You’d think that after a report recently that Bush’s EPA had drastically reduced its enforcement of our environmental laws against the worst polluters in America, that anyone in the Bush administration would be reluctant to raise environmental protection as a justification for its policies. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong, of course. For, as Homeland Security “Unterfuhrer” Michael Cherthoff explained yesterday, we need to build a fence along the United States’ border with Mexico to stop some of the worst polluters on the planet: Illegal Immigrants:

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, whose department has come under fire from environmentalists for fencing off hundreds of miles of the U.S. border with Mexico at Congress’s request, said yesterday that he knows of something worse for nature than a wall: illegal immigrants.

“Illegal migrants really degrade the environment. I’ve seen pictures of human waste, garbage, discarded bottles and other human artifact in pristine areas,” Chertoff told the Associated Press, in remarks confirmed by his spokesman. “And believe me, that is the worst thing you can do to the environment.”

It takes real chutzpah to justify building a border fence by claiming it will protect America from “the worst thing you can do to the environment,” namely allowing illegal immigrants to cross the border. Especially when you consider that this administration has purposely slowed enforcement actions by EPA and the Justice Department:

EPA memos show that [its] investigators … have encountered new obstacles to their long-standing practice of directly referring cases to federal or state prosecutors. A new policy distributed May 25 requires agents to seek prior approval from the head of their division and establishes new paperwork procedures. This has slowed agents’ ability to make referrals, congressional investigators said. […]

… The number of environmental prosecutions plummeted from 919 in 2001 to 584 last year, a 36 percent decline, according to Justice Department statistics collected by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. […]

EPA agents cite other instances that they say have sent a subtle message about their enforcement work, such as the time James Palmer, the EPA’s Southeast regional administrator, took a day off in 2005 to testify as a private citizen against his own agency as a defense witness for a Mississippi developer accused of environmental violations.

“The government’s proposals were heavy-handed,” Palmer testified when asked about the EPA’s actions against the developer, his former law client. He also acknowledged calling the agency’s tactics in the case “unethical.”

The same Bush administration that Rolling Stone, in its 2005 expose on the Bush administration’s environmental record stated “Bush has reversed more environmental progress in the past eight months than Reagan did in a full eight years.”

What can you say about the environmental record of an administration that seeks to test pesticides on poor children and pregnant women? That argues in court that a dam is part of a salmon’s natural environment? That places a timber lobbyist in charge of the national forests and an oil lobbyist in charge of government reports on global warming? That cuts clean-air inspections at oil refineries in half, allows Superfund to go bankrupt and permits the mining industry to pump toxic waste directly into a wild Alaskan lake?

Since President Bush was sworn in for a second term, he has not only continued his unprecedented assault on the environment — he’s intensified it. In recent months, the administration has opened up millions of acres of pristine land to developers, allowing them to log and mine without leaving behind “viable populations” of wildlife. It allowed the import of methyl bromide, a cancer-causing pesticide that was due to be banned this year under an international accord signed by Ronald Reagan, and it scrapped plans to regulate lead paint in home-renovation projects, placing millions of children at risk for brain damage. And on August 8th, taking advantage of solid Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Bush signed into law his long-stalled energy bill, a grab bag of industry favors that provides $10 billion in oil, gas and coal subsidies while exempting Halliburton and other polluters from environmental laws. The measure approves oil exploration in marine sanctuaries, greenlights drilling on millions of acres of public land in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska, fast-tracks sixteen new coal-fired power plants and provides cradle-to-grave subsidies for new nuclear reactors. In a grotesque fit of petro-nuclear synergy, the bill even funds research into refining oil — using atomic radiation.

But thank goodness Michael Cherthoff is on the job to stop the worst environmental polluters in the country, i.e., illegal Mexican immigrants. And yes, folks, that was intended as heavy handed sarcasm.