For decades, untreated sewage from Tijuana has flowed across the U.S.-Mexico border into Southern California, exposing communities to toxic contamination and degrading protected ecosystems. Litigation ef-forts, however, remain fragmented and largely ineffective. This Note ar-gues that the legal and institutional responses to the Tijuana River sew-age crisis reveal deeper structural failures in environmental accountability. Responsibility is strategically splintered: sovereign states invoke juris-dictional immunities, quasi-sovereign entities like the International Boundary and Water Commission cite treaty constraints, and private con-tractors are left as procedurally available targets. This distribution of lia-bility within toxic tort litigation exposes the design flaws inherent in the international treaty regime at play, a territorial framework built to admin-ister a border rather than to govern a shared environmental space. Meanwhile, despite racially charged rhetoric, the absence of litigation against Mexico further underscores the legal and political disparities that shape transboundary environmental harm.

Drawing on case analysis, treaty frameworks, legal theory, and paral-lel global governance failures, this Note illustrates how these layered asymmetries reinforce a legal architecture in which harm is acknowledged but accountability is deferred. In an era of accelerating ecological crises, the Tijuana River litigation offers a cautionary tale: without institution-al reforms that codify cross-border environmental protections, legal systems will remain reactive and piecemeal—better at narrating failure than preventing it.