(Bloomberg View) -- Scott Daniel Warren, a volunteer with a group called No More Deaths, was arrested in Arizona last week after allegedly supplying undocumented immigrants with food, water and clothes. Border Patrol agents had staked out a building near the desert where Warren delivered aid to two men.
The Border Patrol and No More Deaths appear to have a symbiotic, if not particularly constructive, relationship. The group describes itself as a “coalition of community and faith groups, dedicated to stepping up efforts to stop the deaths of migrants in the desert and to achieving the enactment of a set of Faith-Based Principles for Immigration Reform.”
Volunteers with the group leave water and sometimes other supplies along known migrant trails. Agents, treading the same familiar trails, often destroy what has been left.
In a memoir of his time working on the Border Patrol, Francisco Cantu described the practice:
Of course, what you do depends on who you’re with, what kind of agent you want to become, but it’s true that we slash their bottles and drain their water in the dry earth, that we dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze. And Christ, it sounds terrible, and maybe it is, but the idea is that when they come out from their hiding places, when they regroup and return to find their stockpiles ransacked and stripped, they’ll realize their situation ... that it’s hopeless to continue, and they’ll quit right then and there.
Some agents are no doubt cruel; the Border Patrol has a record of discipline problems. But the point of destroying water and supplies is to encourage interlopers to abandon their trek and turn back to Mexico, or turn themselves in.
By contrast, volunteers place their own supplies en route precisely because so many migrants don’t take the Border Patrol’s hint. Some migrants are transporting drugs and reluctant to face an unhappy employer. Others are desperately fleeing trouble, or toward family. Or they’re simply too exhausted by heat, and disoriented by geography, even to know which way to turn.
It’s possible, of course, that a cache of supplies left by volunteers might encourage otherwise despondent migrants to push on when they shouldn’t. In such a case, humanitarian impulses could be a contributing cause of death.
Death is common enough. In 2017, the Border Patrol reported rescuing more than 3,000 people. But thousands of men, women and children have died trying to traverse the vast expanses of Arizona or South Texas in recent decades. An international tracking group reported that at least 376 migrants died in the border region in 2017. Some bodies are never recovered. Others are impossible to identify by the time they are found.
Humanitarianism and borders – in the U.S. as elsewhere – are hard to reconcile. The misery and death associated with illegal crossings, whether the migration begins in Sudan or El Salvador, are a consequence of being born on the losing side of arbitrary lines. The Border Patrol’s job is to contain misery on its appointed side. The humanitarian’s job is to soothe the pain -- which may require ignoring the line.
You can see a similar dynamic replicated along micro borders, similarly transgressed. Earlier this month, police in El Cajon, California, issued criminal citations to members of a group passing out food, in violation of local law, to homeless people in a park. The city park, like the nation’s borderland, is a humanitarian-free zone. If you want to hand someone a sandwich, you have to do it elsewhere.
“Open borders” is an epithet in American politics, and few support what remains a politically radical position. But to those more concerned with humans than with nations, a militarized border represents an especially difficult challenge. Strong fences may make good neighbors. But they create moral dilemmas for Good Samaritans.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg View. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a national affairs writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
To contact the author of this story: Francis Wilkinson at fwilkinson1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net.
For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.