- They Tried to Save the Lives of Immigrants Fleeing Danger. Now They’re Facing Prosecution Archived Message
Posted by Gerard
on November 12, 2019, 10:20 am
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"Scott Warren gazes at the desert stretching from Ajo’s palm-studded town plaza to Mexico. Warren credits this scrubby land of rattlesnakes, tarantulas and cacti with transforming him from a university lecturer to a humanitarian aid worker, but it’s a transformation that has come at a steep price. He has stood trial twice — once on felony and once on misdemeanor charges — and faces a third that could put him in prison for a decade. He’s been thrust from the obscurity of academia into a role he never sought: as the criminal defendant at the center of a politically charged case drawing international attention. All, Warren says, because he tried to save lives. On the afternoon of Jan. 17, 2018, immigration agents descended on a building on the outskirts of Ajo known to be a staging area for aid workers like Warren, who leave water and food in remote desert locations for migrants crossing on foot from Mexico and offer medical care to those in need. Warren was there, speaking with two Central American men who’d recently made the trek. The agents bundled the three men into vehicles and drove to the Ajo Border Patrol station, where Warren spent the night. The next day, he was driven two hours to Tucson, where he was charged with three felony counts: two of harboring undocumented migrants and one of conspiracy to transport and harbor undocumented migrants. The Central American men eventually were deported. It’s a case that might have gone unnoticed were it not for the message it sent to humanitarian aid workers across the world, who say the rise of nationalist governments has added a dangerous element to the war against migrants. Now, not only are migrants being targeted; the people helping them are, too. Warren isn’t the first U.S. aid worker to be prosecuted for helping migrants since Donald Trump was elected on a brash anti-immigrant platform, but the charges against him are the most serious so far. His first felony trial ended in a hung jury in June. Prosecutors dropped the conspiracy charge but plan to retry Warren on the harboring allegations. Warren is still awaiting a verdict from a non-jury trial held in May on misdemeanor charges also tied to his volunteer work. The retrial on the felonies begins Nov. 12. The arrest of Warren “threw up several red flags,” says Brian Griffey of Amnesty International, which has used Warren’s prosecution as a rallying cry for humanitarian workers worldwide as civil wars, persecution, and violence fuel a global migration surge unseen since World War II. “How alarming it is that the U.S. government and Western European nations are now the perpetrators of creating politically motivated human rights violations against human rights defenders themselves,” says Griffey. Elinor Raikes of the International Rescue Committee says it’s all “part of a broader trend in Europe and the U.S. toward increasingly extreme measures to prevent people crossing their borders.” Between 2014 and 2018, more than 30,000 people died trying to cross international borders, according to the International Organization for Migration. The most dangerous frontier by far was the Mediterranean Sea, where more than 17,000 men, women and children drowned. During the same period, at least 1,871 died at the southern U.S. border with Mexico. It’s impossible to say how many U.S. aid workers have been prosecuted since Donald Trump’s election, though the Trump Administration made clear in a speech by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April 2017 that it planned to step up its pursuit of anyone suspected of aiding undocumented migrants. A data-gathering organization based at Syracuse University says the number of people prosecuted in the United States for charges related to bringing in or harboring undocumented migrants was more than 5,200 in fiscal year 2019, a 25.6 percent increase over 2018. Those numbers, obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse through Freedom of Information Act requests, don’t specify how many cases involved humanitarian workers. Gallons of water and cans of beans are stockpiled outside of the Ajo Humanitarian Aid Office, just south of the town's plaza." Go to: https://time.com/5713732/scott-warren-retrial/ for full article. |
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