The Trump Justice Department’s years-long, taxpayer-funded mission to prosecute a volunteer for providing humanitarian aid to two people who had recently crossed the southern border has once again failed. A jury on Wednesday acquitted humanitarian worker Scott Daniel Warren on felony charges of harboring undocumented immigrants. “The not guilty verdict came after just 2.5 hours of deliberation,” the Arizona Daily Star reports, “and it was greeted with cheering, laughter and tears from Warren’s supporters and fellow aid workers, including a contingent of clergy members from across the country.”
This is the second time the Trump administration had tried to imprison Warren for his work with the humanitarian group No More Deaths, which leaves water, food, and other life-saving supplies for migrants in the searing border desert. Warren’s first trial ended in a hung jury this past June, where he’d faced up to 20 years on two counts of felony harboring and one count of felony conspiracy for giving food, water, and clean clothes to two men in Arizona. Not satisfied with failing to criminalize basic humanity, federal prosecutors announced they would once again try him.
”In closing arguments Wednesday, defense lawyer Gregory Kuykendall said Warren only provided humanitarian aid to the men,” the Arizona Daily Star continued. “’Being a good Samaritan is not against the law. Practicing the golden rule is not a felony,’ Kuykendall told the jury.” The jury agreed. “However, he was convicted of a single misdemeanor for operating a vehicle in a wilderness area,” after driving into more isolated areas to leave supplies, No More Deaths said. Because the border is highly militarized, migrants often cross through more remote regions, leaving them at greater risk of exposure and death.
Data suggests that since the 1990s, more than 8,000 migrants have died crossing the border desert, where temperatures skyrocket into the triple digits. While No More Deaths has been doing its good work for nearly two decades now, the group has left humanitarian aid in the wildlife refuge area where Warren drove his vehicle in more recent years, after volunteers found four sets of human remains in the area over five days in 2016.
Speaking outside the courtroom on Wednesday, Warren invoked their memory and urged decent people to remember the vulnerable people and families who continue to seek a better life in our nation today. “As we stand here, people’s brothers, sisters, fathers, spouses and children are in the midst of the perilous desert crossing,” he said. “The need for humanitarian aid continues.”
There’s plenty of evidence the federal government’s obsession with prosecuting Warren has in fact been retaliatory. His 2018 arrest came immediately after No More Deaths released a report that included footage of Border Patrol agents trying to kill migrants by gleefully destroying some of the lifesaving jugs of water left by volunteers in the desert. While No More Deaths said some of the destruction of supplies could be attributed to wildlife and hikers, the main culprits were obvious.
“Make sure you get a nice shot,” one smiling border agent told the camera as he poured out water from a jug. “Picking up this trash that somebody left on the trail.” The report also quoted migrants who witnessed this destruction. “They break the bottles so you can’t even use them to fill up in the tanks,” Miguel said. “I needed water, some of the other people in the group needed water, but we found them destroyed. [I felt] helplessness, rage. They [the US border patrol] must hate us.”
Let’s be clear: Humanitarian aid is not a crime, and the Justice Department’s mission wasn’t just to criminalize Warren for providing humanitarian aid. It was also a mission to terrorize all of us into not showing basic human decency to our fellow human beings in need. That mission, at least in this case, failed, but it’s not a completely happy ending for Warren. He still faces sentencing for his misdemeanor charge for driving in the wildlife area, and he will never get back the two years he lived in anguish and fear as his own government pursued his imprisonment for giving people food and water.
“We have been saying for years that humanitarian aid is never a crime, and today 12 jurors agreed,” Geena Jackson, a longtime volunteer with No More Deaths, said in response to the verdict. “But today I also want to remember that just being human is never a crime. They can try to regulate our communities, our movement, our communication, and our humanity, but we will resist.”
