Trash woes piling up

Splayed in the desert just south of I-10 along Rita Road is an unruly collection of backpacks, flannel shirts, coats, water bottles, soft-drink cans, pill packages, toothbrushes and toilet paper rolls....

Illegal entrants dumped this trash, Pima County officials say. Now the county wants help to clean it up along with at least five other such dumps near Tucson....

The money, to which the county would add $46,000 from its budget, would buy a loader to haul off the trash. It would also pay for containers to put it in, bilingual signs to mark the dump sites, and gloves, hats and vests for the workers who clean the dumps.

"... It's getting worse. We used to find them only in remote areas."...

...The Tohono O'odham Tribe has been struggling to keep up with and remove trash dumped on the reservation for a long time. It has estimated that the average desert-walking immigrant [illegal alien] leaves behind 8 pounds of trash....

Assuming half a million people cross the border illegally into Arizona annually, that translates to 2,000 tons of trash that migrants dump each year. [If we assume a more realistic 3 million people per year, that would mean 12,000 tons of trash are deposited by illegal aliens - Desert Invasion]...

..."Basically the smugglers are making them dump their stuff so they can fit more people into the vehicles," said David Gutierrez, acting assistant chief of the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector.

Using $100,000 in federal grants and $30,000 of its own money, the Tohono O'odham Tribe has cleaned 40 tons of trash from 84 sites in the past year...

Desert Invasion - U.S.

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