Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called on the Trump administration Wednesday to help plug Tijuana’s rampant spills of sewage and other polluted water, which routinely foul beaches in San Diego and cause border patrol agents to fall ill.

“These toxic transboundary flows jeopardize the health of U.S. Border Patrol officers and U.S. residents, require the regular closure of U.S. beaches, and endanger sensitive wildlife habitat,” Senator Feinstein wrote in a letter addressed to Mick Mulvaney at the Office of Management and Budget.

The correspondence follows up on a letter from the National Border Patrol Council that urged Trump’s team to boost funding that could help efforts in the region to improve sewage infrastructure. The council said that agents are “frequently exposed to sewage, chemical solvents and heavy metal pollutants” while working along the border.

“In 2017, over 80 agents at the Imperial Beach Border Patrol Station alone have suffered contamination, injuries, and illnesses related to transboundary runoff,” read the letter from the council, which represents more than 19,000 employees throughout the country, including 1,600 in the San Diego region.


Feinstein noted in her letter that in August the Trump personally retweeted a Fox News article that highlighted the threat to agents from the transboundary flows.

The senator specifically called on the administration to boost funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s U.S.-Mexico Border Water Infrastructure Program in upcoming budget negotiations.

Agents have complained of an increasing amount of toxic runoff spilling through urbanized canyons along the border in recent years.

Imperial Beach, which stretches past the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge to the Mexican border, has portions of its shoreline off-limits to swimmers more than a third of each year on average.


In addition to pathogens found in sewage — including bacteria such as E. coli, vibrio and salmonella — there are several viruses and intestinal parasites that can cause everything from diarrhea to meningitis to respiratory infections.


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