"USA v Scott" and the Fight to Prove That Humanitarian Aid Is Not a Crime

[G_j]

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/usa-v-scott-and-the-fight-to-prove-that-humanitarian-aid-is-not-a-crime?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker&utm_social-type=earned

On January 17, 2018, Scott Warren, a thirty-six-year-old geographer, walked into a bare-bones building called the Barn, in the small town of Ajo, Arizona, less than forty miles from the Mexican border, and found two young men he didn’t expect to see. José Sacaria-Goday and Kristian Perez-Villanueva, from Honduras and El Salvador, respectively, had crossed the Sonoran Desert and come into the U.S. without authorization. They had navigated, they later said, by a compass and the stars. They had made their way to a gas station earlier that day, where a migrants’-rights activist found them and offered to drive them to the Barn, where he said they could rest. Warren arrived some forty minutes later.

Warren is a volunteer with No More Deaths, a humanitarian-aid group that uses the building as a staging ground for remote drop-offs of water and other supplies for migrants trekking across the desert. When Warren encountered Sacaria-Goday and Perez-Villanueva, he offered them water and food and checked them for ailments, following the organization’s protocol. That night, Border Patrol agents, who later testified that they had been surveilling the Barn and tracking Warren, swooped in and arrested all three men. Warren was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport illegal aliens and two counts of harboring, and faced up to twenty years in prison. The lead-up to his first trial, in May, 2019, is chronicled in the short documentary above, “USA v Scott.”

Arizona’s stretch of the U.S. southern border is the deadliest in the country. Over the past two decades, the area has claimed the lives of almost three thousand migrants trying to cross into the United States—accounting for nearly forty per cent of the deaths recorded by border authorities in that time. (Human-rights groups, which, along with the media, have produced higher tallies, note that the death toll is likely greater than official reports indicate.) The Border Patrol’s Prevention Through Deterrence policies, introduced by the Clinton Administration in 1994, have steadily pushed migrants crossing the southern border into more remote and dangerous terrain. The strategy closed off the border’s urban ports of entry, moving crossing traffic into the rugged Sonoran wilderness, where temperatures can reach a hundred and twenty degrees in the summer and fall below freezing in the winter, and where potable water is scarce. As No More Deaths has noted in a series of reports that it is co-authoring about how immigration enforcement is fuelling a crisis of missing migrants, some of the “indicators of success” listed in a 1994 Border Patrol strategy document included “fee increases by smugglers” and “more violence at attempted entries.” “If functioning as intended,” the report states, “Prevention Through Deterrence would reshape migration to become more treacherous, more criminalized, more cartel-driven, and more politically fraught.” Border Patrol figured that pushing crossings into the backcountry would dissuade migrants from attempting to enter the U.S., but it has only increased the risk of death and serious injury. It’s also given rise to a corps of volunteers offering humanitarian aid to those crossing in the desert, such as Warren.

“USA v Scott” is directed by Ora DeKornfeld, a twenty-nine-year-old filmmaker, and Isabel Castro, a thirty-year-old multimedia journalist who was born in Mexico. “I think we were both fundamentally inspired” to make the film, Castro told me, “because we saw it as such a seminal case.” In 2017 and early 2018, several No More Deaths volunteers, including Warren, were charged with federal misdemeanors for “littering” and “trespassing”—that is, for leaving water and other supplies along crossing routes in federal wildlife areas. But Warren’s arrest at the Barn proved a turning point in immigration enforcement. In early 2017, Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s first Attorney General, directed federal prosecutors to use the law against harboring unauthorized migrants as a tool to help enforce the Administration’s zero-tolerance immigration agenda—until then, the law had been used almost exclusively against smugglers who trafficked migrants for profit. Warren was charged by Michael Bailey, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, a Trump appointee.

..more..

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Thank you for posting this very important story!

I'd just finished reading it on my computer and wanted to post it too, but couldn't find a link.

It is absolutely horrifying what is being done at the border in our name and it makes me so angry. The law is absolutely wrong in this case.

Again, thank you so much!

[G_j]

2. thank you

..just so wrong

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. You're very welcome! Yes, just so wrong. n/t