January 24, 2019

U.S. gov’t cites environmental concerns to fuel war on migrants

located:	USA, Mexico
editor:	Yair Oded

Nine volunteers with an Arizona-based NGO called No More Deaths (NMD) were recently prosecuted for leaving water, food, clothes, and blankets for migrants crossing the desert from Mexico into the U.S.

On Tuesday, four of them were found guilty of the charges against them and are expected to face a six-month prison sentence and a fine of $250 each. Four more volunteers are due on trial in February and face similar charges. Yet, the most serious allegations have been pressed against Scott Warren, an NMD volunteer accused of harbouring undocumented immigrants, which is regarded as a felony. If found guilty, Warren could be sentenced to at least 20 years behind bars.

The NMD volunteers on trial have all been distributing humanitarian supplies and water along a remote refuge called Cabeza Prieta in the Sonoran Desert. The refuge, which spans across 860,000 acres of arid desert, has morphed into nothing short of a graveyard of migrants, with a minimum of 3,000 deaths taking place there since 2000. As missing persons reports in the area rose in the past five years, NMD volunteers began to increase their activity in Cabeza Prieta and the surrounding areas – leaving water and food as well as recovering bodies and skeletons of migrants.

The series of trials of NMD volunteers constitutes a new frontier of the current administration’s war on migrants, and stands out both for targeting U.S. citizens as well as citing environmental concerns as the main claim against the defendants. An investigation of documents related to the case by The Intercept reveals that the primary force behind the administration’s attack on the NMD volunteers emanated from a disgruntled and vindictive U.S. Fish and Wildlife official managing the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge.

The official, named Sidney Slone, has waged a war against NMD volunteers seeking permits to get on the refuge back in 2017. Documents procured by The Intercept indicate that Slone has maintained a blacklist of NMD volunteers and shared it with government agencies in both the Interior and Defense Departments, as well as with Border Patrol agencies, and continuously worked to toughen regulations and make it harder to procure permits to enter the Cabeza refuge. A series of emails revealed on Tuesday’s trial also demonstrate that Slone instructed his employees to refer any individuals suspected to be NMD volunteers seeking permits directly to him, and that he personally laboured to set the administration’s prosecution of the activists in motion (based on evidence he collected on their humanitarian actions).

Officially, Slone (and now the administration’s prosecutors) accused the volunteers of violating U.S. Fish and Wildlife regulations and threatening protected areas by entering the refuge without permits and littering it with personal property (i.e water gallons, cans of beans, etc.). Yet, a closer inspection of Slone’s rhetoric indicates that it is his strong anti-immigrant sentiments that fuel his vendetta against NMD. In an email to a colleague, Slone stated, “They are now putting our [sic] protein shakes and canned foods. This is beyond saving lives, as the added food can help energize folks to hike another day or two, thus continue their journey,” revealing that his main concern is to stop migrants from advancing into the U.S.

Slone added on numerous occasions that the volunteers mistake the migrants for “mom and pops” seeking employment and refuge while the majority of them are in fact drug smugglers. This claim has been refuted by a Border Patrol official in charge of the area, who stated that only 5 percent of “illegal traffic” there is tied to drug trafficking.

That volunteers would be prosecuted and imprisoned for providing life-saving humanitarian aid, which should have been extended by the authorities, is outrageous and unethical. That they would be charged based on conservation-related grounds by an administration that has proven itself to be the number one enemy of the environment is brutally cynical.

Photo: Jonathan McIntosh via Flickr. Creative Commons license. 

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