Imperial Beach councilmembers want the U.S. Congress to consider restricting potable water sales to Tijuana as well as limiting border crossings from Mexico.
The 4-1 vote on Tuesday was bundled with a number of requests meant to pressure Mexican authorities to accelerate their response to the Tijuana River sewage crisis. It comes after President Donald Trump said that Mexico was dumping sewage into “our part of the ocean,” and days before U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is set to visit the region.
Officials acknowledged that their request deals with issues they have no jurisdiction over — and that they don’t know how federal officials would carry it out.
Mayor Paloma Aguirre cast the dissenting vote, arguing that the sewage crisis should not be turned into a migration or partisan issue.
“We run the risk of politicizing it when we start to talk about immigration and border crossing on something that is absolutely a public health crisis,” Aguirre said.
The council debated for over an hour over Aguirre’s request to remove the measure from the resolution, a request echoed during public comment from Chula Vista Chamber of Commerce CEO Marcy Weaver and others. The resolution also includes the council’s intentions to engage state Sen. Steve Padilla, D-Chula Vista, to ensure a bill he sponsored directs tolls from the Otay Mesa East Port of Entry toward environmental mitigation rather than maintenance of the federal wastewater treatment plant at the border.
Councilmember Mitch McKay, who proposed the resolution, said he wasn’t willing to cut the measure about border crossing restrictions. Instead McKay amended the resolution to recommend restriction of “commercial” movement across the border.
“It’s a tool I don’t want to throw away,” McKay said at the council meeting.
Aguirre said that the amendment would not change the resolution’s messaging and could result in unintended consequences.
“(When we) talk about border crossing, we’re talking about immigration plain and simple,” Aguirre said, “whether it’s commercial, whether it’s individual, whether it’s for trade, whether it’s for recreation, whether it’s for essential workers, whether it’s for small businesses, it will disrupt commerce.”
Aguirre said instead the resolution should request the Trump administration declare a state of emergency over the sewage crisis, a call that the Biden administration left unanswered. Earlier that day Aguirre repeated her call at an event during which American Rivers, a national nonprofit, declared the Tijuana River as the second most endangered in the U.S.
Councilmember Jack Fisher, however, backed McKay.
“No matter whatever we do, it won’t ever be enough until Mexico takes this problem serious enough, and sometimes you have to take drastic action,” said Fisher, “and we’re asking for the action to take place at the highest levels of government.”
The idea of leveraging border crossing and water sale restrictions are not limited to Imperial Beach.
San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond put out a similar call earlier this week, also suggesting that restricting border crossings and withholding water should be on the table.
“We need to have some sort of leverage to make this Mexico’s problem, not just a U.S. problem,” Desmond told inewsource.
Water rights between the U.S. and Mexico were established by a 1944 treaty in which both countries agreed to share water from the Colorado River and the Rio Grande. Locally, some water authorities sell water to Tijuana seasonally.
Desmond said he did not have a plan as to which water he would like to restrict, potable or industrial. Instead Desmond said he wanted options open, and characterized the sewage crisis as a national security issue.
“We cannot have millions of gallons of sewage coming across into our country for days at a time, shutting down our beaches making our people, and particularly our U.S. Navy SEALs who train in that water, sick,” Desmond said.
The United States-Mexico-Canada agreement, or USMCA, also has provisions regarding water, specifically regarding the Tijuana River and transboundary flows.
Aguirre said that the water issue will be one to watch if U.S. officials renegotiate the agreement.
Recently tensions rose when Trump threatened new tariffs on Mexico for what he said was Mexico’s failure to supply water according to the agreement. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has pointed to a heavy drought that has made it difficult to fulfill its obligation and said that her administration has been in conversation with the U.S. Following the threat of tariffs, Sheinbaum agreed to make an immediate delivery to Texas.
During his first administration, Trump also instituted the rarely used Title 42 policy to restrict border crossings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even after the pandemic dwindled, U.S. authorities used the policy to turn away migrants on the grounds of preventing the spread of the virus.
Biden kept Title 42 in place until early 2023.
A California congressional delegation will meet Zeldin when he visits San Diego next week.
Both Aguirre and Desmond are running for office. Aguirre, a Democrat, is running to replace Nora Vargas as District 1 county supervisor in a special election. Desmond, a Republican, has launched his campaign for the 49th Congressional District.
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News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
