The New American Century is devoid of humanity

From fiscal years 2015 to 2018, the number of people federally charged with smuggling and harboring jumped almost a third, from 3,441 to 4,532. Most of the increase occurred in fiscal year 2018. That’s the year after the Trump administration told prosecutors to focus on the “harboring” statute and to charge people alleged to have violated it with as few as three undocumented immigrants per incident. (Earlier, the minimum was five immigrants.)

A few months after the directive was issued, in summer 2017, Arizona activists working to save lives in the desert by giving or leaving migrants food and water, were arrested and later convicted of felonies and misdemeanors. A Texas driver during the same period was arrested and threatened with prosecution for smuggling and harboring after she gave two migrants a ride. And now Teresa Todd is under threat of indictment after she tried to help a desperately ill girl and her brothers. In each of these cases, it seems as if law enforcement is intent on chilling a basic human impulse: to help people in need.

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In South Texas in 2017, similar punitive enforcement was aimed at a young woman who lives near the border. One afternoon, she went to a gas station to fill her tank for a trip to buy diapers for her baby at a Sam’s Club a few hours away. A man and a teenage boy approached her and asked if she would give them a ride. She said yes.

The woman, who requested anonymity, volunteers with local charities. She has a reputation for altruism, and used to regularly give an elderly neighbor rides to the grocery store.

But after she left the gas station, she was stopped by a Texas state trooper, ostensibly for failing to signal a lane change. The passengers turned out to be undocumented Guatemalans, and the agent called Border Patrol. He rebuked the woman with comments such as, “You’re telling me that two men you’ve never met in your life just approached you … and you let them hop in the vehicle with you?” She was arrested.

She was not charged but was held for six hours before being freed. “I will never give anyone a ride again,” she told this reporter. “Not even my neighbor. I don’t know if she’s undocumented or not.”

Some Samaritans lately have met harsher fates. In Arizona, Scott Warren, a college professor, was charged in January 2018 with felony harboring after he gave food, water, and shelter to an undocumented migrant who was crossing through the desert. From late 1998 to 2017, some 7,000 people died while trying to traverse the border, and Warren was working with No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, an Arizona group that tries to keep more people from perishing.

Also in January, four other No More Deaths/No Más Muertes members were convicted of misdemeanors, after they drove into a national wildlife refuge and left food and water there.

  The Appeal

If ever there were a law that needed to be changed, it's the one that punishes people for helping other people and saving lives.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.