“USA v Scott” and the Fight to Prove That Humanitarian Aid Is Not a Crime

Ora DeKornfeld and Isabel Castro’s short documentary “USA v Scott” highlights the moral questions facing an Arizona community when Scott Warren was prosecuted for bringing water to migrants in the desert.

On January 17, 2018, Scott Warren, a thirty-six-year-old geographer, walked into a bare-bones building called the Barn, in the small town of Ajo, Arizona, less than forty miles from the Mexican border, and found two young men he didn’t expect to see. José Sacaria-Goday and Kristian Perez-Villanueva, from Honduras and El Salvador, respectively, had crossed the Sonoran Desert and come into the U.S. without authorization. They had navigated, they later said, by a compass and the stars. They had made their way to a gas station earlier that day, where a migrants’-rights activist found them and offered to drive them to the Barn, where he said they could rest. Warren arrived some forty minutes later.

Warren is a volunteer with No More Deaths, a humanitarian-aid group that uses the building as a staging ground for remote drop-offs of water and other supplies for migrants trekking across the desert. When Warren encountered Sacaria-Goday and Perez-Villanueva, he offered them water and food and checked them for ailments, following the organization’s protocol. That night, Border Patrol agents, who later testified that they had been surveilling the Barn and tracking Warren, swooped in and arrested all three men. Warren was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport illegal aliens and two counts of harboring, and faced up to twenty years in prison. The lead-up to his first trial, in May, 2019, is chronicled in the short documentary above, “USA v Scott.”

Arizona’s stretch of the U.S. southern border is the deadliest in the country. Over the past two decades, the area has claimed the lives of almost three thousand migrants trying to cross into the United States—accounting for nearly forty per cent of the deaths recorded by border authorities in that time. (Human-rights groups, which, along with the media, have produced higher tallies, note that the death toll is likely greater than official reports indicate.) The Border Patrol’s Prevention Through Deterrence policies, introduced by the Clinton Administration in 1994, have steadily pushed migrants crossing the southern border into more remote and dangerous terrain. The strategy closed off the border’s urban ports of entry, moving crossing traffic into the rugged Sonoran wilderness, where temperatures can reach a hundred and twenty degrees in the summer and fall below freezing in the winter, and where potable water is scarce. As No More Deaths has noted in a series of reports that it is co-authoring about how immigration enforcement is fuelling a crisis of missing migrants, some of the “indicators of success” listed in a 1994 Border Patrol strategy document included “fee increases by smugglers” and “more violence at attempted entries.” “If functioning as intended,” the report states, “Prevention Through Deterrence would reshape migration to become more treacherous, more criminalized, more cartel-driven, and more politically fraught.” Border Patrol figured that pushing crossings into the backcountry would dissuade migrants from attempting to enter the U.S., but it has only increased the risk of death and serious injury. It’s also given rise to a corps of volunteers offering humanitarian aid to those crossing in the desert, such as Warren.

“USA v Scott” is directed by Ora DeKornfeld, a twenty-nine-year-old filmmaker, and Isabel Castro, a thirty-year-old multimedia journalist who was born in Mexico. “I think we were both fundamentally inspired” to make the film, Castro told me, “because we saw it as such a seminal case.” In 2017 and early 2018, several No More Deaths volunteers, including Warren, were charged with federal misdemeanors for “littering” and “trespassing”—that is, for leaving water and other supplies along crossing routes in federal wildlife areas. But Warren’s arrest at the Barn proved a turning point in immigration enforcement. In early 2017, Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s first Attorney General, directed federal prosecutors to use the law against harboring unauthorized migrants as a tool to help enforce the Administration’s zero-tolerance immigration agenda—until then, the law had been used almost exclusively against smugglers who trafficked migrants for profit. Warren was charged by Michael Bailey, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, a Trump appointee.

The film, which has screened at the Tribeca and Mountainfilm festivals, largely skirts politics, focussing instead on how the situation raised “moral questions for people who were living in Arizona,” Castro said. Warren frequently hosts roundtable discussions on immigration in Ajo, and the film opens on one such meeting. “Borders are supposed to keep us safe,” one member of the community says. “And now I have fear.” Another says, “My thing is, they wanna come here, they wanna come here for a better life so badly, but then they also wanna say, ‘Well, do it my old-country way.’ ” Warren listens patiently, nods. “Thank you for sharing that,” he says. The film also shows individual interviews with residents of Ajo. “To us, it’s normal,” one man says. “We’ve lived with [crossing migrants] all of our lives. It was never a big deal. And then the government stepped in and made a big deal out of it.”

Castro pointed to a legacy of people in border towns like Ajo “helping migrants and giving people food or water when they meet them on the streets or in the desert—it’s ingrained in the way that the communities operate.” But the charges brought against Warren “instilled fear about the work that [regular citizens] had been doing for a long time,” she said, illuminating “a consequence of how U.S. immigration policy is making people question their own morals, their own ethics.” “Before, I see somebody on the road, needs some water: ‘Here.’ Now I won’t do it,” one Ajo resident says. “Because I’m afraid of consequences.” The film shows a community meeting in Ajo, where Warren and his partner, Emily Saunders, who is also a humanitarian-aid volunteer, gathered residents to try to answer their questions about the legality of helping migrants. “We can’t at this moment say exactly what will be prosecuted and exactly what will not be prosecuted,” Saunders says. “We’re . . . tracking human-rights defenders increasingly becoming targeted, intimidated, harassed, and prosecuted by state actors, including the United States.” One member asks, “So, is it my responsibility as a United States citizen to get identification from every person I give a glass of water to?”

Warren’s felony trial began in May, 2019. The documentary shows the tense months leading up to it, as he remains calm and diligently continues his work with No More Deaths. “We saw in Scott . . . someone who was doing very radical work but who was carrying himself in a very open and mild-mannered way,” DeKornfeld told me—someone who “could potentially connect not only with people who already agree with his politics but also those who don’t.” The trial ended, in June, in a hung jury.

Because the prosecution declined to drop all charges against Warren, the case went to a second trial, in November, where Warren was tried on the harboring charges. (The conspiracy charge was dropped, and the judge ruled that no mention of the Trump Administration’s policies could be included in the arguments.) The jury found him not guilty. After the verdict, Warren said, “The government failed in its attempt to criminalize basic human kindness.” Although Warren was vindicated, the fate of Sacaria-Goday and Perez-Villanueva remains unknown.