They Tried to Save the Lives of Immigrants Fleeing Danger. Now They?re Facing Prosecution

He’s been thrust from the obscurity of academia into a role he never sought: as the criminal defendant at the center of a politically charged case drawing international attention.All, Warren says, because he tried to save lives.On the afternoon of Jan. 17, 2018, immigration agents descended on a building on the outskirts of Ajo known to be a staging area for aid workers like Warren, who leave water and food in remote desert locations for migrants crossing on foot from Mexico and offer medical care to those in need. Now, not only are migrants being targeted; the people helping them are, too.Warren isn’t the first U.S. aid worker to be prosecuted for helping migrants since Donald Trump was elected on a brash anti-immigrant platform, but the charges against him are the most serious so far. According to a TIME analysis of data compiled by OpenDemocracy, ReSoma and the Institute of Race Relations, at least 188 people have been targeted for helping migrants in Europe since 2015.Warren never expected to be arrested when he began volunteering with the group No More Deaths five years ago. People are still dying off the Mediterranean coast, too — at least 1,090 had died as of early November this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.“The only thing criminalizing humanitarian aid does,” says Sara’s lawyer, Zacharias Kesses, “is to maximize the number of people drowning in the Mediterranean.”Most of those drownings — around 700 — have occurred on the route to Italy, where Carola Rackete, another aid worker, faces prosecution after a dramatic sea rescue that captured world attention. International experts who’ve watched the evolving migration crisis say cases such as Salvini’s, Sara Mardini’s, and now Warren’s were years — even decades — in the making and can be blamed in part on ostensibly moderate European Union and former U.S. administrations, which they say set the stage for today’s populist wave.In Europe, it was centrist politicians keen to be seen as tough on migration who responded to the influx in 2014 and 2015 by scaling back search and rescue operations. In the next year, Italian authorities turned away dozens of boats carrying thousands of migrants and opened at least eight investigations into non-profits working with migrants, including Rackete’s.Salvini lost his position amid government turmoil in August 2019, but recent polls indicate 33% of Italians favor his party above all others, putting Salvini in position to form a new government if an election is held soon.In the United States, the Clinton Administration in 1993 began concentrating border enforcement at high-traffic urban ports of entry like El Paso, Texas, and San Diego. Hours earlier, No More Deaths had released surveillance footage which it said showed Border Patrol agents kicking and emptying jugs of water left by volunteers for passing migrants.Seven months earlier, Warren had been charged with littering and unlawfully entering a nearby wildlife refuge — federal misdemeanors — after driving onto the land and leaving supplies for migrants who are known to cross the area. “It’s a little different than like going and protesting the wall being built.”“Activist,” he says, “is not a term that I’ve earned.”Asked by his attorney, Greg Kuykendall, to explain to the judge presiding over his misdemeanor trial last May why “a handsome 36-year-old man is wandering around the desert with all these humanitarian aid groups,” Warren explained that it was his “sacred duty” to prevent more deaths.