Volunteers for No More Deaths carry gallons of water out in the desert. Photograph: Carrot Quinn It was on these forays that Scott, as well as other No More Deaths volunteers, began to find the human remains. What seemed an anomaly at first soon showed itself to be a crisis of epic proportions: the volunteers were routinely stumbling on human remains.
As No More Deaths stepped up their efforts, so too did Border Patrol and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Not to prevent death or to recover human remains, but to criminalize humanitarian aid.
In the summer of 2017, eight volunteers were charged with federal misdemeanors related to No More Deaths providing humanitarian aid in this area. Many more volunteers had their permits to Cabeza Prieta revoked indefinitely.
Around the same time, a new clause appeared on the permit application for access to Cabeza Prieta. Clause 13 states that the holder of the permit will not leave food or water in the desert, effectively preventing humanitarian aid in Cabeza Prieta entirely.
Border Patrol policy has turned the desert into a weapon. This specific policy is called “prevention through deterrence”, and was enacted in 1994. Before the policy, a person could cross the US/Mexico border relatively safely, from an urban area into an urban area. With prevention through deterrence, urban areas were walled off, forcing border crossers into the harshest and most remote parts of the desert. Checkpoints were placed on roads as far as 100 miles north of the US/Mexico border, so that once in the waterless desert wilderness, those crossing were made to walk for weeks in order to get around these checkpoints.
The US/Mexico borderlands had been restructured as a deathtrap, and it worked – while the number of people crossing went down, death in the desert soared, and continues to rise each year. In the last two decades since prevention through deterrence was enacted, more than 7,000 thousand sets of human remains have been recovered in the US borderlands.
When I last talked to Scott he was in good spirits, in spite of his felony charge and pending trial. Scott puts water and food in the desert where people might die without it otherwise, and he knows that this is the right thing to do.