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Despite chronic understaffing at some of America's busiest national parks, the Trump administration is diverting more National Park Service rangers to the U.S.-Mexico border. USA Today reports that a new "surge" of ranger reassignments is underway, and that park officials have been told to keep sending rangers to the border through at least September 2020.
Blue Ridge Parkway is America's second-busiest national park site, with just 34 rangers to protect 14.7 million visitors last year. Despite having two vacancies, and responding to 20 deaths last year, Blue Ridge expects to divert up to three rangers to the border over the next six months. Similarly, Rocky Mountain National Park has just 14 law enforcement rangers to protect 4.6 million visitors. Rocky Mountain also has two vacancies, but will send two rangers to the border this year and another two in 2020.
Laiken Jordahl, a former Park Service contractor at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona who now works for the Center for Biological Diversity, warns that temporary rangers may be underprepared to deal with both the law enforcement and environmental challenges at the border.
"You're plopping down rangers who are effectively city cops, traffic cops, into a hostile desert environment where they have no training," Jordahl told USA Today. "I mean, they haven't even been trained on how to move through a desert environment."
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I got enough problems with what’s happening on my reservation right now: poverty, drugs, drinking and all that. That’s what’s happening on the day-to-day. I do not need another problem on my shoulders, where I have to worry about whether the pipeline is going to break or not.”
