good thing my people got here early

Scott Warren to be tried for human compassion. Could get 20 years.
Makes you sort of proud to be part of a nation that "helps" prevent
people from suffering by allowing them to die.
*****

Scott Warren visits the site of now-closed copper mines outside Ajo,
Ariz., on July 10, 2018. Photo: Laura Saunders for The Intercept
04/Ryan-Devereaux_avatar_1524960779-1524960779.
Ryan Devereaux
May 4 2019, 5:00 a.m.

1A SLOW-MOTION DISASTER
SCOTT WARREN HAS a checklist he goes through every time he finds a
body in the desert. The earthly components are straightforward. Log
the GPS coordinates.
Take photographs and notes. Scour the brush for more bones and pull
together all the data pertinent to the investigation that local
authorities will, in
theory, initiate once they arrive. These elements are basic
evidence-gathering. But for Warren, the process doesn't end there.

Warren believes that these moments merit an acknowledgement of
humanity. And so, after years of recoveries, the 36-year-old has
developed a modest ritual
for the grim encounters. He goes quiet, lowers himself to the earth,
collects the dirt around him, and then lets the soil pour through his
fingers. The
point, Warren says, is to take a moment to reflect or, as he puts it,
"hold space." It may not sound like much, but for him, this process
and everything
that attends to it is as sacred as anything one might find in a
conventional house of God.

When a person dies, Warren believes, some extra-physical element of
them remains, dwelling in the place where they passed. In the last six
years, Warren
has communed with the dead no fewer than 16 times in the desert
outside Ajo, the tiny Arizona border town he calls home. Those bodies
and fragmented sets
of human remains have served as his window into the slow-motion
disaster unfolding in the borderlands, one in which U.S. government
policy funnels migrants
into the desert, creating a black hole of disappearance and death of
historic proportions.

In response, Warren has helped convene a network of Arizona
humanitarian aid volunteers with roots that go back decades. Through
sweat-drenched marches
deep into the Sonoran Desert, this collective has expanded access to
water and medical aid in one of the border's deadliest and most remote
corridors,
and fueled a historic increase in the number of bodies accounted for
there. Even for those who can't be saved, the finding of human remains
opens the door
for bodies to be returned to grief-stricken families, providing
answers to painful questions. In an alternate universe, one could
imagine the efforts of
Warren and his cohort being the kind of thing a society might actively
support, or even prioritize. But that's not what is happening in
Arizona right now.

Aid Worker Faces 20 Years in Prison for Providing Water and Shelter to
Immigrants