By J.D. Long-García | Nov. 16, 2009 | The Catholic Sun

ARIVACA, Ariz. — Nearly two years ago now, 14-year-old Josseline Janiletta Hernandez Quinteros crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

She and her 10-year-old brother, both from El Salvador, joined a coyote-led group with hopes of meeting up with their mother, who lived in California. Along the way, Josseline fell ill and the group left her behind.

Her brother wanted to stay with her, but Josseline told him he needed to keep going. He needed to make it to see his mother, she told him. Josseline said she’d be all right — she was his big sister after all.

Josseline died in the desert alone.

Her body lay in a river basin for three months until Dan Millis, a volunteer with the humanitarian group No More Deaths, stumbled across it. Millis was hiking through the rough desert with three other volunteers, en route to leave water for illegal immigrants.

“We were doing a regular supply job,” he said. The group, which searches for migrants in need of medical assistance, also leaves behind food, water and socks at designated locations along migrant trails.

Each item is dated and the group tracks the locations. If they come across a bottle of water later, while picking up trash at another drop-off point, they get a sense of the routes migrant are taking.

Two days after Millis found Josseline’s body, federal law enforcement officials ticketed him for littering after he left supplies behind on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Refuge officials enforce a strict no-littering policy in respect for wildlife and the environment.

Millis, borderlands campaign organizer for the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club, is sympathetic toward the refuge’s environmental concerns. He and other No More Deaths volunteers pick up a lot of trash while on patrols.

“We’re obviously not going to be deterred by these bogus littering tickets,” he said. “The biggest threat to human life out in the desert is lack of water, so we continue to put it out in the desert.”

Nonetheless, he was tried and convicted. Though Millis was not given a sentence, the group is appealing the case.

“We thought it was an anomaly,” Millis said.

More citations

But it wasn’t. On Dec. 4, 2008, No More Deaths volunteer Walt Staton received an identical citation while on the refuge. A 12-person jury convicted Staton in June.

Defying Staton’s conviction, 13 humanitarians from No More Deaths, Tucson Samaritans and Humane Borders went out to the wildlife refuge to leave behind water jugs for migrants. All 13, including Franciscan Father Jerome Zawada, received littering tickets.

The Tucson 13, Fr. Zawada said, told officials of their intention before arriving at the refuge. Federal officials were waiting for them when they arrived.

“We put the water down and were walking away,” the Franciscan priest said. “They asked us if we were going to pick it up. We told them we weren’t. So they wrote us tickets and put the water jugs in the back of their trucks — as evidence.”

Fr. Zawada, who is looking into establishing a Franciscan community in Tucson to serve migrants, said the United States needs to stop building barriers.

“They’re coming across because they’re seeking survival for themselves and for their families,” Fr. Zawada said. “In the heart of God, there are no borders. We are one family.”

The 13 were scheduled for court Nov. 11, but the trial has been postponed until 2010. In the meantime, the group has been meeting with officials from the wildlife refuge to work out where they can leave water.

Calls seeking comment from Wildlife Refuge officials were not returned.

More deaths

While the number of migrant desert deaths has decreased since 2007, the number of deaths this year, 206 according to some estimates, is a drastic uptick from last year’s 183 — Josseline among them.

What makes the increase even more tragic, according to No More Deaths volunteers, is that the number of migrants crossing has actually decreased.

“Without any kind of actual legal path for people to come into the country — without any reform — it pushes people to more and more treacherous terrain,” said Jeffrey Boyce of No More Deaths.

Volunteers have noticed migrant trails moving further into the mountains. When people get lost, Boyce said, they’re not found in time.

The U.S. Border Patrol has moved the migrant flow into more remote areas to help enforce immigration laws, according to Agent Mark Qualia.

It’s practically impossible to track immigrants illegally entering the United States through urban areas, he said. So, over the last 20 years or so, the Border Patrol has beefed up its enforcement near border towns like Nogales and Douglas, Ariz.

The border wall is near the
cities, and where there are no walls, the migrants have to contend with the dangerous desert. This strategy, according to No More Deaths volunteers, explains the growing number of deaths.

“We’re not the ones smuggling these people,” Qualia said. Due to the stepped-up efforts of the Border Patrol, immigrants have been forced to employ coyotes, the people truly responsible for the death toll, he said.

“This is not a mom-and-pop deal anymore,” Qualia said. The smugglers are tied to drug cartels who have cornered the market on the smuggling of narcotics.

“Now you have human smuggling organizations that have basically done the same thing,” Qualia said. Smugglers then take unsuspecting immigrants across the border through desert terrain they are not equipped to traverse.

Once in the country, some migrants die while fleeing Border Patrol agents in smugglers’ vehicles.

“They’ll try to elude arrest in a pick-up full of people, and they’ll have a rollover accident,” Qualia explained.

Presented with the Border Patrol’s explanation for the swell in deaths, Millis refused to get in a back-and-forth argument about blame.

The border conflict, he said, would only be resolved by treating the root causes of migration — the push-pull factors that are forcing people to leave their families and homes. He attributed the drop in migrant crossings to the sputtering economy, not enforcement efforts.

Treacherous journey

Days after the Tucson 13 were arraigned on littering charges, a group of young adult volunteers mapped out their patrols in the Arivaca desert camp.

Annie Swanson of Tucson wrote out patrol assignments on a dry erase board while the other dozen or so volunteers worked out the teams.

Veronica Rayas, assistant director of the Tepeyac Institute in the El Paso Diocese, joined Laura Illardo and Christopher Martinez of Phoenix. Daniel Nelson, a volunteer from California who’d spent the summer in the desert, led the crew.

Nelson’s group would be patrolling “Josseline’s Shrine,” so named because it was on this route that Millis found the 14-year-old girl’s body.

The team loaded up the supplies and piled into a Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Illardo, an organizer of No More Deaths in Phoenix and a longtime volunteer, drove the group up and down pothole-laden dirt roads.

“You see people out here, they’re not ready for this,” Nelson said. “That’s why they die.”

Some migrants, believing they’ll arrive at the pickup point in a few hours, pack a change of clothes — oftentimes their Sunday best. Women will often pack high heels, Nelson said. Most of these items are left behind in the desert.

The journey can be days long, depending on where the group of migrants is to be picked up. The closer the pickup, the more likely Border Patrol agents will intercept them. But the further they have to walk, the more dangerous it becomes.

Migrants simply can’t carry enough water for the journey. This summer, No More Deaths in Phoenix brought some 10,000 gallons to Tucson for the border effort.

“It certainly helps them, but we can’t say if it saves them,” Illardo said of the effort. She told the newer volunteers Josseline’s story when they arrived at the site.

A mound of rocks and a white cross commemorate the young girl’s life. Illardo, a Xavier alumna, gathered up debris and told the volunteers how local Catholics celebrated a Mass for Josseline a few feet away.

Each volunteer carried two gallons of water and a backpack full of supplies to the drop-off point — a good half-hour hike from where they were able to drive. They helped each other up small cliffs and down steep hills.

The tattooed Nelson pointed out a shaded place where migrants stop to rest during the day. Migrants only travel under the coolness and cover of night, he explained.

The site was littered with abandoned backpacks, empty Red Bull cans and discarded shoes. Nelson checked the bags and clothes for identification.

Each volunteer filled a couple black trash bags with items the migrants left behind. The volunteers left only a jacket and a gallon of water, which Nelson thought might be useful for a traveler. The actual supply drop off site is around the bend.

“It’s one of ours,” Nelson said as he picked up a discarded jug of water. Checking the writing, he pointed to a mountain on the horizon. “It’s from way over there, where those two peaks meet.”

‘A higher law’

Throughout the summer, No More Deaths organizes water drives, dubbed aguatones, at different locations in Phoenix. All Saints Catholic Newman Center in Tempe takes part.

The Newman Center and St. Matthew Parish, among other Catholic communities, collect money for the humanitarian effort.

“We’re answering to a higher law by ignoring the littering charge and going ahead and doing what we consider a life-saving work,” said Chris Fleischman of the Newman Center.

“In the past, we didn’t get tickets for leaving water there,” he said of the refuge. “They just looked the other way.”

Being in solidarity with the migrants through their border efforts gives volunteers a unique insight into the immigration issue, according to Jason Odhner, a Phoenix volunteer.

“Sometimes the most effective social change is through direct service,” he said. “It changes people and makes them realize how important it is to get more involved.”

Despite the controversy, the group isn’t letting up.

“If we were to respond with ‘OK, well, we’re going to stop putting water out there,’ that would be a betrayal of everything we’re committed to,” said Boyce of Tucson.

“Providing water for people who are dying of thirst seems like a pretty common sense thing to do,” he said. “It seems like something everybody can get behind. We haven’t seen that attitude from the government, but we’re certainly not going to stop.”