The ‘crime’ is treating migrants as humans

The federal government resumed its crusade Tuesday to lock away a southern Arizona geography teacher for the next decade.

Making America safe, once again, from those who commit the apparently unforgivable crime of acting like a human being.

This is the federal government’s second try at putting away Scott Warren of Ajo.

Warren, 37, is a volunteer with No More Deaths, a humanitarian aid group that puts water jugs in the desert and offers help to migrants in medical distress.

In other words: A guy who did that which his religion and his heart told him to do — he gave food, water and temporary shelter to a pair of Central Americans who snuck into the country illegally.

This, in Donald Trump’s America, where aiding migrants can get you a long stay in prison.

Or so federal prosecutors hope. Once upon a time, humanitarian aid workers who refused to stand by and do nothing while people died in the unforgiving southern Arizona desert would have been ignored by the federal government. In those days, the feds went after smugglers and drug runners and others who turned a profit from illegal immigration.

That all changed in April 2017, when

then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared it a priority to go after anyone harboring undocumented immigrants.

“This is a new era,” Sessions declared in Nogales, where he announced a series of crackdowns. “This is the Trump era.”

Nine months later, Warren was arrested. He is one of nine No More Deaths volunteers being prosecuted since Trump’s inauguration, though Warren is the only one facing felony charges.

Earlier this year, prosecutors put Warren on trial for conspiracy and harboring but the jury deadlocked in June, refusing to convict him of crimes that would have put him in prison for 20 years.

Now the government is going after him again, dropping the conspiracy count in the hope of getting this dangerous character off the street – or more precisely, out of the desert – for 10 years.

Warren’s trial began Tuesday in U.S.

District Court in Tucson.

No More Deaths came under investigation after an anonymous tip in April 2017, the same month as Sessions announced the crackdown.

Warren was arrested in January 2018 by Border Patrol agents who had been watching a house on the outskirts of Ajo used by No More Deaths as a staging area.

Warren said he offered food, water and temporary shelter to a pair of Central American migrants who showed up and were in physical distress. Prosecutors contend Warren conspired to shield them from the Border Patrol and that the men were never in distress.

It’ll be up to a jury – again – to decide whether Scott Warren crossed the line and became a criminal when he provided two immigrants here illegally with food, water and shelter.

Whether to convict and imprison a man who acted not out of a profit motive but out of a Christian motive, a belief that coming to the aid his fellow man is the good and right thing to do.

Even here, in Donald Trump’s America.