Thread: Law, aid groups at odds on the border

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Law, aid groups at odds on the border
Volunteers who offer water, clinics have been arrested


By Stephen Franklin
Tribune staff reporter

August 28, 2005

ARIVACA, Ariz. -- With a U.S. Border Patrol helicopter whirring above, Margo Cowan stood in a campsite waving the chopper toward a mother and child lost miles back in the thick cactus and dangerous desert terrain.

Moments before, she had called the patrol to alert it that members of her group had come across migrants rushing north who told them about the wandering pair.

It was a perfect moment for Cowan's organization, No More Deaths.

Troubled by the rise in migrants' deaths in the vast Sonoran Desert, Tucson-area religious and humanitarian groups created the organization nearly two years ago and have tried since to make a difference.

The efforts have ranged from putting water at desert spots marked by a bright blue flag with the Northern star and a drinking gourd to getting medical help for seriously ill migrants.

Though largely an Arizona movement, No More Deaths has attracted support and volunteers from across the U.S., including visits from people who just want to see the border situation for themselves.

Not everyone has welcomed the work of the coalition, which has borrowed a page from, as well as leaned on, some Tucson-based veterans from the 1980s sanctuary movement when religious and other groups offered haven in the U.S. to Central Americans fleeing wars.

2 face prison

In addition to the backlash from people unhappy with migrants passing through their communities or who consider the help to be misguided, the federal government recently charged two 23-year-old volunteers with illegally transporting undocumented migrants. The two, who say they were taking three migrants to Tucson for medical care, could face up to 15 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

"There's a lot resting on this," said William Walker, an attorney for the two volunteers.

"The humanity of our country is at stake if it is truly against the law to transport someone for emergency medical purpose. What's happened to `Give me your tired and your poor?'" said Walker, who describes the charges as unprecedented.

The U.S. Southwestern border this fiscal year has seen the highest number of migrant deaths than in any other year since government record-keeping began in 1998, according to the Border Patrol.

The governors of Arizona and New Mexico have declared states of emergency to deal with the crisis in drug trafficking and illegal migration.

Since its efforts began, members of No More Deaths have been taking seriously ill migrants found in the desert to hospitals or a medical clinic in a Tucson church, Walker said. There has been no intention to break the law, and the Border Patrol has known what is going on, he said.

"Now, all of a sudden there is a change in [the Border Patrol] attitude," he said.

Border Patrol spokesman Gustavo Soto disagrees.

"If they've been doing this, they've been getting away with it," said the official based in Tucson.

Soto also questioned the coalition's placement of food and water in the desert.

"Smugglers are telling the illegal aliens, `Don't worry about crossing because there are people out there who will help you guys,'" he said.

Such supplies also give migrants "the false hope" that they can survive the desert, he added.

In Arivaca, a rural community several miles north of the Mexico border, resentment toward the coalition and migrants was palpable at a recent meeting called by the Border Patrol. The town and surrounding area are often crisscrossed by the smugglers and migrants, with Border Patrol agents chasing them in the air and on the ground.

"This humanitarian thing, it was a good idea, but it seems to be going swiftly wrong," Scott Bumagin said at the meeting.

Another resident suggested the patrol use sharpshooters to kill the smugglers and then hang their bodies on poles to scare off the migrants.

But neighbors' griping and the arrests have not dampened the enthusiasm of Cowan, a veteran of the sanctuary movement. She had taken a week off from her job as a Pima County public defender to oversee the camp being set up in the desert by No More Deaths.

`What we do is right'

On hand were a few college students from across the nation and a middle-age man sent by his church in Orlando. The camp is called the Ark of the Covenant in the tradition of the box containing the sacred scrolls that Jews carried when wandering in the desert in biblical times.

"What we do is right. We cannot stand by and see people die by the side of the road," said Cowan, a leader of a human-rights group active in the No More Deaths coalition.

Similarly, Shanti Sellz of Iowa City, one of the two charged volunteers, was sure she'd prevail in court.

"I'm not scared. Those were people who were extremely ill," she said, referring to the migrants whom she and the other volunteer, Daniel Strauss of New York, were taking to a church-run medical clinic in Tucson when arrested by Border Patrol agents on July 9.

Among those she helped before her arrest was a family--grandmother, mother, father and child--who fell sick in the desert, and a young man seriously ill and dehydrated, whom she held in her lap on the way to a hospital, trying to keep him awake.

"He kept saying, `Call my sister and tell her when I die' and I kept saying, `You will not die,'" she recalled.

He survived.

Rev. Robin Hoover of the First Christian Church in Tucson, says his reason for taking part in the effort comes from the "politics of Matthew 25 ... feeding the hungry and the sick, and the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty."

"We want to do good deeds," said Hoover, who five years ago created Humane Borders, which sends water trucks to the desert daily to fill tanks located along migrants' well-traveled trails. A number of Tucson churches fly his group's bright blue flag as a sign of support.

`This is a faith-based effort'

As Hoover led a convoy of trucks along treacherous desert roads, Dinah Bear was one of the volunteers accompanying the group. A lawyer with the government's Council on Environmental Quality in Washington, she was taking vacation time to help the watering effort.

"This is a faith-based effort dealing with an issue that the president has said is a problem," she said as the truck bumped along.

Humane Borders' work is not against the law, she added.

Driving one truck was Gary Wolfe, 63, a retired San Francisco-area businessman who lives in Tucson.

"I'm not crazy about migrants using tax money," he said, "but I'm not about to let anyone die."

- - -

Helping hands in the harsh desert

Tucson, Ariz., organizations involved in the group known as No More Deaths include:

- Humane Borders, a faith-based group that maintains water stations in the desert.

- Samaritan Patrol, a group that patrols the desert daily, providing food and water and medical help for migrants.

- Derechos Humanos, a grass-roots advocacy program that deals with the migrant issue.

- BorderLinks, a non-profit group that arranges border tours.

The two students Daniel Strauss and Shanti Seliz were both from Colorado College. No More Deaths and BorderLinks are both tied to the Dean of the Colorado College Political Science Department. He has an interesting personal and political history. Someone in the US immigration restriction movement should check Dean Juan Lindau's history out. You are going to eat it up.<g>