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Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin’s trip Tuesday to this scenic family-friendly coastal tourist destination was all business and at times quite unpleasant, considering the noxious fumes he was there to discuss.

Zeldin visited this border city on Earth Day to try to put an end to a decades-long environmental catastrophe: Billions of gallons of sewage and industrial chemicals from Mexico have flowed into the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, closing local beaches and sickening U.S. Navy SEALs who train in the water on nearby beaches.

The cross-border pollution has been going on for decades with Congress addressing the disgusting effluence piece-meal, throwing more than $653 million at the problem over the last five years alone even as the contaminant levels surged.

The Tijuana River runs close to the coast in Mexico then flows into California, through Navy-owned land, and dumps into the ocean. In recent years, Tijuana’s population and industry have boomed, overwhelming its aging wastewater treatment plants and pumping stations and increasing the levels of toxins, including industrial chemicals, bacteria, and trash, in the river and nearby coastal waters. Scientists and researchers say the sewage doesn’t only contaminate the water – it also vaporizes into the air and they have detected high levels of harmful gases in the area.

Enter President Trump, who with his “drill-baby-drill” refrain may seem an unlikely environmental hero. But the president has been intensely focused on the border and has demanded that Mexico help stop the flow of illegal immigrants, drugs, and now human waste into U.S. territory and waters. During Trump’s first term, he usually either touted progress on his “big, beautiful border wall” or railed against Democrats efforts to defund it – without mentioning the sewage pouring into California coastal zones.

Now the problem is “top of mind” for Trump, Zeldin said. 

Zeldin, a former Congressman from New York who ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2022, spent his day discussing various options to expedite solutions. He met the previous evening with his Mexican environmental counterparts and left the meeting hopeful about their commitment, but he also didn’t mince words.

“I’m a New Yorker, and if I say this in a way that offends people from Southern California, I’m sorry. But I know my counterparts in Mexico are listening,” Zeldin told reporters after a forum with a bipartisan group of congressman and local leaders. “What’s going on inside of the American who just cares about having it resolved – they don’t give a shit about how it gets done, as long as this crisis is over.”

Earlier in the day, while touring a U.S. plant that treats sewage as a secondary facility to one in Mexico, Darrell Issa, longtime San Diego-area GOP congressman, recounted an alarming story. He recalled one Border Patrol agent telling him the Tijuana River water is so toxic that his boots started disintegrating after stepping into it while doing his job.

Rep. Mike Levin, a Democrat representing northern San Diego County, later told reporters that his wife’s nephew who had trained as a SEAL near the border had been diagnosed with cancer in his 20s. The family can’t prove that his training in the deeply polluted water caused the cancer, but they have their suspicions. Other Navy vets have recently started dubbing the sewage outflows, located roughly one mile from their training waters, the “next Camp Lejeune.”

The Navy is considering relocating its Coronado training site for SEAL candidates after documenting 1,168 cases of acute gastrointestinal illnesses of its recruits from 2019 to 2023. The pollution has sickened swimmers, surfers, lifeguards, and border patrol agents, closing California beaches near the border more often than they’ve been open over the last four years.

Zeldin, who took a helicopter tour of the polluted areas and met with Navy officials Tuesday, said American patience has run out. In the coming days, he will deliver Mexico a to-do list to resolve the environmental crisis and plans to issue a joint statement outlining concrete steps, which must happen “as fast as humanly possible.”

The actions must be “aggressively pursued with extreme urgency,” he stated.

During the tour of the U.S. wastewater treatment center, lawmakers and local officials explained that expanding that facility alone will only take care of roughly half the problem. The center can treat only a limited amount of raw sewage before releasing it directly into the ocean. Meanwhile, Mexican factories and people are dumping chemicals and trash into the Tijuana River itself.

The Mexican government, Zeldin said, must clean up the river and prevent its citizens from re-contaminating it. In 2022, Mexico committed $88 million to help remediate the pollution but still needs to designate the funds to several ongoing wastewater treatment projects and upgrades. One of those projects must be installing floodgates to collect trash in Tijuana, Zeldin said.

“They cannot view this as a U.S. problem just because their contamination reached U.S. soil,” he said. “We need Mexico to not just commit to all the projects that will stop the flow, but in order to actually finish this project, they’re going to [have to] commit to that final cleanup.”

The meetings on the issue so far have been productive, Zeldin stressed, noting that the relatively new administration of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has appeared receptive to working out a “strong collaborative relationship” and a course of action.

Zeldin, however, did not outline any enforcement actions and said he has not discussed the possibility of making Mexico’s action on the sewage problem a condition to a pending agreement to lift tariffs.

“I haven’t had that conversation with anyone – that’s not something that I’ve heard,” he told RealClearPolitics. “But I wouldn’t read into that one way or the other.”

San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, a Republican challenging Levin for his congressional seat, has been the one sounding the alarm since the first days of the Trump administration. During Tuesday’s meeting with Zeldin and other lawmakers, Desmond suggested a far simpler solution than the complex set of wastewater upgrades and expansions on both sides of the border under consideration.

“I’m happy to support the plant there, but – I’ll go out on a limb – I think we need to dam up the Tijuana River,” he said in the meeting, a video of which a reporter posted on X.com afterward. “That’s what everything’s being thrown into – mattresses, shopping carts, tires, diapers – everything that’s coming across the border.”

Desmond also expressed optimism that “real, tangible solutions” are on the way, but said he plans to continue keeping the pressure on Mexico.

“I’m not letting up until we see results,” he said after the meeting. “Holding Mexico accountable is no longer optional – it’s urgent. Our beaches, our health, and our military demand it.”

Zeldin didn’t comment on Desmond’s proposal to dam the river, which would no doubt anger environmentalists who have complained for decades that the pollutants are harming the entire Tijuana Valley estuary, leading to mass deaths of its fish and other marine life and a reduction in biodiversity.

Doing so would also violate numerous environmental regulations. The estuary is one of just 30 that remain protected in North America and is recognized by the United Nations as coastal wetlands in need of these safeguards. Even so, Mexican factories and others continue to violate the protections and disregard regulations.

The bilateral solution will likely be complex, Zeldin said, but the status quo is unacceptable. The administrator then predicted that the U.S. and Mexican government would be celebrating putting the crisis in the “rearview mirror” by Earth Day 2026.

“There’s no way that we are going to stand before the people of California and ask them to have more patience and just bear with all of us as we go through the next 10 or 20 or 30 years of being stuck in 12 feet of raw sewage and not getting anywhere,” he pledged.

As to why Trump is making the issue a priority now and why no other president, Democrat or Republican, over the last 25 years has successfully tackled it, Zeldin demurred.

“Look, I have plenty of thoughts as to missed opportunities in the past,” he told RCP. “But I’m not here to look backwards right now. I’m just looking forward.”

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' national political correspondent.