‘You can taste it’: El Paso residents fear air pollution will worsen after border crossing upgrade
On a dark November night, a stream of cars and trucks lined up to cross the US border into Mexico. The commute, a commonplace one for many who live and work in the border city of El Paso, Texas, seemed interminable, and as the wait dragged on, the exhaust leaving idling cars choked the surrounding air.
At Bridge of the Americas, one of the region’s most popular ports of entry, this slow crawl across the border is a near daily occurrence – and residents of surrounding communities say the resulting air pollution is killing them.
The port is the city’s only toll-free one, making it especially attractive to the hundreds of thousands of commercial vehicles that cross there annually. The bridge’s facilities are over 50 years old and federal regulators say they are in urgent need of revitalization. But local environmental advocates say such an effort would cater to the needs of the business owners who use the port over the health concerns of the residents who live nextdoor.
“It’s a public health issue. Lives are being affected,” said Cemelli de Aztlan, a community organizer with La Mujer Obrera, an El Paso organization committed to empowering working women of Mexican heritage. She worries that local leaders aren’t doing enough to elevate the concerns of its most vulnerable residents. “To dismiss the health of residents and prioritize [industry] is not acceptable.”
In light of the federal push to revamp the Bridge of the Americas, some residents say commercial vehicles shouldn’t be using the bridge in the first place given that it’s located so close to homes, schools and churches in a historically disadvantaged neighborhood. For activists like De Aztlan who have been living with the environmental impacts of trucks coming in and out of their communities for years, the goal is clear.
“Get the trucks out,” De Aztlan said.
A history of pollution
For companies that move goods from maquilas on the Mexican side of the border into the US, the federal push to modernize the toll-free bridge represents an opportunity to make their operations even more efficient.
But many in the surrounding southcentral El Paso neighborhoods see the project as an opportunity to highlight existing environmental injustices, saying that the truck traffic worsens the surrounding area’s air quality and puts their respiratory health at risk.
South-central El Paso has historically been home to working-class communities like the San Xavier neighborhood, where residents say their feedback on infrastructure projects has previously been ignored. Ricardo Leon has lived in San Xavier, adjacent to the Bridge of the Americas, for the majority of the last 60 years. He said he’s developed a cough from exposure to diesel fumes from the trucks that cross the border every day.
“They’re just idling and you can smell everything. On a hot day, it’s very, very irritating, annoying. You just can’t stand it. Your eyes start burning, you feel it in your throat, you can taste it,” Leon said.
Neighbors are particularly concerned about the traffic’s impact on their children. Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, which represents residents of the San Xavier community, recently requested that Zavala elementary school, which abuts the highway, be closed and converted into a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) administrative office.
Poor air quality has long been a community issue for this region of El Paso. The Environmental Protection Agency puts the diesel particulate matter, traffic proximity, and air toxics cancer risks in the neighborhoods surrounding the Bridge of the Americas in the 95-100th percentile range compared with the rest of the country. The American Lung Association ranked El Paso as the 14th worst city in the US for ozone pollution, giving it an F rating.
Penelope Quintana, a public health professor at San Diego State University who studies the impact of idling trucks near ports of entry, said air pollution from vehicles can increase the incidence of asthma, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. “Heavy duty trucks spew out much more pollution than passenger