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There’s A Poop Crisis At The Border

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A grassroots activist in rubber gloves and a respirator is filming the border crisis nobody in Washington is talking about.

While cable news fixates on migrant caravans and wall funding fights, a different emergency has been quietly drowning the beaches of southern San Diego County for years. Millions of gallons of raw sewage, industrial runoff, and trash cross from Tijuana into the United States through the Tijuana River every year, and a VICE News documentary aired on HBO in March 2019 went looking for the people trying to make the country care. What they found was one man in a “Stop the Poop” t-shirt, standing ankle-deep in an estuary, yelling at the smell.

• Baron Partlow runs the Facebook page “Stop the Poop,” regularly patrolling the Tijuana River Estuary in rubber gloves, high-top boots, and a respirator to document untreated wastewater crossing the border.
• Millions of gallons of raw sewage, industrial chemicals, and refuse flow through the Tijuana River channel from Mexico into the United States and out into the Pacific Ocean.
• The pollution routinely shuts down beaches in San Diego County, especially Imperial Beach, and exposes residents, lifeguards, and border personnel to dangerous pathogens and airborne stench.

One Man, One Facebook Page, One Estuary

Partlow’s routine looks almost absurd from the outside: full protective gear, an iPhone camera pointed at brown water, and a running commentary about what he’s smelling in real time. It’s not theater. The Tijuana River Estuary sits directly on the border between Tijuana and Imperial Beach, and Partlow treats it like a crime scene he revisits on a loop, uploading footage of the discharge to “Stop the Poop” to force a problem that’s easy to ignore in Washington into public view.

“I’m starting to smell it,” Partlow said, standing in the estuary and turning to ask if the woman filming him could smell it too.

Millions of Gallons, Every Year

The scale is the part that doesn’t fit on a protest sign. Every year, the Tijuana River carries a mix of untreated sewage, industrial chemicals, and general refuse north across the international border, eventually dumping into the Pacific Ocean along the San Diego coastline. It’s not an occasional spill tied to a single storm or a broken pipe — it’s a chronic, cross-border plumbing failure that has been running for years with no durable fix.

Beaches Closed, Lifeguards Exposed

The most visible casualty is Imperial Beach itself. The contamination forces regular closures of one of southern California’s more popular beach towns, and the fallout goes well beyond a sign warning swimmers to stay out of the water. Lifeguards, Border Patrol agents, and residents who live near the estuary are routinely exposed to the stench and the pathogens riding in on it, turning a stretch of coastline into a low-grade public health hazard that rarely makes it into a national headline the way border enforcement does.

A Different Kind of Border Story

What the documentary makes plain is the mismatch in attention. Federal officials spend their energy on enforcement numbers and asylum policy while an environmental disaster plays out a few miles away with no equivalent political urgency. Partlow’s Facebook videos aren’t going to move a congressional vote by themselves, but they’re the closest thing Imperial Beach has to a paper trail on a problem the government hasn’t prioritized fixing.

Partlow keeps posting. The tide keeps bringing more of it in. Until Tijuana’s wastewater infrastructure gets fixed or Washington decides a beach closure is worth the same attention as a border wall, “Stop the Poop” is likely to stay exactly what it’s been since Partlow started it — one guy in a respirator, filming the water, hoping enough people watch to finally do something about it.