At this moment, it’s hard to write about anything other than the rapid expansion of immigration enforcement in our daily lives. This week, President Donald Trump dispatched ICE agents to airports around the United States.
People have already been detained, including one mother at San Francisco International Airport, who was traveling with her daughter when agents separated them. Billions of dollars are being spent on immigration enforcement, while TSA workers go without pay.
But ICE’s inflated budget isn’t only coming at the cost of mothers, children, and families. It’s coming at the cost of our environment and our communities.
Since Trump’s return to office, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) budget has ballooned, while funding and resources from the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) have dwindled. And this has gone on for years: in 2018, $10 million from FEMA was used by DHS to lock up and deport immigrants.
The result is simple: more money for sweeps and raids means less money for disaster response and recovery.
ICE is even installing a 17-mile stretch of industrial-grade buoys in the Rio Grande river to discourage people from crossing the border with no concern for how it will disrupt the natural environment. It plans to place enough buoys to stretch 563 miles — and more than $1 billion has been granted to private companies by DHS to install them. Now, experts and border communities are warning the buoys can intensify flooding and change the river channel.
Communities Fight Back
But in moments like this one, it is the people who have the power to force a change of course in the direction of the future we want to live in. People continue to organize against the billions-backed repression and pollution that have been evermore amplified by the Trump administration.
Take Diane Wilson, for example, who has now been on a hunger strike for 23 days against Dow Chemicals. She says the petrochemical company has been polluting the San Antonio Bay for decades with plastic pellets called “nurdles.”
Wilson has found more than 100 pounds of plastic pellets in the water, the equivalent of as many as 2 million pellets.
Dow is facing multiple lawsuits, including from Wilson’s organization, San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper. To shield itself from accountability, the company has requested that the state of Texas approve an amendment to its permit that would allow it to discharge plastic pellets into coastal waters.
The days have gone by, but Wilson is still camped out in a ditch at Dow’s facility in Seadrift, Texas. For her, the hunger strike is long-term.
“We have a right to be involved and know what they’re dumping,” she said. “It’s not a one day, shot-in-the-pan type of action. I will sit here and they will know me."
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