Does mass immigration adversely affect the natural environment?

Immigration, especially of illegal aliens on the southern border of the United States, is a contentious issue in 21st century America. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has expressed concern about immigration probable impact on the unemployment rate. Homebuyers and renters are concerned about its impact house prices and rents. Law enforcement agencies question its impact on crime rates. School districts are concerned about the increased number of immigrant students and their academic progress. And Americans are generally concerned about immigration issues, such as birthright citizenship and the assimilation of immigrants into the nation’s culture.

Now a lawsuit is headed to court alleging that President Biden’s executive orders on immigration, signed on his first day in office in 2021, violate provisions of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). Yes, immigration allowed by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is seen as allegedly harming the country’s physical environment, and the lead environmental watchdog agency, the EPA, is seemingly indifferent to these environmental harms.

The oft-maligned Environmental Impact Agency (EPA)

President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) in 1970, creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Americans were then open to the creation of a new, independent executive agency responsible for protecting human health and the environment, under the influence Rachel Carsonbest selling book Silent springwhich gave birth to the modern ecological movement.

NEPA was designed to hold all federal agencies accountable for the environmental impacts of proposed policies by requiring a detailed environmental impact statement (EIS) for any proposed agency actions. This EIS requirement has sometimes led Americans to accuse the EPA of unnecessarily interfering with their personal use of private property, potentially resulting in criminal penalties. regulatory influences in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, allegations that led to lawsuits against the EPA.

For example, two recent Supreme Court decisions West Virginia v. EPA in 2022, which ruled that the EPA did not have authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions related to climate change, and Sackett v. EPA in 2023, stripping wetlands of federal protection under the Clean Water Act.

Recently, 25 states sued the EPA to block it emissions regulations was intended to encourage production of electric vehiclesclaiming that the EPA had exceeded its legal authority. And now, a nonprofit environmental group is suing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for failing to produce an EIS analysis of the impact of immigration on the U.S. environment.

Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform (MCIR) v. United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS):

In September 2023, the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform (MCIR), a pro-environment membership, filed lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, alleging that mass immigration, including policies that increase population growth, have had a negative impact on the environment since the Biden administration replaced the Trump administration in January 2021. That lawsuit alleged that many of the administration’s actions Biden’s immigration issues: ending Trump’s border wall construction, ending Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, allowing border agents to board foreigners on buses to other states, and preventing immigration officials from detaining and expelling foreigners – should be subject to EIS analysis.

However, it is important to remember that the defendants in this recent lawsuit are two other federal agencies, not the EPA. Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are the culprits behind the immigration changes. USCIS is component agency DHS along with other components such as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and many other departments. DHS is a large, sprawling cabinet-level department to which many entities were transferred after its creation in 2002.

After the lawsuit was filed, the lawsuit was joined by two other individual plaintiffs who live near the southern border and four plaintiffs who live in non-border states. Border state plaintiffs alleged that the increase in illegal border crossings has harmed the local environment, with some illegal aliens even setting fire to their ranches. The four remaining borderless plaintiffs argued that population growth due to immigration had harmed the environment and that the significant displacement of immigrants into their communities had exacerbated homelessness and strained local public services and schools.

All plaintiffs argued that these results required a NEPA analysis that was never conducted. Although many Americans claim that allowing millions of foreigners into the country is true Prima facie environmentally significant, neither the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, nor previous agencies such as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) have ever complied with NEPA before taking action to expand immigration.

A jury trial to determine a plaintiff’s standing in a lawsuit

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, scheduled: bench trial in July 2024 to determine whether the Biden administration’s actions caused a border crisis that harmed border plaintiffs. If damages were suffered, the plaintiffs would have standing to continue to pursue the merits of their case. The judge’s conclusive statement said: “The President’s Administration enjoys considerable discretion to enforce our nation’s immigration laws and protect our borders. But this freedom does not allow breaking other laws.”

Translation: While Biden’s DHS and USCIS have some discretion in enforcing U.S. immigration laws, that discretion does not allow for violations of NEPA requirements to investigate and report environmental harm resulting from the president’s immigration policies. The judge thus granted the plaintiffs standing to continue their lawsuit against DHS and USCIS on the merits, scheduling an October 25-December 20, 2024 briefing in his court on appropriate remedies for DHS violations of NEPA.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which filed an amicus brief to represent the plaintiffs, hopes the plaintiffs will win the case on the merits. CIS is a nonprofit think tank recognized as such by the left-leaning Southern Poverty Center racist and anti-immigrationportending likely controversy when the case returns to court.

Reflections on this lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

How can one understand the existence of two Cabinet-level executive agencies – DHS and USCIS – that allow radical changes to immigration policy at the southern border, but overlook or ignore NEPA’s requirement that EPA investigate possible environmental harm from these immigration policies? And how could they understand the presidential administration that allows such an outcome? Moreover, what do we make of a major cabinet-level department and one of its agencies that allegedly failed to meet its legal environmental obligations under the president’s immigration policies, when these entities report directly to the same president? What about a cabinet department that ultimately depends on a nonprofit citizens’ group to go to court to repair the harm they say these immigration policies are causing?

While NEPA is only indirectly implicated in this history as a culprit, it has nonetheless remained a law since 1970 that has caused considerable grief among Americans over the years. Now it is being used to shift some of the blame for the president’s immigration policies, which have harmed the environment that the EPA is supposed to defend.

Filing a lawsuit against DHS and USCIS to bring charges against the senior president at the end of his failed presidency and the two executive branch entities directly reporting to him could be difficult. It is also a testament to the dire state of the Biden administration that the immigration situation has led to this outcome.

On a more cynical level, it could be argued that filing such a lawsuit over environmental damage when in fact the larger violation is a major border disaster is in some sense the equivalent of slapping Al Capone for income tax evasion when in fact his serious, real crime was murder.

In recent years, both alleged and self-proclaimed perpetrators and victims of some climate-related controversies have turned to the courts for relief, when in fact such relief might better be left to representative legislative bodies as climate-related controversies continue to plague today’s political landscape. . There is no legal precedent for this type of conflict resolution in court. It is unclear at this time how these controversies and lawsuits will play out.