the U.S. from Canada.
“The domestic approach cannot get the whole solution,” she stated. “There are limits.”
In recent years, Mexican authorities have initiated projects aimed at reducing the wastewater flowing into the U.S.
Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador mandated the military to rebuild a sewage treatment facility along the Tijuana coast. The current Mexican President, Claudia Sheinbaum, highlighted this project during her first visit to Baja California, the state where Tijuana is located. The state’s governor, Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda, has also advocated for this endeavor. Following her meeting with Newsom, she posted on social media that the new plant “will be a turning point for the water future of Baja California and California!!”
Construction at the plant was initially expected to be completed by the end of September. While there were challenges in acquiring equipment, officials now anticipate it will be operational by mid-December.
“We are doing what we have to do to solve this problem because, yes, we are embarrassed that those beaches are contaminated on both sides of the border,” stated Kurt Honold, the secretary of economy and innovation for Baja California, in an early September interview.
He also urged the U.S. to act more promptly to upgrade the international treatment facility it oversees.
“I can send you our workers,” he added.
Navid Kalantari contributed to this report for TROIB News
