EDITORIAL: Transferring rangers to the border threatens our national parks

Zion National Park is one of the national parks from which rangers will be transferred under a Trump administration program. | Sun-Times Library

It takes a breathtakingly cynical mindset to view our national parks as resources ripe for continual looting, but that’s what the Trump administration keeps doing.

In the latest outrage, as USA Today reported Monday, the Trump administration has ordered rangers from national parks around the country to go fight illegal immigration and drug traffickers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

That is not what rangers are trained or paid to do. They rescue people who are in danger. They protect 85 million acres of priceless natural areas. They deter poaching. They do a host of things that preserve our parks as national gems.

It is absurd to use them to shore up President Donald Trump’s political agenda, especially when there already are too few rangers working the parks.

Each succeeding generation of Americans must be a steward of the great parks inherited from those who have gone before us. But already, the current administration has cut funding for the parks and promoted commercial interests damaging to the parks. Because of the budget cuts, biologists who are supposed to be out in the field working to preserve the parks’ flora and fauna are instead helping with parking. Diverting park rangers, even temporarily, is just another way the Trump administration is eroding the quality of our national parks.

On Nov. 5, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a government watchdog group, reported full-time National Park Service staff has fallen by more than a sixth since 2011, including a 20% drop in the number of rangers and emergency services staff. And the Trump administration wants to trim the National Park Service’s budget by another $481 million in fiscal year 2020.

The administration has not revealed how many park rangers are being transferred to national parks along the border — where their new responsibility is to chase down illegal border-crossers. But USA Today found that rangers have been transferred temporarily from Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska, the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and Zion National Park in Utah and other parks to Arizona and Texas.

The numbers of rangers being transferred are in most cases small, but the numbers of rangers to begin with are small. For example, Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado — the third busiest national park with 4.6 million visitors in 2018 — has only 14 law enforcement rangers, yet it has been ordered to send two rangers to the border this year and two more next year.

The ranger transfer program was begun last year on a trial basis. The stepped-up effort began this month in the wake of a refusal by the U.S. House of Representatives to allocate $5 billion for Trump’s border wall.

Adding to the problem, the Trump administration in its Fiscal Year 2020 budget has requested another overall reduction for law enforcement in the parks. This would include a nearly $10 million cut to “park protection,” which works out to 67 fewer full-time staff members in charge of law enforcement and visitor safety across the national park system.

Against that backdrop, diverting rangers to the border looks even less wise.

Rangers play a critical public safety role. Just on Saturday, for example, a 49-year-old man died of an apparent heart attack while backpacking in Big Bend National Park in Texas before rangers could get him to a hospital.

“There is a clear public safety implication by removing rangers from parks whose jobs include keeping people out of trouble in these remote natural places,” said Josh Mogerman, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Forget the politics and let park rangers be park rangers. Our national parks deserve better.

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