Activists Left Water at the Border for Migrants, Then The Feds Swooped In

There's a crisis at the border. It's just not the one used as a xenophobic scare tactic by the Trump administration and Fox News. Since 1998, an estimated 7000 people have died trying to cross the border, with dehydration as the leading cause of death, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. And one organization, No More Deaths, says it has become the target of the federal government for merely leaving water and food in the long treacherous stretch of desert so that migrants don't die.

In January, four volunteers with the activist group were convicted on federal charges of operating a vehicle without a permit in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge—for what the group maintains was political retaliation for their releasing a 2017 video showing Border Patrol agents destroying water jugs left for migrants. Earlier this month, they were fined and sentenced to 15 months probation each. And another volunteer is set to go to trial in May for harboring and feeding two men accused of crossing the border illegally.

For 15 years, the Tucson- and Phoenix-based organization No More Deaths has worked to save the live of migrants making the extremely long and dangerous journey to the U.S., at the border of Mexico and Arizona, providing legal aid and basic water and food on the American side and medical supplies and services on the Mexican side. We talked to Catherine Gaffney of No More Deaths about what shocked her most about their journey, how this humanitarian crisis has intensified, and how the U.S. government has changed their approach to the desperate migrants looking for refuge.

GQ: What brought you out to Arizona to start working with No More Deaths?

Catherine Gaffney: I’ve been a volunteer with No More Deaths for ten years. I first came through the volunteer program as a one week volunteer in 2009 and then I moved to Tucson so I could do the work as a year round volunteer in 2011. I was working at a youth agency in New York that did a lot of work with immigrant youth, and my family on my dad’s side has basically not left New York since arriving at Ellis Island six generations back. But there’s no recent immigrant experience in my family and I wanted to understand what the part of that trip looks like on the U.S.-Mexico border. So I went out to volunteer and honestly I felt really naive, like I had understood some things about immigrant experience in this country based on being a New Yorker and I came out to the border and realized I had no idea what it was like.

What shocked you the most about going out there?

Seeing the desert terrain. I don’t think I had any understanding that people were walking for days or weeks through miles and miles of desert where it is so easy to get lost and there are so few resources for people to be able to save themselves or find help when they need it. In my head, the border was a patch of desert that you walk for a couple hours. You pass one set of mountains, and there’s another ahead of you, and you walk through those mountains and there’s another one ahead and still no houses or lights in sight.

And what made you decide to move to Arizona full-time?

It’s very direct work: people are dying of thirst, go out and put water on the trail. People are dying because they can’t find help when they need it, so let’s go out and be on the trails and we can be just a presence out there where there’s not a lot of potentially other people out there with a humanitarian mission. So some combination of political work that felt really of the moment, I think, and doing it in a way that’s so direct. There’s never any doubt about the impact of getting water to a place where people need it because they’re thirsty and dying of exposure. And I love to hike and I think the desert’s very beautiful. I feel fortunate to do meaningful work in an environment that I really treasure.

And No More Deaths does more than just leaving caches of resources. Can you talk about some of the other things the organization does?

Because the border journey has so many phases to it, we try to offer help at a couple different phases. In Tucson, we run a free legal clinic that gives immigration help. The idea is if we can prevent undocumented community members or people who have been here a long time from being deported because they’re eligible for a status or can apply for a visa, then people aren’t deported, and then they aren’t walking through the desert trying to get back to their families here.

We do a lot of work in northern Mexico with different shelter partners, both working with people who have been recently deported and just need to get in touch with their family members. And also there are a lot of shelters in northern Mexico that’s sort of the last place a migrant might stay before undertaking the journey so we go down and just try to share resources, so if people are determined to start this journey they can at least start with some bare minimum of nutrition and medical attention.

We have an abuse documentation team and we’ve heard so many stories from people we work with, especially in the northern Mexico shelters, about the Border Patrol being really abusive and not respecting really basic human rights. They gather and publish reports on different aspects of the journey, including border patrol abuses, as well as different ways that private corporations profiteer off of immigrants and the whole private prison industry in very specific aspects that haven’t been widely reported.

From your own observations, what’s changed the most in the time you’ve been working at the border?

In the 10 years I’ve been taking volunteers to the desert, most of that time people have had similar reactions, “Wow, I had no idea this was happening.” This is actually a political moment where there’s a lot of public attention on the idea that there’s a humanitarian crisis on the border. It’s been militarized for 15 years, but now people have an expectation that they’ll see military helicopters, drones, widespread surveillance, all kinds of different technology used in war being deployed on the border. That’s the philosophy toward immigration that causes death and cruelty.

There’s more widespread awareness, I think, that migrants die and go missing when they cross the border. And to the extent that we have exposure to the routes people use, we’ve seen a lot of changes in that. I think when I first came here a lot of our work was focused in Arivaca Corridor, which is an extremely rugged, mountainous, remote patch of desert where people were walking usually up to 40 miles to cross. In the last five years, we’ve really seen a corridor emerge in the west desert which is in a different part of the state about two hours west from Tucson, and the corridor there is three times the size and people are walking for 80 miles and there’s no natural water sources.

How do you mean that the surveillance technology causing people to die and go missing?

Right, so, since 1994, the official strategy of the Border Patrol has been something called “prevention through deterrence.” It also coincides with NAFTA going into effect, which the government knew was going to provoke this economic crisis in Latin America. Many of the traditional border towns that had been places where people crossed fairly casually for work, like San Diego, El Paso, Nogales. And Border Patrol began to deliberately build walls and lock down those traditional crossing points with the explicit goal of pushing migration into wilderness areas with this idea that if you make the journey more deadly, people will be deterred from crossing—really with the explicit idea that people would die and suffer and as a result there would be less migration. But it hasn’t resulted in less migration. It’s resulted in what we call the real humanitarian crisis on the border, which is that 7000 people we know have died on the U.S.-Mexico border since 2001, and we have no idea how many have gone missing. People have life or death reasons to undertake the journey in the first place, so it just makes it more perilous for anyone who does make that really hard decision.

What’s your experience been like with residents?

We work really closely with community organizations that are led by borderlands residents that come together to support humanitarian aid. There’s this preconceived notion some volunteers have that’s, oh, that person’s a rural cowboy and we’re not gonna share politics at all, and it’s like, actually that person is living the work that you’ve come here to do and has been doing it for 30 years just by virtue of owning a ranch near the border.

Arizona has a reputation as a very conservative state and a very anti-immigrant state, and I don’t think that’s true in the borderlands because people see migration as something that’s been happening here for a long time. We don’t hear the voices of borderlands residents enough, and they know just about the most, besides people crossing through the borderlands, about what’s really going on. They know it’s not this huge national security threat because mostly they get people knocking on their back doors for water and it’s not at all how it’s portrayed in the media. And basic hospitality is just a human value here.

Meanwhile, several No More Deaths volunteers have been charged with trespassing on public lands. I understand that you sometimes shift where you leave supplies in response to what corridors migrants are starting to move through, but logistically, what exactly has changed that's caused these charges to happen now?

We’ve been putting water out in the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge since 2015, in response to this pattern of deaths we saw emerging. It’s an area where you have to get a free permit just to be out there. And in 2017, Cabeza Prieta changed the permit language specifically so now you have to sign a statement that says "I will not put out food, water, blankets, medical supplies, et cetera." That was 100 percent a direct response to our humanitarian work out there, and that’s what the charges stem from. Because that’s not a permit that we can in good faith sign when we’re specifically going to an area to put out food, water, and make sure that there’s medical supplies on hand.

So prior to the change in that language, you guys didn't have issues leaving medical supplies or jugs of water behind in areas with a lot of foot traffic?

Since I came here, we’ve had a longstanding agreement with Border Patrol that they wouldn’t interfere with our humanitarian work. What’s new is this very deliberate targeting of No More Deaths for political repression. So it was so striking to me to hear federal land managers say in court that they didn’t think it was their job to track deaths, they didn’t know how many people were dying, and they didn’t feel compelled to ensure any more of a response than there already was. And then to have us, our volunteers, the people who are paying really close attention to where people are dying and going out exactly to those sites and putting out water, be the ones on trial.

It’s really hard, I think, to make an argument that if people are dying of thirst, they shouldn’t get water. And somehow the government is really contorting itself to try and make that argument.