California beach town flooded with poop

When plans for a U.S. plant to treat Mexican sewage were first proposed in the 1970s, they called for a facility large enough to handle 100 percent of Tijuana’s sewage. Gradually, the future plant was scaled down to a quarter of that size and simplified so it could be built more cheaply, with the expectation that improvements would be made over time. David Gibson, an executive with the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, said the IBWC plant was already obsolete by the time it was completed in 1997. “The design decisions that were made in the 1990s for this treatment plant, we’re still paying the price for them today,” Gibson said. Without taxpayers to cover maintenance costs, the plant has also fallen victim to the Darwinian logic of the federal budget, receiving just $4 million in maintenance funding in total from 2010 to 2020, a period when billions more were allocated to border security. “It’s like buying a nice Corolla in 1997 or a nice Ford, but you never change the tires or the oil,” Gibson said. The plan now is to make the necessary repairs and double capacity. But current funding, Gibson said, is “barely half” of what is needed “for the business model.” He worries that the region is on the verge of returning to nearly 100 years of sewer history, “not exceeding the capacity of the infrastructure until about a decade after it’s installed.”

Gibson, however, echoed the view I heard from nearly every U.S. official I spoke with, that the only reliable solution to Tijuana’s sewage problem is to build the infrastructure on the U.S. side. In this case, Tijuana’s sewage treatment seems destined to function as an extension of the border wall, a constant, fitful intervention at the mouth of the river, rather than its source, no matter the cost. “I don’t think Mexico in general has the resources to deal with its problems,” Giner, the IBWC commissioner, told me. “How are we going to make sure that all of this moves forward with adequate resources once all of this is built?” she asked, referring to improvements on the U.S. side. “Let’s say we’ve caught up. Once we’ve caught up, that’s the question we’re going to have to answer.”

Everywhere you look, U.S. border politics is driven by a persistent myth: With enough money and will, the two countries could one day be isolated from each other, like apartments sharing a 2,000-mile wall. Decades of border militarization could be described as rendering Mexico invisible to U.S. residents. The same could be said of cross-border industrial development: permeable to money and airplane parts, but resistant to everything else. Straddling one of the world’s busiest border crossings, the Tijuana River offers a persistent refutation, a reminder that the two sides of the border are one and the same. Once the feces are in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get them out.