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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/08/10/scott-warren-trial/">https://theintercept.com/2019/08/10/scott-warren-trial/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Unraveling of the Conspiracy Case
Against No More Deaths Volunteer Scott Warren</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Ryan Devereaux - August 10,
2019<br>
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<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">T</span>he
federal courthouse</u> in Tucson, Arizona, has
always been a place where the borderlands and the
American justice system collide. Described by its
engineers as “a gateway to the desert and the
mountains beyond,” it was completed in 2000, the year
that the Pima County medical examiner’s office began
tracking an explosion of deaths in that same desert.</p>
<p>Each afternoon, Monday through Thursday, dozens of
chained migrants who survived the journey across the
border but found themselves in Border Patrol custody
are marched up from the building’s bowels for mass
hearings. They come in groups of up to 70 at a time.
You hear the chains before you see the people — men
and women still wearing the clothes they crossed in.
Appearing before a judge in clusters, they confess to
entering without inspection, receive their sentences,
and leave. Cases are adjudicated in minutes.</p>
<p>On May 29, as the prosecutorial machine churned on, a
courtroom on the building’s fifth floor filled for a
different kind of proceeding. Marshals with
radio-linked earpieces lined the back wall. District
Judge Raner Collins took his seat. Before him, a crowd
of people sat shoulder to shoulder on wooden benches.
After 16 emotional months, the moment had finally
come.</p>
<p>A young prosecutor in a baggy suit approached the
microphone. The American flag pin fixed to his lapel
glinted in the light.</p>
<p>“This case is not about humanitarian aid,” Nathaniel
J. Walters declared in his first words to the jury.
Instead, he said, it was about Scott Warren’s decision
to take part in a conspiracy to break the law and
“shield two illegal aliens from law enforcement over
the course of several days.” Warren was a
“high-ranking leader of an organization called No More
Deaths,” Walters told the jurors, but “No More Deaths
is not on trial. Scott Warren is.”</p>
</div>
<p>For nearly a year and a half, Walters and his
co-counsel, Anna Wright, had been working to put Warren
in prison. The then-35-year-old geographer was arrested
on January 17, 2018, along with two young migrants in
the unincorporated community of Ajo, where Warren lives
and works. He was accused of providing 23-year-old
Kristian Perez-Villanueva, of El Salvador, and
20-year-old José Sacaria-Goday, of Honduras, with food,
water, and a place to sleep over three days.</p>
<div data-reactid="209">
<p>By the time the felony trial began, the prosecutors
had already brought <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/01/23/no-more-deaths-arizona-border-littering-charges-immigration/">federal
misdemeanor charges</a> against Warren and eight
other volunteers with No More Deaths, a faith-based
organization headquartered in Tucson, for leaving jugs
of water and other aid supplies on federal lands where
migrants are known to die. The prosecutors had won
four convictions in those cases, but the punishments
were relatively light — $250 fines plus probation. The
felony case presented an opportunity to mete out real
consequences: 20 years in prison if Warren was
convicted and sentenced to consecutive terms.</p>
<p>Signs began popping up in front yards and windows
across Tucson in the months leading up to the trial.
Humanitarian Aid Is Never a Crime<em>,</em> they read,
Drop the Charges<em>.</em> Immigrant rights advocates
were watching closely. If the prosecution succeeded,
they worried, it could set a disastrous precedent. Not
only would a conviction threaten aid work in a region
where thousands of migrants have died, but it could
also conceivably open the door to a broader
criminalization of anyone knowingly providing
undocumented people with the basics of human life,
including individuals living in families with mixed
immigration status.</p>
<p>Standing before the jury, Walters promised to tell
the story of Warren’s central role in a criminal
conspiracy and to show, beyond the shadow of doubt,
that Warren chose to violate the law. As the
prosecutor took his seat, defense attorney Greg
Kuykendall rose. He crossed the courtroom and set a
slide on the court projector.</p>
<p>“INTENT,” the slide said, in large, red letters.</p>
<p>“There’s one question in this case,” the defense
attorney told the jurors. “Did these government
prosecutors prove with evidence beyond a reasonable
doubt that Scott Warren intended to violate the law?”
Kuykendall contended that he did not. “Scott intended
one thing: to provide basic human kindness in the form
of humanitarian aid.”</p>
<p>“Keep your eyes on the ball,” he advised.</p>
</div>
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<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">I</span>n the
trial</u> of U.S. v. Scott Daniel Warren, 12 jurors
were presented with a set of events and told to come
to a unanimous conclusion about its meaning. They <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/06/12/felony-trial-of-no-more-deaths-volunteer-scott-warren-ends-in-mistrial/">would
fail</a>, but in doing so they became a mirror,
reflecting a country deeply divided on the moral and
legal questions raised by its border enforcement
strategies. As much as the prosecution and defense
worked to keep the jurors’ eyes on the ball, there was
simply no denying that virtually every element of the
trial, right down to the way it ended, felt like a
referendum not just on the current political moment,
but on a multi-decade government policy of pushing
migrants to the border’s deadliest spaces.</p>
<p>The government’s argument was not that Scott Warren
had somehow strayed inadvertently into criminal
activity in an effort to do the right thing. Far from
it. Rather than some innocent do-gooder, the
prosecutors argued, Warren was an experienced and wily
senior official in an organized, nonprofit human
smuggling operation that uses humanitarian aid as a
cover, and he led an illegal operation in January 2018
in service of a broader political agenda aimed at
abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the
Border Patrol and ushering in a borderless society.</p>
<p>The critical events in the case boiled down to a
nine-day period early last year.</p>
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<p>On January 14, Warren arrived at “the Barn,” a
building long used by humanitarian groups in Ajo, to
find Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday already inside
the bathroom. According to their videotaped
depositions, later played for the jury, the pair spent
approximately two days crossing the desert. Both said
that trauma accompanied their journeys. Sacaria-Goday
referred to the suffering of his northbound train
trek, while Perez-Villanueva described fleeing
problems in El Salvador. The young men said they had
been chased by immigration agents and dropped most of
their supplies, including their food. They made it to
Ajo on foot, where they got two rides from two
different drivers at two separate gas stations. The
second driver dropped them off at the Barn. Both
drivers were strangers, the migrants said.</p>
<p>The two young men asked Warren for food and water. He
obliged and performed medical assessments on both of
them. A certified wilderness first responder, Warren
recorded their conditions in medical forms known as
SOAP notes, noting the nickel- and quarter-sized
blisters on their feet. Perez-Villanueva also had
scratches — “rayones” — on his right hand and reported
cold symptoms. Sacaria-Goday complained of serious
pain in his torso, the result of falling on a rock
days earlier. In keeping with No More Deaths’
protocol, Warren called for advice from two women who
have long provided medical services for humanitarian
groups in southern Arizona: Susannah Brown, a local
nurse in Ajo, and Dr. Norma Price, an award-winning
physician.</p>
<p>The migrants spent three days and two nights at the
Barn, while Warren and other humanitarian aid
volunteers came and went. All three men were arrested
on the afternoon of January 17, as the migrants were
preparing to carry on north.</p>
<p>The jurors in Warren’s case were told to count one
fact as stipulated: that the Pima County medical
examiner’s office had recorded approximately 3,000
suspected migrant deaths in southern Arizona since
2000. During deliberations, they were later directed
to keep in mind that there is no legal obligation upon
citizens to report suspected undocumented immigrants —
or any other suspected criminals — to law enforcement.
For at least one of the jurors, the premise of the
prosecution was a problem. Following the opening
arguments, the young woman passed a note to the judge,
informing him that she could not participate in an
attempt to convict Warren for the events that had been
described.</p>
<p>The next morning, she was gone.</p>
<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">W</span>ith
the exception</u> of the two migrants, the
government’s witnesses were all Border Patrol agents.
Two of them, John Marquez and Brendan Burns, were
members of the plainclothes “Disrupt Unit” that took
Warren into custody. Both testified in pretrial
hearings in the case, describing Disrupt as a
specialized unit focused on bringing in smuggling
cases linked to organized criminal networks. Marquez
had taken a particular interest in Warren in the days
leading up to his arrest, <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/04/30/were-gonna-take-everyone-border-patrol-targets-prominent-humanitarian-group-as-criminal-organization/">text
messages showed</a>, and the operation itself was
initiated hours after No More Deaths <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/01/17/u-s-border-patrol-systematically-destroyed-water-supplies-left-for-migrants-in-desert-report-says/">released
a report</a> — accompanied with a viral video —
documenting the destruction of thousands of gallons of
water in the desert and implicating the Border Patrol
in the vandalism.</p>
<p>The prosecution leaned hard on selfies and security
camera footage of the migrants at two Ajo gas stations
as evidence that they were not in need of aid. At
Wright’s direction, Burns narrated their actions
inside one of the stores, describing the migrants
stretching, charging their phones, sharing a Powerade,
and laughing with a cashier. The prosecutor then
displayed a still image. Shot from overhead, it showed
two smiling young men in white undershirts inside a
building: Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday in the
Barn. Behind them, a trio of No More Deaths volunteers
waved and flashed peace signs for the camera.</p>
<p>“Looking at Mr. Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday,
from what you can see, do either of them have any
bruises, cuts, marks on them?” Wright asked.</p>
<p>“No, ma’am,” the Border Patrol agent replied.</p>
<p>Another image showed Perez-Villanueva alone, taking a
selfie. A third showed the Central Americans smiling
as they cooked a meal in the Barn’s kitchen. In each
instance, the prosecutor asked if Burns saw signs of
injury. He did not.</p>
<p>By the time the jurors heard from Perez-Villanueva
and Sacaria-Goday themselves, in the form of roughly
three hours of videotaped deposition testimony, their
street clothes and smiles were gone, replaced by
detention center jumpsuits.</p>
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<p>By the time the jurors heard from Perez-Villanueva
and Sacaria-Goday themselves, their street clothes and
smiles were gone, replaced by detention center
jumpsuits.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>They described how, by the time they reached the
outskirts of Ajo, they were hungry, thirsty, and their
feet hurt. Sacaria-Goday said he lied to Border Patrol
agents at various points during his initial arrest
interview because he was angry. Perez-Villanueva
testified that the person who drove them to the Barn
told them to keep quiet about his role and that they
honored his request when Warren showed up. Both said
Warren was “hardly” present during their stay, that
they barely spoke with him, and that he never gave
them directions north. They said they were free to
come and go as they pleased.</p>
<p>The government then laid out its theory of a criminal
conspiracy.</p>
<p>In his opening statement, Walters confirmed that a
man named Irineo Mujica was Warren’s alleged
co-conspirator. Mujica operates a migrant shelter in
the Mexican border town of Sonoyta, just south of Ajo.
He is better known, however, for his role leading
Pueblo Sin Fronteras, an immigration rights group that
organized and supported some of the migrant caravans
that led President Donald Trump to declare a national
emergency and deploy thousands of troops to the border
last year. In February, The Intercept <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/02/08/us-mexico-border-journalists-harassment/">revealed</a>
that Mujica and Pueblo Sin Fronteras were targets in a
sprawling intelligence-gathering operation that swept
up a number of activists, journalists, and immigration
attorneys working with caravan members in the San
Diego, Tijuana, area in late 2018 and early 2019.</p>
</div>
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<p>These data points together raised a host of questions
about what might be revealed in Warren’s trial. On its
final day of arguments, the prosecution called Border
Patrol agent Rogelio Velasco to the stand. A member of
the Tucson sector’s intelligence unit, Velasco
examined two key phones in the case:
Perez-Villanueva’s and Warren’s.</p>
<p>According to the Border Patrol agent, those records
showed that Perez-Villanueva texted Mujica the words
“we’re here” after making it to Ajo, and that Mujica
replied, “I’m on my way.” The records also showed that
Warren had communicated with Mujica in June 2017,
December 24, 2017, and on January 11, 2018, six days
before his arrest. His phone records further revealed
communications with Susannah Brown and Norma Price,
the nurse and the doctor, respectively, whom he had
called after the migrants arrived at the Barn.</p>
<p>On cross-examination, Kuykendall asked Velasco about
his process for narrowing down 14,000 pages of records
extracted from Warren’s phone into a one-page report.</p>
<p>“Just by talking to the U.S. attorneys,” the Border
Patrol agent testified, explaining that Walters and
Wright gave him the criteria and date ranges to search
for — none of which revealed communications between
Warren and Perez-Villanueva, he acknowledged.</p>
</div>
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<p>Kuykendall asked Velasco if he was aware that Mujica
and Warren were involved in humanitarian aid efforts,
and that Mujica operates a shelter in Mexico.</p>
<p>“I think I might’ve heard something, but I’m not
exactly sure,” Velasco replied.</p>
<p>Kuykendall turned to the January 11 communications
between Mujica and Warren, asking the Border Patrol
agent if he had seen what Warren Googled after they
got off the phone.</p>
<p>As it turned out, Warren’s phone showed that he had
looked up backcountry regulations for federal lands
south of Ajo and a recent documentary showing a
humanitarian group finding human remains in that area.
Velasco was unaware. The agent similarly didn’t know
that, after the migrants arrived in Ajo, Warren
Googled a Spanish word for scratches — “rayones” —
before calling Price for medical advice. Nor did
Velasco seem familiar with the fact that
Perez-Villanueva had worked for Mujica while staying
at his shelter, offering a possible explanation for
their communications and relationship.</p>
<p>Kuykendall then introduced a June 2017 email between
Warren and Mujica and asked if Velasco had come across
it in the searches the prosecutors directed him to
make. He had not. Kuykendall introduced another email,
asked the same question, and received the same answer.
The process repeated itself until roughly a dozen
emails were introduced. About halfway through, Velasco
turned his gaze to the prosecutors, a puzzled
expression on his face.</p>
<p>The emails were later shown to be part of an ongoing
correspondence between Warren, Mujica, and other
humanitarian volunteers, which included Warren
providing tips on how to obtain useable information
regarding where missing or dead migrants could be
found.</p>
<p>As Velasco stepped down, the prosecution recalled
agent Burns. Burns was shown selfies Perez-Villanueva
took inside a van. Based on the markings on its
windows, Burns testified that the vehicle belonged to
Mujica. He knew this, in part, because a week after
Warren and the migrants were arrested, Mujica was
stopped driving the van through a Border Patrol
checkpoint outside Ajo. Inside the vehicle, Burns
testified, agents found black water jugs often carried
by migrants crossing the desert and multiple foreign
ID cards belonging to individuals who had been
deported.</p>
<p>Burns described racing to the scene as the stop was
happening and finding Mujica still there when he
arrived. But when Kuykendall asked the obvious
question — whether Burns interrogated Mujica about the
conspiracy he allegedly facilitated with Warren, a man
he had arrested the previous week — the Border Patrol
agent testified that he did not.</p>
<p>Instead, Burns said, Warren’s alleged co-conspirator
was released.</p>
</div>
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<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">T</span>he
second phase</u> of the prosecution’s theory of
conspiracy was unveiled on day four, when the defense
called Brown to the stand. “Scott told me that there
were two young men in need of medical care at the
Barn,” Brown testified, referring to a phone
conversation she had with Warren soon after the
migrants’ arrival. The 67-year-old nurse, currently
licensed in Arizona, headed to the Barn the next
morning. Brown described inspecting the two young men
and confirming the injuries Warren had noted. She had
estimated that they might need anywhere from three to
five days to recover.</p>
<p>Brown told the jury that it was not uncommon for her
and Warren to take volunteers to Mujica’s shelter,
though she didn’t specifically recall a trip they had
made the weekend ahead of Warren’s arrest. Typically,
Brown said, she would drive a pickup truck hauling an
enormous tank of potable water. Volunteers would pass
out “harm reduction kits,” packets that include
chlorine for purifying water, ointment for treating
blisters, combs for removing cactus spines, and a list
of American emergency phone numbers, including 911.
Brown would then spend the rest of her day treating
migrants by the dozens.</p>
</div>
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<p>Warren’s trial was not normal.</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="228">
<p>When Walters had his shot at the nurse, on
cross-examination, he zeroed in on these visits to
Mexico and what they might really be about. He asked
Brown if she had ever met the migrants Warren was
arrested with before they made it to Ajo. Brown
testified that she wasn’t sure.</p>
<p>“I see a lot of people at the clinics in Sonoyta,”
she said.</p>
<p>The prosecutor then introduced three pieces of
evidence from December 25, 2017, the same date that
the Ajo Samaritans — one of the humanitarian groups
both Brown and Warren work with — went to the Sonoyta
shelter to serve Christmas dinner.</p>
<p>Walters first flashed an unflattering close-up of
Brown’s face at the scene. “Oh, that’s a terrible
picture,” Brown responded. He then showed a photo of
Mujica at the same location. Then, finally, the
assistant U.S. attorney delivered his coup de grâce:
cellphone video taken by Perez-Villanueva.</p>
<p>The shot showed a group of retirement-aged volunteers
preparing a picnic table. Brown was one of them.</p>
<p>Perez-Villanueva asked her name in Spanish.</p>
<p>“Susannah,” Brown replied. “¿Y usted?”</p>
<p>Normally, video of a 67-year-old white woman with
U.S. citizenship preparing Christmas dinner for
migrants at a shelter would not be the kind of
evidence one would expect to see in a high-profile
federal trial.</p>
<p>Warren’s trial was not normal.</p>
<p>As a matter of law enforcement prioritization,
harboring cases are historically rare (though that’s
changed a bit under the Trump administration) and are
typically focused on for-profit, criminal networks. An
<a
href="https://tucson.com/news/local/tucson-court-cases-could-upend-long-standing-status-quo-for/article_604bc8c1-608c-500c-a2b1-34d749ad78e5.html">analysis</a>
by the Arizona Daily Star uncovered just two cases out
of 119 filed in the U.S. District Court in Tucson in
the first six months of 2018 where the defendant was
not suspected of attempting to turn a profit. Warren’s
case was one of them.</p>
<p>Over and over, as the defense called its witnesses to
the stand, prosecutors Walters and Wright implored the
jury to understand that these individuals were not who
they said they were — they were smugglers too.</p>
<p>After Warren was arrested, the Border Patrol either
forgot or failed to secure the Barn as a crime scene.
In the days that followed, volunteer Flannery
Shay-Nimrow took the SOAP notes and locations of water
drops from the Barn. Walters challenged the decision:
What kind of transparent organization removes its
materials from an aid station? Shay-Nimrow reminded
the prosecutor that No More Deaths has documented the
Border Patrol destroying its water drops.</p>
<p>When longtime volunteer Geena Jackson told the jury
that No More Deaths models its protocols after the
international Red Cross, which requires that
“humanitarian aid be separate and distinguished from
law enforcement to be effective,” Walters pounced
again.</p>
<p>“Isn’t it true that No More Deaths has openly
advocated for the abolishment of ICE?” he asked.</p>
<p>Walters had taken the same line of attack in previous
No More Deaths hearings and would turn to it more than
once during Warren’s felony trial.</p>
<p>Jackson told the prosecutor that she was unsure if
that was true.</p>
<p>“Are you aware that No More Deaths has also called
for the abolishment for the entire Border Patrol?”
Walters asked, pressing on. Given No More Deaths’
mission to end death and suffering in the desert,
Jackson acknowledged, “the end of the agency that
causes the death and suffering would make sense, yes.”</p>
</div>
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<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">F</span>or a
prosecution</u> that was ostensibly not about
humanitarian aid or No More Deaths, the two subjects
were coming up quite a bit. That remained so when,
late in the afternoon on day five, Warren stepped onto
the witness stand for the first time.</p>
<p>As people who know him often point out, Warren was
perhaps the most challenging person the prosecution
could have chosen to make an example of. Not only did
he have the unearned advantage of being a
well-educated white man in a prosecutorial system that
comes down harder on people who are not, he also
happened to be a profoundly effective speaker — and a
literal expert — on the issues core to his case.</p>
<p>Testifying over two days, Warren told the jurors how
he came to Ajo looking for “a quiet place to write my
dissertation” and soon found himself immersed in a
generations-old community effort to confront migrant
deaths in the borderlands. His field is geography, he
explained, and his focus is on the human and cultural
geography of the U.S.-Mexico border. Warren likened
Ajo to a lone population center in a “a low-intensity
conflict zone.” It’s not as though there are
out-and-out gun battles, he explained — “The border is
not this scary, deadly place that you hear about in
the media.” What there is, however, is an enormous
build-up of security and surveillance infrastructure;
armed state and nonstate actors; and civilians, some
of whom happen to be migrating through one of the
deadliest landscapes in the Western hemisphere, while
an army of federal agents searches for them night and
day.</p>
</div>
<blockquote data-reactid="232">
<p>Warren was perhaps the most challenging person the
prosecution could have chosen to make an example of.</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="234">
<p>Knowing what he did as an academic — the push and
pull and factors that cause people to migrate, and the
manner and scale at which they die in the Sonoran
Desert — left him with little alternative but to act,
Warren testified. “In one sense, it feels a little
choice-less,” he said. “How could you not do that?”
Geographers research and write about places, Warren
acknowledged, but to him, making the place where you
live “more humane, more just” is also part of the job.</p>
<p>Crossing the desert is an “epic undertaking where you
have to put everything you’ve got on the line in order
to make it,” Warren explained; one where it is
impossible to carry enough water and “there is the
expectation that you are going to witness death.”
Warren told the jury about the 19 times he has
recovered human remains in the desert, how he fixates
on the loneliness that accompanies such deaths, and
the mark those encounters have left on him. When he
meets people preparing to, or already crossing, the
desert, Warren said, a vision flashes through his
mind. “I see these bones,” he said. “Almost like a
split screen.”</p>
<p>The person in the flesh, and the ones who didn’t make
it.</p>
<p>“It’s not a stretch to say that every day, migrants
are kind of coming stumbling out of the wilderness,
knocking on doors in Ajo, needing food and water and
other kinds of basic care,” Warren testified.</p>
<p>“People have been giving aid for generations in that
town,” he explained. “The great thing about it,” he
added as his first day of testimony wrapped up, “is
humanitarian aid work is legal.”</p>
<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">C</span>ourt
resumed the</u> next morning under a darkened cloud
of conspiracy. Approximately two hours before Warren
took the witness stand the previous afternoon, Mujica
was arrested in Sonoyta along with another activist.
The charges, which soon became public, were related to
illegally moving human beings across borders.</p>
<p>Though Mujica, who did not respond to a request for
comment for this story, was released from custody days
later, the news of his arrest reverberated in whispers
through the Tucson courthouse. While day one of
Warren’s testimony focused on his beliefs, day two
would address the facts of his case. If the government
planned to spring some surprise evidence linking
Warren to the newly arrested Mujica during
cross-examination, as they did with nurse Brown, this
would be the day to do it.</p>
<p>Returning to the witness stand, with Kuykendall
asking the questions, Warren told the jury how the
first weeks of 2018 were a busy time. In addition to
teaching classes at Arizona State University, he was
also beginning a new gig at a community college for
residents of the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation, up
the road from Ajo. On top of that, he was working as a
facilitator at No More Deaths for a new monthlong
volunteer program based out of the Barn.</p>
<p>Describing his January 11 communications with Mujica,
Warren told the jury that Mujica had called with
information about some human remains that migrants
coming through his shelter had reported spotting. The
tip, Warren testified, jogged his memory. He got off
the phone and looked up a recently published Vice News
documentary that depicted a humanitarian group, the
Armadillos Búsqueda y Rescate, on an operation outside
Ajo in which it reported the discovery of human
remains.</p>
<p>“For whatever reason, the recovery was never done,”
Warren said. He wondered if the remains the Armadillos
found might be the ones Mujica was hearing about at
the shelter.</p>
<p>Warren went on to explain that he and Mujica had
“many email conversations” about search-and-recovery
work in the desert and the coordination of volunteer
visits to the shelter.</p>
<p>The Friday before he was taken into custody, Warren
told the jury, he and Brown took the new volunteers to
the shelter. One of those volunteers, Isabella
Reis-Newsom, who served as Brown’s translator for the
day, testified that the goals of the visit were to
supply clean water, perform medical assessments, and
provide information on the risks associated with
crossing the desert. She estimated that Brown treated
between 50 and 70 patients over multiple hours.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="237">
<p>The new volunteers headed out into the field the
following day, locating the human remains the
Armadillos had reported. The next morning, Warren went
to the local sheriff’s office substation to coordinate
a recovery operation, which was completed later that
afternoon. It was around sunset, Warren said, when he
pulled into the Barn with a bag of groceries to make
dinner for the returning volunteers. As he approached
the building, he noticed that the bathroom door was
open. Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday were standing
in the doorway.</p>
<p>Perez-Villanueva did most of the talking, Warren
said, explaining that they were looking for water and
asking if they could help him with his groceries.</p>
<p>“This kind of thing happens a lot in Ajo,” Warren
told the jury.</p>
<p>Placing the perishables in the fridge, Warren began
his medical assessments. He made his calls to Brown
and Price, the doctor. Among the new volunteers was a
fluent Spanish-speaking EMT, he added, who took over
much of the medical supervision responsibilities when
the group returned to the Barn. Kuykendall asked if
Warren ever instructed the migrants to hide. Warren
replied that he had not. “We can’t break the law,” he
explained. “We want to be spending our time in the
desert getting water out, getting food and water and
medical care to people — not here.”</p>
<p>“My intention was to provide them some basic
humanitarian aid,” he testified, and to “treat them as
I would any human being who showed up on my doorstep.”</p>
<p>The following days saw Warren making a handful of
appearances at the Barn. He spent the day of his
arrest working for home, prepping classwork and
ironing out logistics for the arrival of a group of
high school students that night. It was around 4 p.m.
when he got to the Barn, he said. There were three No
More Deaths facilitators inside. Perez-Villanueva and
Sacaria-Goday were still there, though they were on
their way out. Warren took the two outside.</p>
<p>“I pointed out two landmarks to them,” Warren
testified — Childs Mountain and Hat Mountain. “I told
them that the critical piece of information that they
need to know is that Highway 85 runs between those two
mountains.”</p>
<p>This was not about giving the pair directions to find
a ride or evade the Border Patrol, Warren explained.
“There’s only one paved highway in all of this desert
area,” he told the jury — it’s “the only piece of
civilization out there.” If Perez-Villanueva and
Sacaria-Goday somehow got to the left of Childs
Mountain, they could stray into the Growler Valley, a
profoundly remote stretch of desert where the remains
of hundreds of migrants have been found.</p>
<p>If you need help, Warren told the young men, “you
walk this way — you don’t walk that way.”</p>
<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">A</span>s the
prosecution</u> came in for cross-examination, it
felt as though Walters and Warren weren’t just on
opposing sides but in alternate realities.</p>
<p>“In terms of No More Deaths, you would agree that
you’re a high-ranking leader in that
organization?” the prosecutor told Warren.</p>
<p>Warren explained that No More Deaths is more of a
“flat-power organization,” and that “experienced
volunteer” would be a fair description.</p>
<p>Carrying on, Walters shifted attention to the day
of his arrest. Despite “his entire testimony”
centering around the migrants’ well being, the
prosecutor submitted for the jury that Warren’s
actions in those moments revealed his true motives.</p>
<p>“You know the jig is up,” Walters said.</p>
<p>“The jig?” Warren asked.</p>
<p>“You didn’t hand over the SOAP notes,” Walters
explained. These were hardly the actions of an
innocent man.</p>
<p>“Well,” Warren replied. “I was in handcuffs.”</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="240">
<p>Undeterred, Walters pressed on, positioning himself
to score a spectacular prosecutorial goal.</p>
<p>On the eve of his trial, Warren published an opinion
<a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/i-gave-water-migrants-crossing-arizona-desert-they-charged-me-with-felony/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.82ac8d027144">piece</a>
in the Washington Post laying out the facts of his
case and describing the potential precedents his
conviction could set. Walters pointed to a line Warren
wrote that “someone” had told the migrants they might
be able to find help at the Barn.</p>
<p>“You knew that it was Irineo Mujica,” Walters said.</p>
<p>“No,” Warren testified, he didn’t know who dropped
the migrants off.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="242">
<p>The prosecutor then noted that Warren had described
the deaths of migrants in the borderlands as
“violent.” He asked Warren to tell the jury what he
meant by “violent.” The border studies instructor,
with a Ph.D. in the human and social geography of the
region, appeared more than willing to offer his
thoughts on the issue.</p>
<p>“When I think of violence, it’s more like systemic
and institutional violence,” Warren explained —
violence within “much larger policies that are at
play.”</p>
<p>The mess the prosecutor made for himself became even
more clear on rebuttal, when Kuykendall started
reading Warren’s op-ed from the beginning. Walters
objected but Collins overruled, directing the
defendant himself to read the text.</p>
<p>Reading his article slowly and carefully, Warren
described the dire humanitarian situation around Ajo
and how, for years, “humanitarian groups and local
residents navigated a coexistence with the Border
Patrol.” After all, he noted, “in a town as small as
Ajo, we’re all neighbors, and everybody’s kids go to
the same school.” Warren referenced the other cases
Walters and Wright had brought against No More Deaths
volunteers for leaving water in the desert and
outlined the “dangerous precedent” his case could set
for mixed-status families.</p>
<p>“The Trump administration’s policies — warehousing
asylees, separating families, caging children — seek
to impose hardship and cruelty,” he read. “For this
strategy to work, it must also stamp out kindness.”</p>
<p>Collins had made a daily point of telling the jurors
not to research Warren’s case, not to discuss it with
anyone, to pay no mind to the fact that this
particular trial, for some reason, drew a packed
audience and a crowd of demonstrators every single
day. Much of what the judge would hope to exclude from
the jurors’ minds was now trial testimony. The
president’s name was invoked, and the case was tied
directly to his most controversial immigration
initiatives.</p>
<p>As Warren read from his piece, Walters stared
straight ahead, posture rigid as he took large gulps
from a Styrofoam cup.</p>
<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">T</span>he
next morning,</u> the line to get into the
courthouse was out the door. Wright delivered the
government’s closing arguments.</p>
<p>On Christmas Eve, 2017, she said, Warren texted
Mujica. The following day, Brown was at Mujica’s
shelter serving food. Both Mujica and Perez-Villanueva
were there. Weeks later, on January 11, Warren and
Mujica spoke by phone. The next day, Warren and Brown
visited the shelter, where they delivered No More
Deaths’ harm reduction kits — or, as Wright referred
to them, “predeparture kits.” Perez-Villanueva and
Sacaria-Goday crossed the border the following night.
Two days later, they made it to Ajo, where
Perez-Villanueva called Mujica and got a ride to the
Barn. Warren arrived shortly thereafter.</p>
<p>“That is evidence not of coincidence,” Wright told
the jury. “But of planning.”</p>
<p>Everything Warren did in the days that followed was
in furtherance of this “well-made-off” criminal plan,
Wright said, and nothing his attorneys said could be
taken seriously. Warren made two calls after the
migrants arrived, she pointed out, but the first, to
the nurse, was not included in his SOAP notes. “That
call doesn’t show up in the SOAP notes because it’s
not about medical care,” Wright asserted. “That call
is letting her know that he made it and the plan
worked.” The notes were part of the cover-up, Wright
said, and the migrants were never in need of medical
care. “Mujica and the defendant have an ongoing
relationship,” she explained. “That relationship
involved activities around illegal aliens. Sometimes
they’re search and rescue. Sometimes they’re this.”
Warren was “the hub” in a criminal operation, she
insisted, in which, he, Mujica, Brown, and unspecified
“others conspired to further Kristian and José’s
illegal journey into the United States.”</p>
</div>
<blockquote data-reactid="243">
<p>“It’s not against the law in our country to provide
humanitarian aid unless, in doing so, you intend to
violate the law. There’s absolutely no evidence that
Scott intended to violate the law.”</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="245">
<p>“The question is, what’s the benefit to him of all
this?” Wright asked the jury. “He’s not getting any
money out of it. That much is clear. So what does he
get?”</p>
<p>The answer, the prosecutor argued, was that “he gets
to further the goals of the organization,” of which he
is “a high-ranking leader.” One of the goals of that
organization, Wright told the jury, “although never
stated outright, is to thwart Border Patrol at every
possible turn.”</p>
<p>As Kuykendall replaced Wright at the microphone, the
word “INTENT,” in large, red letters, returned to the
jurors’ screens.</p>
<p>“Like I said at the beginning of this case, there’s
one issue,” he said.</p>
<p>Walking through the legal system’s different
standards of proof, the defense attorney stressed the
high bar of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.</p>
<p>In Warren’s case, the government had at its disposal
some 500 Border Patrol agents in Ajo and “14,000-plus
pages” of Warren’s phone records. “Everything about
Scott’s life,” Kuykendall said. Not only did the
prosecutors fail to produce evidence beyond a
reasonable doubt, he argued, but there was in fact “an
intentional absence of evidence.” Kuykendall pointed
to the testimony of the agent who examined Warren’s
cellphone, who was oblivious to a history of
communications between Warren and Mujica.</p>
<p>“They’re alleging Scott talked to Irineo about some
far-flung conspiracy, some conspiracy that doesn’t
make a bit of sense, but they intentionally told the
agent, ‘Don’t look at the emails,’” Kuykendall said.
“If you’re the government of the United States, with
all the power in the world, you direct your agents to
review precisely this kind of evidence and present it
to folks like you.”</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="248">
<p>And then there was the testimony of agent Burns,
Kuykendall went on to say, who had Mujica in front of
him at a Border Patrol checkpoint a week after
Warren’s arrest and did not ask him about the alleged
conspiracy. “If the government wanted to produce
evidence to you of a conspiracy between Scott Warren
and Irineo Mujica, what better evidence than finding
out from Mujica what they were talking about?”
Kuykendall asked. “Why didn’t they do that? That right
there constitutes a gigantic, gaping, reasonable
doubt.”</p>
<p>“If it weren’t so scary, it would be laughable,” he
added. “But it isn’t laughable. It’s the most
important day of Scott’s life.”</p>
<p>The defense attorney wrapped up by returning to the
two stipulated facts in the trial. “It’s not against
the law in our country to provide humanitarian aid
unless, in doing so, you intend to violate the law,”
he said. “There’s absolutely no evidence that Scott
intended to violate the law. The evidence in this case
is precisely the contrary.”</p>
<p>“Scott wanted to alleviate human suffering,”
Kuykendall told the jurors. “This isn’t a close call.”</p>
<p>Wright’s rebuttal lasted more than half an hour.
“We’re not saying the defendant is evil,” she said.
“No, he did a bad thing and that’s what’s charged in
the indictment.” The jurors had to know, Wright
argued, her intensity building as she made her final
pleas, that “this is not a case about deaths in the
desert and a crisis and all this.”</p>
<p>“That is a smokescreen to distract you from what
happened,” she said.</p>
</div>
<p>Warren and his lawyers were deploying slippery language
and fancy words, the prosecutor argued. The idea that
orientation is a human right — and that’s what
Warren provided the migrants as he pointed out landmarks
in the moments before their arrests — was just another
“smokescreen,” she said. “Orientation is a fancy word
for giving people directions,” Wight argued. “It is an
attempt to make legitimate what is actually illegal.”
Similarly, she said, the word “context,” which Warren
used in attempt to explain his role in No More Deaths,
was just “another fancy word for confusion.”</p>
<div data-reactid="261">
<p>The fact that Perez-Villanueva’s text messages showed
that he planned to get to Phoenix the first night he
made it to the U.S. — undercutting the idea of a plan
to stay in Ajo — didn’t matter, Wright argued. “Travel
plans change,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that
there’s not a plan, not a conspiracy. It simply means
that Kristian doesn’t know all the details. And that
would make sense. Who’s the experts? Who’s been doing
this awhile? Who’s been around people who’ve been
crossing and have that information? Not Kristian. It’s
the other people planning.”</p>
<p>As she brought her case to close, Wright returned to
the selfies, encouraging the jurors to trust what they
saw. “Looking with your own eyes, you can make your
own assessment,” she said. “They are not injured. They
were not sick. They were not resting and recuperating
on their sick beds. They were taking their time
getting to the place that they wanted to get to, with
all the help they could possibly need from the
defendant. They got food. They got water. They got
shelter. They got directions. They had everything
brought to the Barn that they could possibly need.
Everything. For four days.”</p>
<p>“Coincidences don’t happen like this,” the prosecutor
said. “This was a plan and under the law, a plan like
this is a conspiracy.”</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="264">
<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">A</span>s the
jurors</u> headed into deliberations, I headed to
Warren’s attorneys’ office.</p>
<p>Kuykendall and his co-counsel, Amy Knight, are death
penalty defense attorneys by trade. They took on
Warren’s case pro bono, as a matter of principle.
During their 16 months working on it, they had
maintained a low media profile. Though Warren’s
prosecution had precedent-setting potential, the
charges he faced were low-level felonies compared to
the capital crimes Kuykendall and Knight usually
litigate. The attorneys kept up their death penalty
defense posture nonetheless, hammering the prosecution
with pretrial motions in an effort to force the
government to truly prove its case — or back down.</p>
<p>“The Border Patrol’s not accustomed to trying cases,”
Kuykendall said, as the lawyers settled in for lunch,
waiting for the jury to return its verdict. In a
system in which an agent’s investigative
responsibility often boils down to proving a person
lacks papers, and a right to attorney is not a given,
“nobody goes to trial,” Kuykendall said. “Nobody
fights back.”</p>
<p>While Kuykendall made most of the arguments in court,
Knight was in many ways the tactician behind Warren’s
defense. She had accepted early on that she wasn’t
going to find an expert witness on migrant deaths in
the Arizona desert who would not be perceived as being
on Warren’s “side.” “There’s no such person,” she
said. The U.S. government has maintained a
multi-decade policy of channeling migrants into the
deadliest areas of the desert, resulting in thousands
of deaths, in order to deter others from coming. “Once
you know this information, you can’t not be an
advocate.”</p>
<p>“Their policy doesn’t work if it’s not deadly,” she
added.</p>
<p>As Warren’s trial played out, Knight said, she was
struck by the “shocking amount of power the federal
government really has.” Here were two assistant U.S.
attorneys interpreting a law in a new, and radically
more aggressive, direction and getting institutional
support from the Department of Justice to do so.
Kuykendall agreed. The defense attorney said it
wouldn’t surprise him if Warren’s prosecution cost the
government upwards of $1 million. “How you could not
believe that Scott’s primary intention in life is to
alleviate suffering, I don’t understand,” he said,
adding that it was an interpretation of the facts that
made him “aware of what a polarized universe we live
in.”</p>
</div>
<blockquote data-reactid="265">
<p>Here were two assistant U.S. attorneys interpreting a
law in a new, and radically more aggressive, direction
and getting institutional support from the Department
of Justice to do so.</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="267">
<p>“It’s like they came from Mars or something, and they
have a completely different set of receptors,”
Kuykendall said.</p>
<p>The day ended without a verdict. The weekend came and
went. The following Monday morning, I found Susannah
Brown mingling with No More Deaths volunteers outside
the courthouse. Just a few days earlier, she had
walked into the building and been blindsided by a
federal prosecutor naming her as an unindicted
co-conspirator in a felony conspiracy. She was clearly
still processing. “I felt pretty good until Friday,”
Brown told me with a laugh. “And then it was like,
holy shit. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”</p>
<p>“It was like, this is preposterous, you’re crazy,”
she said. The chilling part, she added, was that
Wright was skillful at crafting a narrative that could
sound compelling, “if you didn’t know what the facts
were.”</p>
<p>“That was scary,” Brown said.</p>
<p>Brown was one of several Ajo residents I had come to
know over the last year who saw Warren’s prosecution
as a defining moment in their town’s recent history
and a test of their own principles. At a community
meeting earlier this year, I heard residents like her
describe a proud history of providing aid to migrants
in Ajo, and the fear and confusion they were feeling
now. It was clear that Warren’s experience and actions
were not unusual. The federal government’s posture was
at odds with traditions that many people viewed as
moral obligations. Some, like Brown, had built their
lives around the fulfillment of those obligations and
weren’t planning to change course now.</p>
<p>“We’re gonna carry on,” she told me. “We have to.”</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="270">
<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">L</span>ate on
the</u> afternoon of June 10, a phone rang in
Warren’s attorneys’ office: The court clerk was
calling to say that the jury had delivered a note to
Judge Raner Collins. The lawyers piled into a car and
headed for the courthouse.</p>
<p>After 11 hours and 23 minutes of deliberations,
Collins told the court, the jurors were “unable to
reach consensus.” He ordered them to go back and try
again. “Each of you must decide the case for
yourself,” he said. “I’m going to ask you to retire
again and continue deliberations.”</p>
<p>The following day, at 12:36 p.m., the phone rang
again. Warren’s lawyers hustled back to court. An hour
later, the jurors filed in. They were deadlocked.
Collins asked if they all agreed that further
deliberation would not result in a resolution. On that
point, there was unanimity. It would not.</p>
<p>“I want to thank you for your time and your
attention,” Collins told the jurors, and with that,
they were dismissed. Collins filed a formal mistrial
later that afternoon.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="272">
<p>After their dismissal, the jurors invited Kuykendall
and Wright in for a conversation. Eight of them
believed that Warren was innocent on all counts, the
lawyers learned, and four believed that he was guilty
as charged. This did not appear to be a case of jury
nullification, when jurors take a position against a
certain type of prosecution or charge and refuse to
convict regardless of the evidence. On the contrary,
Kuykendall told me, it was a jury that started from a
position of guilt and evolved as more evidence was
presented.</p>
<p>“They were all very suspicious,” he said, and their
deliberations appeared sincere.</p>
<p>Warren walked out of the courthouse to a crowd of
friends and the press. Standing under the shade of a
tree in a light gray suit, he thanked the people who
had supported him and called attention to the fact
that Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday had
regrettably not received the same support. “Since my
arrest in January 2018, at least 88 bodies were
recovered from the Ajo corridor of the Arizona
desert,” Warren <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/06/12/felony-trial-of-no-more-deaths-volunteer-scott-warren-ends-in-mistrial/">told</a>
the crowd. “We know that’s a minimum number and that
many more are out there and have not been found.”</p>
<p>“The government’s plan, in the midst of this
humanitarian crisis?” he asked. “Policies to target
undocumented people, refugees, and their families;
prosecutions to criminalize humanitarian aid,
kindness, and solidarity.”</p>
<p><u><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">B</span>order
Patrol agents</u> recovered the body of 6-year-old <a
href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/12/asia/us-border-death-indian-girl-family/index.html">Gurupreet
Kaur</a> the following day. She was found south of
Ajo, on the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where
Warren and other area humanitarian groups have
directed much of their work. Her cause of death was
heat stroke. According to U.S. Customs and Border
Protection, temperatures had reached a high of 108
degrees in the area where she was found. The second
grader passed away while her mother, who came to the
U.S. from India to seek asylum, was searching for
water.</p>
<p>That afternoon, U.S. Attorney’s office issued a
statement saying that it would make a determination as
to whether to retry Warren’s case ahead of a July 2
hearing.</p>
<p>The knot of compounding disasters, tragedies, and
outrages on the border seemed to somehow worsen in the
days that followed, with fresh evidence of <a
href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/06/child-detention-centers-immigration-attorney-interview/592540/">children
held</a> in horrifying conditions at immigration
detention centers, the <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/world/americas/rio-grande-drowning-father-daughter.html">drowning</a>
of a father and daughter who attempted to cross the
Rio Grande, and <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/07/05/border-patrol-facebook-group/">revelations</a>
of a secret Border Patrol Facebook group that was a
cesspool of rage and hate and boasted nearly 10,000
members, including <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/07/12/border-patrol-chief-carla-provost-was-a-member-of-secret-facebook-group/">the
Border Patrol chief herself</a>.</p>
<p>Nobody knew what to expect when Warren returned to
court in early July. Would the U.S. Attorney’s office
take the 8-to-4 split as a sign that their case was
flawed and pack it up? Or, after all this time and
effort, would they stay the course?</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="275">
<p>At 9:37 a.m. on July 2, Collins’s courtroom filled.
Anna Wright, who just a few weeks earlier had
passionately argued that Warren was the ringleader in
a network of nonprofit human smugglers, informed the
judge that the government was dropping its conspiracy
charge. The U.S. Attorney’s office would continue to
pursue the two harboring charges, Wright said, though
Warren had the option to accept a plea deal, if he so
desired.</p>
<p>The government had split the difference, abandoning a
core component of its criminal narrative, while
holding on to the possibility of still eking out a win
down the line. Standing outside the court, under the
same trees where he had addressed the media weeks
before, Warren said in a statement that he and his
attorneys were “ready for the second trial and more
prepared than ever.” Though, he added, it remained
“unclear what the point of all this effort, time, and
money has been and now continues to be.”</p>
<p>“While I do not know what the government has hoped to
accomplish here,” Warren said, “I do know what the
effect of all this has been and will continue to be: a
raising of public consciousness, a greater awareness
of the humanitarian crisis in the borderlands, more
volunteers who want to stand in solidarity with
migrants, local residents stiffened in their
resistance to border walls and the militarization of
our communities, and a flood of water into the desert
at a time when it is most needed.”</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
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