Volunteers convicted on charges related to leaving food, water for migrants

Humanitarian volunteers convicted on charges related to leaving food, water for migrants at Arizona-Mexico border

Each of the women convicted are part of Tucson and Phoenix-based advocacy group No More Deaths, which seeks to end the deaths of undocumented immigrants crossing the desert regions near the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the group's website.

The charges stem from an incident on Aug. 14, 2017, when the helpers encountered a U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Arizona after they operated a vehicle there without a permit and left behind gallon jugs of water and cans of beans, the Arizona Republic reported.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/humanitar...-related-leaving-food-water/story?id=60520579

 

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...uitted-charges-helping-migrants-cross-border/
After helping migrants in the Arizona desert, an activist was charged with a felony. Now, he’s been acquitted.

The first jury that heard Scott Warren’s case earlier this year could not agree. Should he should face prison time for helping migrants who had crossed the border into the United States?

Federal prosecutors had charged the 37-year-old with illegally harboring two Central Americans at a camp in southern Arizona. Warren’s lawyers, however, argued he had merely offered them basic necessities for survival — part of his humanitarian efforts to help migrants making the treacherous trek across the Sonoran Desert.

On Wednesday, however, it took only two hours for a different jury in Tucson to come to a definitive conclusion: Warren, a geography teacher who has since emerged as a symbol of the Trump administration’s crackdown on border activists, was found not guilty.

“This jury understood that Scott’s purpose had nothing to do with illegality,” his lawyer, Gregory J. Kuykendall, told The Washington Post. “Scott’s purpose was to keep people safe — people who otherwise stood a good chance of dying.”

Outside the U.S. District Court on Wednesday afternoon, Warren cheered the victory, saying it would allow him and the group he works with, No More Deaths, to continue offering clothing, food and shelter to migrants.

“The government has failed in its attempt to criminalize basic human kindness,” he told a crowd of supporters.

The verdict in Warren’s highly publicized trial marks the peak of a months-long legal saga, after he was arrested nearly two years ago by U.S. agents at an aid station run by No More Deaths.

Known as “the Barn,” the station is located near the tiny town of Ajo, Ariz., about 40 miles north of the border and almost 130 miles west of Tucson. Warren and other volunteers would meet there to haul jugs of water and buckets of first-aid supplies into nearby mountains and canyons.

When they received reports that someone had gone missing, No More Deaths sent volunteers on search-and-rescue missions to offer emergency aid or, in the worst of cases, recover bodies. Between 1998 and 2017, the remains of more than 7,000 people have been found along the U.S.-Mexico border, including nearly 3,000 in southern Arizona, according to U.S. Border Patrol, though experts say both of those figures are low.

Those deaths have been linked to a 1994 Border Patrol policy implemented under President Bill Clinton, known as “Prevention Through Deterrence,” which closed off high-traffic crossing points along the border to discourage illegal immigration.

But the policy didn’t keep migrants from crossing, Kuykendall said. It simply pushed them to more treacherous points along the border.

That may be where two migrants, Kristian Perez Villanueva of El Salvador and Jose Sacaria Goday of Honduras, entered the United States in January 2018 before trekking through the desert to a gas station. A migrants’ rights organizer saw the men and offered to shuttle them to a better location, dropping them off at the Barn, The Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker reported.

No one was on the premises. But when Warren discovered the men less than an hour later, they asked for food, water and a place to rest, according to court records. He gave them clean clothes, offered them beds and fed them, lawyers say, but never hid them or encouraged them to make an unlawful entry.

All the while however, Border Patrol agents had been staking out the Barn. They had been tipped off by an anonymous Arizona resident, who suspected the group was harboring undocumented immigrants, the Associated Press reported.

When agents noticed Warren speaking with the two migrants, they arrested all of three men. Perez Villanueva and Sacaria Goday were both deported, while Warren was charged with two felony counts of harboring and conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants.

At his first trial in June, a jury spent days parsing through the details and debating whether Warren had knowingly helped the men hide from Border Patrol. Four jurors were sure he had and insisted on a guilty verdict. Another eight wanted to see Warren go free. Faced with a deadlock, a judge eventually declared a mistrial.

Prosecutors repeated their claims at his new trial, which started last week. Nathaniel Walters, an assistant U.S. attorney, challenged Warren’s claim that he was “orienting” the men, pointing out the two migrants didn’t need medical attention.

“What they needed was a place to hide, and that’s what the defendant gave them,” Walters said, according to the AP. “That is an intent to violate the law.”

Kuykendall, however, argued that it was not illegal to help migrants if it’s not for an illegal purpose. Warren’s work on the border was being guided by neutrality, he said, and his only goal was to save lives.

“This is a place where a humanitarian crisis of epidemic proportions is occurring,” Kuykendall told The Post. “People who exercise the golden rule, people who are Samaritans, are not committing crimes. They are doing what all of us should aspire to.”

During the trial, prosecutors successfully asked U.S. District Judge Raner Collins to bar the defense from mentioning President Trump or his policies during the trial.

Kuykendall disputed the request, charging that Warren had been charged in part because of the Trump administration’s policies. In 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had ordered federal prosecutors to step up their enforcement of the harboring statute, telling them to pursue “any case involving the unlawful transportation or harboring of aliens.”

On the felony charges, however, the jury sided with the defense.

Michael Bailey, the U.S. attorney for Arizona, vowed to continue prosecuting people who harbor and smuggle migrants.

“We won’t distinguish between whether somebody is trafficking or harboring for money, or whether they’re doing it out of, you know, what I would say a misguided sense of social justice or belief in open borders or whatever,” Bailey told the AP.

Warren, meanwhile, preached the importance of exchanging dialogue on such a divisive issue.

“Part of our work here has been to educate, to explain the complicated context of the border with clarity,” he said outside the courthouse, vowing to listen to those on the opposite side of the debate: “I hope they know that I have much to learn from their perspectives, experiences and frustrations as well.”

Just hours earlier, another high-profile legal saga over migrants on the Arizona border also reached its conclusion.

In the same courthouse, just two floors down, former Border Patrol agent Matthew Bowen was sentenced to three years of probation and supervised release. In a plea deal, Bowen admitted he had intentionally run over a Guatemalan migrant with his truck — and then lied about it.

 

http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local...unteers-fined-250-sentenced-15-mos-probation/

No More Deaths volunteers fined $250, sentenced to 15 mos. probation

A federal judge sentenced four No More Deaths volunteers to 15 months unsupervised probation and fined each $250 on Friday, stemming from their convictions last month of violating federal law when they left water and food for migrants crossing Southern Arizona's protected Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

The judge also banned the volunteers — Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse, and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick — from entering the wilderness area.

On Jan. 18, U.S. District Court Judge Bernardo Velasco found them guilty of federal misdemeanors after they were cited by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services officers during an incident in the summer of 2017.

Hoffman was found guilty of operating a motor vehicle in a wilderness area and entering a national refuge without a permit while Holcomb, Huse, and Orozco-McCormick were found guilty of entering without a permit and abandonment of property — each a class "B" misdemeanor.

The volunteers drove a Dodge truck down a poorly maintained road in the wilderness area in August 2017, and left one-gallon bottles of water in milk crates, along with other supplies, in an attempt to stave off the deaths of people who attempt to cross Cabeza Prieta, where hundreds of bodies have been found over the years across the rugged and remote terrain.

A FWS officer was notified that the volunteers for the humanitarian aide group were within the refuge and went to investigate, and after interviewing the women, he escorted them out of the area and collected the supplies they left.

Following a short sentencing hearing Friday, Velasco said that he while he didn’t have “any doubt” in his mind that the women wouldn’t violate federal law again, he felt it was necessary to tell No More Deaths that they should be “aware that their conduct may be against the law.”

Federal prosecutors asked during the hearing for a $1,500 fine for Hoffman, and $1,000 fines for the others, and 12 months of supervised probation.

During the hearing, prosecutor Anna Wright said that the four women had committed multiple violations of federal law, and that their testimony during the trial was “difficult to believe on several points.”

“They each did this intentionally,” Wright said. She also bristled at the idea, presented during trial, that No More Deaths had an “agreement” with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“Frankly, that’s just not true,” Wright said. “There are no agreements now.”

As Velasco listened impassively, the volunteer’s attorney, Chris Dupont, said that the four volunteers were “credible” and “strong” women who went out to help people. He also reminded Velasco that only days earlier, a man had died near a No More Deaths truck while volunteers were out searching and dropping water — his death the result of exposure and dehydration.

Dupont argued that the four volunteers violated federal law not out of “greedy motive” and asked Velasco to weigh the necessity of deterrence and the government’s actions against their entry into the refuge.

“Their motives were pure,” Dupont said. “And, for that they’ll face lifelong consequences.”

After Dupont spoke, Velasco asked the women to stand, and said that they needed to know that their conduct was illegal, and while they were engaged in humanitarian aid, on the “other side of that coin” they were abandoning property in the refuge. And, he said that they and the organizers of No More Deaths should know that federal prosecutors think that their actions are against the law.

During the hearing, the judge also quickly dismissed a motion for a new trial filed by defense attorneys, who alleged that federal prosecutors did not disclose documents as required under the law.

Velasco’s decision Friday mirrors an agreement made by federal prosecutors last week that dismissed the charges against four other volunteers with the group, who entered Cabeza Prieta that same summer in an attempt to search for men who had gone missing in the area.

While Hoffman and the others face sentencing, last week federal prosecutors decided to drop the charges against four other volunteers — Caitlin Persis Deighan, Zoe E. Anderson, Logan Thomas Hollarsmith, and Rebecca Katie Grossman-Richeimer — who faced their own prosecutions for entering Cabeza Prieta without a permit, and for operating a motor vehicle there in June 2017.

On Feb. 22, prosecutors announced in a short three-minute hearing, backed by 100-word court document, that the government had agreed to settle the matter, and issue civil infractions carrying fines of $250 for each.

This leaves one more No More Deaths case on the docket here as federal prosecutors continue to press a case against a ninth member of the group. Scott Warren was arrested by Border Patrol agents on Jan. 17, 2018, at the "Barn," a privately owned building in Ajo, regularly used as a staging point for volunteers who want to offer humanitarian aid in the harsh deserts surrounding the small town west of Tucson.

Warren faces two counts of harboring illegal aliens and one count of conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens. If convicted and sentenced to consecutive terms, Warren could face more than two decades behind bars. In the indictment, federal officials said that Warren "did knowingly and intentionally combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with various other persons" unknown to the grand jury to transport and move two men, identified as Kristian Perez-Villanueva and Jose Arnaldo Sacaria-Goday. Warren was also charged with attempting to "conceal, harbor and shield" the men to avoid detection by immigration officials.

While federal officials once attempted to prosecute a No More Deaths member in 2008 for littering in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, another federal refuge managed by FWS — a conviction that was overturned two years later by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — up until recently, there has been a long standing détente between humanitarian groups and federal wildlife officers.

However, in 2016 federal officials increasingly began to interfere with the work of No More Deaths. In December 2016, security guards banned volunteers from the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range and the adjacent Cabeza Prieta refuge. Then, during the summer of 2017, Border Patrol agents raided the permanent No More Deaths camp near Arivaca, southwest of Tucson, after setting up a temporary checkpoint nearby and conducting surveillance on the camp.

Then, in July 2017, FWS cited Deighan's group for entering Cabeza Prieta, and in August of that year, Hoffman's group was cited and the food and water they hoped to leave was collected by FWS officers, and they were later cited. Then, in January 2018 just following the release of a NMD report that argued Border Patrol agents "are responsible for the widespread interference of essential humanitarian efforts" in the 800-square-mile corridor near Arivaca, Warren was arrested at the barn.