Biblically inspired volunteers work to save crossers' lives

10:09 AM MST on Monday, July 26, 2004

By Stephanie Innes / Arizona Daily Star

ARIVACA -Breaking the silence in what appears to be an empty migrant camp, Hector Suarez and Diane Raab shout loudly in Spanish, offering food and water. "We are your friends," they say.

Suddenly, two young men appear from a wash, claiming they are alone. But soon more faces emerge from the thick desert brush.

A young woman wearing jeans and a tank top walks up hesitantly behind the two young men. Gulping water she accepts from Suarez, she says in Spanish that she is 22 years old. She says there are 11 people in her group and they have been at the camp for two days waiting for a ride to Tucson. The air is heavy and humid from the previous night's rainfall.

"The sheer magnitude is hard to grasp if you aren't out here," says Suarez, 23, who joined the biblically inspired volunteer Ark of the Covenant camp in Arivaca after graduating from Colorado College in May. "It's a definite, pretty loud statement that we don't agree with the immigration policies."

Since Memorial Day weekend, some 250 volunteers, including Suarez and Raab, have been working shifts as part of a new round-the-clock effort to help the men, women and children who continue to cross the border from Mexico into Arizona by foot. With the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector alone apprehending an average 1,200 undocumented migrants each day, the number of people making the difficult journey across the border is estimated to be in the thousands.

Federal immigration law says it's against the law to help any immigrant, "in furtherance" of their illegal entry. On Wednesday, two members of a Phoenix church group pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting illegal entrants. But the Ark volunteers maintain their humanitarian aid remains within the confines of the law, and so far none has been charged by the U.S. Border Patrol.

"We have had no legal problems with them," confirmed Andy Adame, a spokesperson for the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector, when asked about the Ark camps. "As long as they are not concealing, harboring or shielding from detection any undocumented alien - furthering their illegal entry. But we haven't run into any alien smuggling with that group."

Organizers for the Ark camps say they intend to return each summer until the United States changes its immigration policy. They say a blockade strategy along the border since 1995 is failing miserably.

This summer the undocumented border crossers have been dying in the desert's searing heat at a rate of one each day. Since Oct. 1, at least 139 people are known to have died in Arizona's desolate borderlands with Mexico, most of them from heatstroke and dehydration.

Volunteers from the Arivaca camp place the number of migrants they have helped with food, water and medical aid at about 300 and, as far as they know, all have lived.

On July 10, Suarez was one of the volunteers who encountered an elderly woman holding her grandchild and sobbing behind a Dumpster. She was part of a group of 14 people - all of them dehydrated and suffering. The volunteers transported the group to Tucson to get medical help, Suarez recalled.

The volunteers' log book recounts an incident on July 5 involving two men in their 40s whose desperation to work in the United States had been beaten down so badly by their journey that they were pleading to go back home to Mexico, even though they said they had spent $2,000 apiece for a coyote - a smuggler - to help them travel from Oaxaca to Arizona. The men told the volunteers, who gave them food and water, that they could not walk a single step more.

Though their efforts remain controversial with some - the volunteers have been heckled and criticized by a few Arivaca residents - the volunteers plan to keep their aid camps in Arivaca and Douglas in operation through the end of August and possibly longer. A third camp that had been set up near the Arizona border with Mexico in Why was shut down earlier this summer because of a lack of migrant traffic.

The camps, which are part of a larger faith-based movement called "No More Deaths" 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 when they were wandering the desert. The volunteer training materials begin with a single sentence from the Torah: "Know the heart of the stranger, for you too were strangers."

When they aren't traveling through the desert with packs of food and water, Suarez and the other volunteers are cleaning up trash that the migrants leave, and they are also offering donated food that comes in from Tucson churches to the many residents of Arivaca who do want to aid the migrants.

The base camp in Arivaca is on a remote piece of property owned by popular Southwestern children's author Byrd Baylor and is marked with two white flags - one with water droplets on it and the other showing a green cross, which volunteers say is a recognizable symbol for a nonprofit Mexican medical and rescue group called Rescate. The base camp is on land that migrants are known to frequent, and Baylor has seen groups as large as 30 pass by her home. But so far, migrants apparently have been too fearful to stop at the camp and ask for help, so the Ark volunteers make two runs to popular migrant traveling spots each day looking for people in need of help.

A well-traveled spot is in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge off Arivaca Road, where Suarez and Raab on Wednesday morning encounter the migrants who say they've been waiting two days for a ride. Near the trail where they walk are obvious signs of life - a wash thick with trash, including piles of backpacks, clothing, some women's underwear, food cans, blankets, shoes, boots and some wrapped candy.

After the two young men and the young woman take some water, a middle-aged man approaches Suarez and Raab from a different direction. He is sweating heavily and asks for water. A fourth man, who appears to be in his 20s and says he is from Hermosillo, walks up and curiously asks Suarez and Raab what they want. Another face peers around some shrubbery but quickly vanishes.

"Regardless of their situation, they are people who are hanging out in the middle of the desert in the middle of the day," observes Raab, a 39-year-old teacher who is volunteering at the Arivaca Ark camp through her church - St. Mark's Presbyterian, 3809 E. Third St. "The Ark means just being a presence in the desert - a spiritual and psychological presence. Our faith is a belief that we're all worthy of love and that this is what God would want anyone to do."

Suarez guesses that the first two men he and Raab encountered Wednesday were coyotes, and he isn't certain about the rest of the group.

"This group wasn't typical. Typically we find people who were in a group but got left behind because they are sick, or not in shape and they need medical help," says Suarez, recalling that on Tuesday morning he drove an ill diabetic migrant and his friend from Arivaca to Nogales so they could go back to Mexico.

"You can't really be sure if what they are saying is true or not because so many of them are afraid. Sometimes on our runs, people will run away. Other times we see people who are hallucinating, throwing up, things like that."

On June 20, Suarez met two brothers in their late teens, one of whom had a badly broken wrist. The brothers said they had not had any food or water for two days, and Suarez arranged for them to be taken to Tucson for emergency aid.

The No More Deaths training manual says that if a medical problem is serious or the person is in need of intravenous fluids, they should either be transported to a hospital or else the U.S. Border Patrol's BORSTAR rescue unit should be called. In the case of dehydration, exhaustion, or injuries like severe blisters, the training manual says volunteers can arrange for the person to be transported to a Tucson church or clinic.

Suarez was raised in East Los Angeles by two parents who crossed the border illegally into California from Mexico. His parents were granted amnesty during the 1980s, and he still feels especially close to the issue and believes that trade agreements are to blame for the poverty that forces Mexican people to seek work in the United States. Suarez says it's unfair to allow the free flow of goods and services between Mexico and the United States without affording people that same right. He says that working on the front lines with No More Deaths is only reinforcing his convictions.

"The goal is to save people's lives," says Suarez, one of several Colorado College students who joined Ark of the Cove-nant with the help of two private grants. "I think I've really learned a lot more the power that religion can have."

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©The Arizona Daily Star, 2004