The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that Mexico must stop the flow of billions of gallons of sewage and toxic chemicals from Tijuana that has polluted the Pacific Ocean off neighboring Southern California, closing beaches and sickening Navy SEALs who train in the water.
Lee Zeldin made the demand during an Earth Day trip to the California-Mexico border, where he toured a plant in San Diego County that treats the sewage as a secondary facility and flew along the frontier to see the Tijuana River. He also was scheduled to meet with SEALs.
Zeldin said that in the next day or so, his agency will present Mexico a to-do list of projects to resolve the decades-long environmental crisis, but he stopped short of specifying how the Trump administration would hold Mexico accountable if it does not act.
Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s Environment and Natural Resources secretary, said her country also wants to resolve the problem. She met with Zeldin the previous evening and said they made progress in finding solutions.
“We are here because we want to solve this,” Bárcena said in a statement in Spanish. “Not only so there is no untreated wastewater on Mexican beaches, but in the United States as well.”
The 120-mile (195 km)-long Tijuana River runs near the coast in Mexico and crosses into Southern California, where it flows through Navy-owned land and out to the Pacific.
As Tijuana’s wastewater treatment plants have aged and its population and industry have boomed, an increasing amount of toxins have made their way into the river and into San Diego County — since 2018, more than 100 billion gallons of raw sewage laden with industrial chemicals and trash.
