Hourly Update

Faith-based volunteers to again offer medical aid, water to border crossers

For a second consecutive year, volunteers from Tucson faith groups will camp in the desert this summer to offer 24-hour-a-day medical aid as well as food and water to migrants who illegally cross the border on foot from Mexico. Calling the crisis in Arizona’s borderlands “morally intolerable,” members of a coalition that calls itself No More Deaths on Thursday made a public appeal to the local religious community to help curb the number of migrants who die in the desert every year. “A new season is upon as and we are on pace to set a new record for migrant deaths,” said the Rev. Stuart Taylor of St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church, 3809 E. Third St., which is part of the coalition. “We need the support of the religious community again.” The coalition expects at least 400 volunteers, many from faith groups, will help staff round-the-clock aid stations called “Arks of the Covenant” this summer. The camps are located in northern Sonora, Mexico near Douglas, and in Arivaca. The Ark camps are named for a wooden Ark of the Covenant box that, in the Old Testament, symbolized the presence of God traveling with the people of Israel as they wandered in the desert. The Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector is apprehending an average of 1,300 illegal entrants each day. Since Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year, 111 migrants have lost their lives crossing the desert and summer has not even officially begun yet. An Arizona Daily Star compilation of medical-examiner records found 221 people died trying to cross the Arizona border in the previous fiscal year. Taylor said surveillance of the Ark camp in Arivaca by members of the U.S. Border Patrol last summer created tension and also made it difficult for the volunteers to do their work effectively. But no volunteers were arrested in the inaugural year of the Ark camps and volunteers stress that giving humanitarian assistance does not violate any federal law. The volunteers say they will continue to help migrants until the deaths stop. They blame the deaths on economic inequality, a U.S. immigration policy that they say is a failure and a strategy of policing the border that they say has forced migrant crossers into more remote areas of the desert. “Every year, more people are funneled into the corridor of death,” said Kat Rodriguez of Derechos Humanos, a local social justice group that’s also part of No More Deaths. “We need to speak up, demand change. This needs to be the last year we ask why. How many more are going to die?” Read more in Friday’s Arizona Daily Star.