A faith-based humanitarian group that provides aid and shelter to undocumented migrants on the southwestern border fears it has become the latest target in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration advocates. Nine members of the group, No More Deaths, were charged with federal crimes and misdemeanors in recent months, including one volunteer arrested last week shortly after the publication of a report documenting alleged abuses by the U.S. Border Patrol. Last week, the Tucson, Arizona-based organization published a report presenting what it described as evidence of Border Patrol agents’ systematic destruction of water jugs left for migrants in the desert, as well as “months of increasing surveillance and harassment” by the agency beginning last year. Hours after the report was published, one of the group’s organizers was arrested in a remote area of Arizona, along with two undocumented immigrants, and hit with felony charges. According to a complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Arizona, Border Patrol agents conducting surveillance in the town of Ajo observed Scott Warren, 35, and two undocumented immigrants entering a building — referred to as “the Barn” — on January 17, 2018, the same day the humanitarian group’s report was published. The migrants reportedly learned of the Barn’s address, and the sanctuary it was said to provide, through online research. “Warren met them outside and gave them food and water for approximately three days,” the complaint states, accusing the activist and Arizona State University instructor of also providing the migrants with “beds and clean clothes.” With assistance from Pima County sheriffs’ deputies, the Border Patrol agents knocked on the door of the Barn and found Warren and the others inside. The government is now relying on the migrants as material witnesses in its case against Warren, who was charged with bringing in and harboring undocumented immigrants.

For Warren, last week marked his second brush with federal law enforcement since June, when he was cited by an officer with the Department of the Interior in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle in a federally designated wildlife area and abandoning personal property — littering — in a national wildlife refuge. The same types of charges — misdemeanors that carry a maximum six-month sentence — have also been used against eight other No More Deaths summer volunteers, most of them from out of state. U.S. marshals began serving the summonses last month, when many of the volunteers had returned home to locations across the country. On Tuesday, the defendants, whose charges have not been previously reported, had their first court hearing — the five out-of-state defendants attended by video. Legally, Warren’s arrest last week and the summonses he and his fellow volunteers received are distinct cases, but that doesn’t mean they are unrelated, No More Deaths says. At the center of it all, the group says, is its longstanding practice of leaving jugs of water for migrants making their way through some of the border’s most treacherous terrain, and a broader campaign on the part of the Trump administration to target immigration advocates with prosecutions related to their work. “They’re definitely connected,” said William G. Walker, a Tucson-based attorney who has represented No More Deaths volunteers for more than a decade and is currently providing counsel to the latest round of defendants. No More Deaths has maintained “a cooperative, working relationship with both the Border Patrol and the U.S. attorney’s office,” Walker said in an interview before Tuesday’s court hearing. The activities the volunteers are accused of taking part in, the attorney explained, are activities the organization has “been engaged in for the last several years.” “Border Patrol — and the U.S. attorney — knows about the activities, has surveilled the activities, has permitted the activities, has recognized that we’re out there helping to save lives,” Walker said. “And now all of the sudden it’s all changed.” Border Patrol declined to comment on the recent charges, deferring to the U.S. attorney’s office. In a statement to the Washington Post Tuesday night, Carlos Diaz, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said that Warren’s arrest was “not retaliation” and “we’re protecting immigration laws in the area and there was a situation in which we needed to do the arrest because there were some illegal individuals in that area.” The U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the other No More Deaths cases. In an interview with The Intercept last week, however, Steven Passement, acting special operations supervisor in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, said his agents “work together” with No More Deaths in situations “where it involves saving lives.” While the federal government maintained a hands-off approach in recent years, the arrest of a volunteer for providing assistance to undocumented migrants and the attempt to prosecute members who leave water for migrants in federal wildlife preserves are issues the organization has dealt with before. In 2005, volunteers Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss were arrested by Border Patrol agents as they attempted to transport three undocumented migrants to a local hospital. The volunteers, both in their early 20s at the time, faced up to 15 years in prison. But a judge threw out the charges, ruling that the young volunteers were acting in accordance with a set of protocols they had been told were legally sound. Five years later, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a littering conviction against Daniel Millis, a No More Deaths volunteer, for leaving gallons of water for migrants in Arizona’s Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, ruling that water did not meet the definition of waste. Walker represented the defendants in both cases. In the wake of the Millis ruling in 2010, he said his client’s prosecution was the result of “a highly politicized decision by the Department of Justice under the Bush administration to shut these people down.” Eight years later, Walker suggested the era of politicized prosecutions has returned with a vengeance under the Trump administration, attributing the shift to “the federal government being of such a mindset that they’re more interested in locking up humanitarians than they are in really going after real crime.” Walker said there are persistent complaints among Arizonans that not enough focus is given to enforcing the law and strained resources mean crime fighting falls by the wayside. “So why are we out there, then, using these precious resources to slash water bottles?” he asked. “To arrest and charge humanitarian volunteers from across the country that are trying to save lives?” “I know why we do it,” he added. “We have a racist federal government now, and you can quote me on that.”

A U.S. Border Patrol agent takes Central American immigrants into custody on January 4, 2017 near McAllen, Texas. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images