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Pastor Randy Mayer skillfully maneuvers his SUV over rough dirt roads, dodging giant potholes and jostling up steep inclines in the predawn darkness. The rugged terrain in this remote stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border is familiar territory. Mayer, co-founder of the Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian aid to migrants, has traveled here for nearly 25 years.
His destination on that Friday in January was a small encampment about 20 miles east of Sasabe, Arizona, where for the past two years his and other religious and humanitarian organizations have provided food, water and first aid to migrants stranded in the Pajarito Mountains.
A 30-foot-tall bollard fence built during President Donald Trump’s first term ends in the foothills. In 2022, human smugglers began exploiting the gap to move people into Southern Arizona in greater numbers, adding to a sharp increase that year in migrants crossing between ports of entry.
“There were days that we would find two, three, four, 500 people walking along out there,” Mayer says. The following year, more than 500,000 people entered between ports of entry in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Tucson Sector. Their numbers overwhelmed the agents, causing them to wait days to be picked up.
The rugged mountain range, which stretches into Mexico, can be deadly, with temperatures climbing close to 100 degrees in summer, with torrential downpours and flash floods. In winter, temperatures regularly plunge below freezing.
“People were in great danger,” says Mayer, who is also pastor of the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in Sahuarita, Arizona.
Most people who stop at the camp in the Coronado National Forest — which has two large circular tents, fire pits and portable bathrooms — want to turn themselves over to Border Patrol.
The Samaritans and other groups that run the camp, including Humane Borders and No More Deaths, said they cooperate with the U.S. Forest Service and border officials in Arizona and hope to continue working with them under the Trump administration. Border Patrol and the Forest Service allowed them to operate the camp over the past two years, Mayer added, because it didn’t disrupt their operations — and in some ways it enhanced them.
But a few weeks before Trump took office, a liaison with the Forest Service notified volunteers that they must close the camp and clear off federal land, according to Mayer.
The volunteers said they won’t willingly dismantle the camp because doing so would endanger migrants. Human smugglers on the Mexican side still drop off people in the area. And a Trump executive order effectively suspending asylum access borderwide will inevitably push migrants to attempt more remote and riskier routes through the deserts and mountains of Southern Arizona, the volunteers said.
“If he cracks down on us, we will fight back,” said Paula Miller, who volunteers at the camp with Tucson Samaritans, a mission of the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson. “We will respond to the need because it saves lives.”
The Forest Service didn’t answer Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions about the status of the camp or the groups’ pending application for a special use permit to continue operating on federal lands. The agency said it was reviewing Trump’s executive orders and determining how to implement them.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials told the news organizations in an emailed statement on Jan. 24 that agents’ work patrolling the Tucson Sector is not enhanced by humanitarian aid volunteers, saying the agency is able to provide medical and rescue support when necessary. Agents often engage with members of aid groups while on duty. They encourage private organizations and citizens alike to report any illegal activity or emergencies they become aware of, the agency added.
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The number of border crossings has declined since June, when President Joe Biden suspended access to asylum in between ports of entry. At the camp in Sasabe, volunteers see an average of 35-50 migrants per day now, compared to hundreds just over a year ago, Mayer said. Twenty-five migrants — including families with children — stopped at the camp that Friday morning in January.
It’s hard to predict whether those numbers will rise or fall as Trump’s crackdown on legal pathways to enter the United States takes hold. But the volunteers believe the work of providing humanitarian assistance to people crossing the border will come with many more legal risks. During Trump’s first term, the U.S. attorney’s office in Arizona prosecuted at least five volunteers doing humanitarian aid work in Southern Arizona, including members of No More Deaths. Border agents also raided a migrant camp run by volunteers near Arivaca, Arizona.
Still, the volunteers say they have a constitutional right to feed, clothe and save the lives of people seeking refuge. Past crackdowns, and the one they fear might be coming for the camp near Sasabe, infringe on their religious freedoms, which they’re prepared to defend, they say.
“We are following God’s executive order,” Miller said.
“Mitigating a Lot of the Problems”
Sunrise is still 90 minutes away when Mayer arrives at the camp. Temperatures are below freezing, and winds funneling through nearby canyons intensify the biting cold.
Mayer immediately sets out hot chocolate and coffee, assembles a camping stove and begins to make bean burritos with flour tortillas. Volunteers have provided blankets to the migrants, who huddle around the camp’s firepits.
The group that day had walked around the fence during the night and were waiting for border agents to arrive. They had come from Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Guinea and Russia.
Before volunteers established the camp, migrants cut down vegetation to build fires, risking igniting wildfires in the protected wilderness area. And trash and human waste accumulated along the fence. Mayer said shutting down the camp would make things more difficult for the Border Patrol and Forest Service. The camp serves as a gathering point where agents can routinely pick up migrants several times a day, he said.
Federal authorities, however, have alleged humanitarian assistance can veer into aiding illegal activity, such as facilitating migrants’ entry into the country or concealing them from law enforcement.
In 2018, border agents raided an Ajo, Arizona, property that No More Deaths used as a staging area for water drop-offs in the desert. Scott Warren, a volunteer with the group, was charged with felony harboring and conspiracy. The case was tried twice, the first ending in a hung jury and the second in acquittal.
In 2019, four volunteers with No More Deaths were found guilty of entering the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Southern Arizona — another deadly smuggling corridor — without a permit. The volunteers were dropping off canned beans and gallon bottles of water for migrants. The volunteers were sentenced to probation and each fined $250, but a federal judge overturned their convictions on appeal, citing their “sincere religious beliefs.”
No More Deaths said in a written statement that it remains committed to its work of saving lives despite the threat of criminalization. The group cited recent situations in which people were in life-threatening situations, noting that Border Patrol’s response was “largely non-existent.”
“No More Deaths, like other humanitarian aid groups in the region, exists as a response to the absolute dearth of medical and rescue services available for migrants. And this is not due to a lack of resources on the part of CBP; it is by design and a matter of policy that people are left to die in the desert,” the group said in its statement.
Another ongoing lawsuit offers a glimpse of what faith-based migrant aid groups nationwide could face in Trump’s second term. In Texas, the state’s Republican leaders are trying to shut down El Paso’s Annunciation House, a Catholic migrant shelter, accusing the charity of violating state laws by harboring undocumented migrants.
During oral arguments before the Texas Supreme Court on Jan. 13, attorneys for Annunciation House argued, among other things, that their work caring for migrants at the border is protected by the First Amendment’s religious freedom clause. They have the backing of the First Liberty Institute, a conservative Christian legal group that litigates religious freedom cases, which argued that Annunciation House’s work with migrants is protected activity under Texas’ religious freedom law.
“It says the government ‘may not substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion,’” said Elizabeth Kiernan, who appeared on behalf of the institute at the hearing. “And terminating a religious charity’s corporate charter absolutely is a burden on that exercise of religion.”
Policies Force More Dangerous Crossings
As Biden left office, fewer migrants were attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border than when he entered the White House, enforcement numbers show. He also left in place restrictions that made it harder to access asylum at the southern border.
Trump in the first week of his second term has further sealed off access. On Jan. 20, he ended the use of the CBP One phone app to process asylum claims at ports of entry and cancelled all scheduled appointments, stranding about 270,000 asylum-seekers in Mexican border cities.
Trump also issued executive orders further curbing asylum access by declaring an invasion at the border and reinstating the Migrant Protection Protocols forcing asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico for their proceedings. In addition, he called for construction of more physical barriers on the border.
That directive could seal off the gap used by smugglers now at the Pajarita Wilderness, one of the remaining unfenced portions of Arizona’s border with Mexico.
Humanitarian aid workers fear Trump’s executive orders will push migrants to riskier routes outside of ports of entry, including through the Pajarito Mountains, to evade detection. The groups said that over the past 30 years they have seen barrier construction in Arizona push migrants to more remote areas.
“I’ve been here for five administrations and each administration continues to build upon the bad policies of the other,” Mayer said. “No new ideas.”
Aid groups said they are already anticipating the need for more water drops in the Sonoran Desert to prevent migrants from dying in remote stretches of the Arizona border.
Humane Borders, which provides support for the camp near Sasabe, does water drops across the borderlands. They also have tracked the recovery of human remains since 1981. In that time, they’ve logged more than 4,300 migrant deaths in Southern Arizona.
“We have been doing this a long time. We’ve been doing this longer than Trump has been in power,” Miller, the volunteer from Tucson, said.
“My Faith Calls Me to It”
As dawn arrived that Friday morning, flashing lights appeared to the west. Border Patrol agents were en route to the camp.
When they arrive, they tell the migrants to form two lines, one for families and the other for single adults. Miller uses an app on her phone to translate the instructions into Russian and Portuguese.
The migrants climb into two vans bound for the Border Patrol’s Forward Operating Base in Sasabe, where they’ll be processed. Because of the new restrictions on asylum access at the border, Mayer says most of the people they assist at the camp are barred from claiming asylum and will likely be deported. Some as soon as that day.
As the Border Patrol’s red and blue lights disappear into the distance, Mayer disassembles his camping stove and packs the coffee and hot chocolate into his SUV.
“Nowhere in my ordination vows did I ever have to say, ‘I will only care for U.S. citizens,’” Mayer says. “I am a pastor of the world. My faith calls me to it.”
Mayer says he will keep returning to the camp as long as it is operating. If they’re forced to remove it, he adds, he’ll go to wherever the need is greatest.
