Immigration Clampdown
Mother Jones, CA Immigration Clampdown
NEWS:Â Last summer, two aid volunteers saved some desperately ill Mexicans who’d crossed illegally into Arizona. For their troubles they may end up in jail.
By Andrew Gumbel (archived)
On July 9 last year, a group of eight Mexican migrants made the hazardous journey across the U.S. border into Arizona and, after three days of walking through the blistering desert heat, stumbled into a group of humanitarian aid volunteers near the farming village of Arivaca, about 60 miles southwest of Tucson.
Five of them needed no more than rest, food, water and relatively minor treatment for blisters on their feet before they were on their way again. But the other three were in altogether worse shape. According to several eyewitnesses, they were badly dehydrated and vomiting repeatedly after drinking contaminated water from a cattle trough. One of them, Emil Hidalgo-Solis, later told investigators he was unable to keep anything in his stomach, solid or liquid, and noticed that his diarrhea was streaked with blood.
The aid volunteers, representing a group called No More Deaths, brought the three to their camp in Arivaca and, following standard protocol, discussed the men’s symptoms over the telephone with a registered nurse, who consulted in turn with a physician. Together, they decided the men needed to be brought to Tucson for further examination and treatment.
So far, this was nothing out of the ordinary in a border region where undocumented migrants have lately been crossing—and dying—in record numbers. (More than 280 bodies were recovered from the border region in 2005 alone, up from the previous year, and there is every expectation the number will increase in 2006.) No More Deaths was established in 2002 in direct response to what its members see as a shocking and needless loss of life arising from the inconsistencies and contradictions in U.S. immigration policy. Over the past three years, the group and its dozens of volunteers have established a modus operandi with the Border Patrol permitting it to carry out its mission of distributing food, water, and medical aid more or less unmolested.
But on that day last July something very unusual happened. The two volunteers who drove the sick migrants to Tucson were flagged down by the Border Patrol and arrested along with their charges. According to the Border Patrol, the three men sitting in the back seat of their car were not sick at all—or at least not sick enough for the assistance they received to be regarded as strictly humanitarian in nature.
The volunteers, Daniel Strauss and Shanti Sellz, both 23, were hauled into custody and later indicted on two felony counts carrying a potential sentence of up to 15 years in prison—”transportation in furtherance of an illegal presence in the United States” and “conspiracy to transport in furtherance of an illegal presence in the United States.” In blunter language, they were accused of aiding and abetting a cross-border racket in illegal human smuggling.
The accusation is unprecedented, and has triggered a furor among No More Deaths activists and a growing band of supporters, who see the case as a crucial test of basic human values at a time when immigration is becoming an ever more prominent political issue, and the swelling population of undocumented Mexicans—an estimated 2 million make the crossing each year—is prompting a severe backlash in several border states including Arizona.
For the activists, the charges filed against Strauss and Sellz are an indication that anti-immigrant sentiment is now out of control. [more]