Is showing compassion to migrants a crime?
Trump – and governments across the western world – are putting humanitarians on trial. That should scare us
On 11 June, a federal jury in Tucson, Arizona refused to convict the immigration activist Scott Warren on felony charges that could have sent him to prison for twenty years. What had Warren done to merit such extreme punishment? In January 2018, he committed the unconscionable act of offering food, water, and lodging to two migrants who had crossed the US-Mexico border without authorization.
Warren is a member of the group No More Deaths, an organization founded in 2004 to stop the epidemic of migrant fatalities occurring in Arizona’s unforgiving Sonoran desert. Their work is constant, necessary, and honorable. After all, more than 7,000 people have perished crossing the US-Mexico border, according to US government statistics, though the actual number is almost certainly much higher. Over a third of those deaths are in the Arizona desert.