4 women fined, sentenced to probation for leaving water for migrants crossing US-Mexico border

[FireDragon76]

So, in Arizona you can be fined for compassion?

Apparently.

Historian Rutger Bregman has said that borders are one of the biggest sources of injustice left on the planet. Workers in Bolivia, for instance, earn 2.5 times less than Americans, even if they have the same education and skills.

 

[Shiloh Raven]

Shiloh... the tabloid press doth know how to excite the passions. I fall for it all the time, god forgive me but let's both of us try not to be so easily manipulated in future. To be sure, the issue of border control does need to be addressed but not at the expense of reason. <high fives>

I almost considered what you had to say on the border situation until I saw that you're in the UK.

 

[Tropical Wilds]

This is one of those things where you can be right to be wrong or wrong to be right. Do the right thing by helping people in need by wrongly going into a wildlife refuge, or rightly staying out to wrongly let people die of something they can prevent.

My consolation is that I bet these women aren’t at all deterred or ashamed, which they shouldn’t be, and more see it as a badge of pride.

 

[JazzHands]

I almost considered what you had to say on the border situation until I saw that you're in the UK.

Our situation is more immediate than yours.. at nearly 220 people per square kilometer compared to your 51 per square kilometer, your old family is dying to breathe...

 

[SoldierOfTheKing]

Or, Trump’s border policies are driving desperate people to take more dangerous routes.

Advocates: Trump policies are causing surge in illegal border crossing

Your statement makes it sound like you are ok with people dying in the desert as long as the wall gets built.

I certainly don't want illegal entry into the US to be safe.

 

[ripple the car]

What these women are doing is arguably very kind, but they're also breaking the law to help other people break the law, and encouraging, indirectly, these folks to make a dangerous, illegal, and possibly life-ending journey through wilderness. There has got to be a better way.

I am ok with a wall. And with legal immigration, and even legal assylum-seeking at the border. Go ahead. But not having a wall, not having a better system, is only going to encourage people to illegally make a trek which could leave them dead (either because of elements, hunger, thirst, or murder at the hands of smugglers), and which puts them at odds with the law.

Once illegally here, their options are to stay under the radar, take a difficult, low-paying job under the table, steal someone's identity for a social security number, or all of the above. And risk being sent back, anyway. Not great options.

 

[JazzHands]

What these women are doing is arguably very kind, but they're also breaking the law to help other people break the law, and encouraging, indirectly, these folks to make a dangerous, illegal, and possibly life-ending journey through wilderness. There has got to be a better way.

I am ok with a wall. And with legal immigration, and even legal assylum-seeking at the border. Go ahead. But not having a wall, not having a better system, is only going to encourage people to illegally make a trek which could leave them dead (either because of elements, hunger, thirst, or murder at the hands of smugglers), and which puts them at odds with the law.

Once illegally here, their options are to stay under the radar, take a difficult, low-paying job under the table, steal someone's identity for a social security number, or all of the above. And risk being sent back, anyway. Not great options.

Thank you for putting it in more humanistic tones than I can articulate Gracia...

 

[SarahsKnight]

You know, if these four women had owned a Christian business and they had discriminated against a same-sex couple on the basis that serving the couple would have violated their Christian beliefs that these four women would be praised and not condemned by right wing Christians or if these women had been like Judge Roy Moore and had refused to remove a Ten Commandments monument on the basis of their religious convictions and religious liberty that they would have been praised and not condemned by right wing Christians. I'm sure we would have heard that these women were in the right to disobey man's law, so they could follow and honor their Christian convictions. I think that they should have claimed that they were following their Christian convictions of compassion and mercy.

Exactly. It's not only sickening but scary that such folk honor the Christian right-wing ideology and its current champion sitting in the Oval Office that they will make the excuses and spins that they have in this very thread to condemn the women for the most minor act of compassion that really any human would naturally feel is the right thing to do - not just the religious. But no, instead, we're going to lump most or all migrants together as criminals who deserve no bread or water and likely may even have a murderous streak and that the four women were just aiding them in their evil against good god-fearing America.

 

[EpiscipalMe]

I certainly don't want illegal entry into the US to be safe.

People who would have presented themselves at a legal port of entry are now so desperate that they are seeking illegal entry through the desert.

 

[EpiscipalMe]

President Trump has the right to set certain immigration policies as he sees fit. Non-Americans do not have a right to come to America.

Is this "compassion" more valuable than the lives which those illegal immigrants may take once they've arrived in the US?

Trump has immense power as president, that doesn’t excuse using it stupidly.

As for the lives taken by illegals - as has been demonstrated numerous times in other threads, illegals commit less violent crime that US citizens and communities with higher percentages of illegal immigrants have less violent crime.

It's easy to be charitable when you're not in a position of responsibility - something I think any patriarch or matriarch knows all too well. Trump is hated because he's trying to implement what is necessary, not what is 'kind', just as nature does and, by way of a cross-reference to another thread I've been engaged in, not what God does. I didn;t arrive at the place I'm at now because God laid down a path of rose petals for me, I got here because I was forced to confront my weaknesses. Nature sets the tempo and we must all follow and keep up. Philanthropists have big hearts but they don't seem to engage their prefrontal cortexes much.

Trump created a fake crisis at the border to push his wall agenda. Nothing he has done at the border has been necessary. His only accomplishment has been to make the situation worse.

 

[Shiloh Raven]

Trump created a fake crisis at the border to push his wall agenda. Nothing he has done at the border has been necessary. His only accomplishment has been to make the situation worse.

Trump's insistence of a national emergency on the southern border was so crucial to the boiling point that he had to let off some pressure on himself by golfing shortly after he made his declaration.

 

[JazzHands]

In fairness, I'm from the UK, not the US but we've had a 50 year taste of social emancipation... that is .. we've flirted with socialist politics and it's caused more riots and polemics than you can imagine..

 

[EpiscipalMe]

So your reaction to Trump's 'onerous' legislation is that we should simply dispense with law and open the gates?

Where did I say that? No one is for open borders.

But there is no reason to make legal entry through claims of asylum harder as Trump has done.

My reaction is that Trump is either an idiot who has no idea what he is doing, or an awful person who has no problem using the desperation of immigrants for his own gain. More likely, he is both.

 

[Shiloh Raven]

Exactly. It's not only sickening but scary that such folk honor the Christian right-wing ideology and its current champion sitting in the Oval Office that they will make the excuses and spins that they have in this very thread to condemn the women for the most minor act of compassion that really any human would naturally feel is the right thing to do - not just the religious. But no, instead, we're going to lump most or all migrants together as criminals who deserve no bread or water and likely may even have a murderous streak and that the four women were just aiding them in their evil against good god-fearing America.

I'm rather confident that if Trump approved of these women giving water to the migrants on the southern border then his supporters who are criticizing the women now would approve of it too.

 

[EpiscipalMe]

I'm rather confident that if Trump approved of these women giving water to the migrants on the southern border then his supporters who are criticizing the women now would approve of it too.

No doubt.

The rise of Trump has shown us that his followers will fall in lock-step with him even though some of his beliefs are the exact opposite of what conservatives used to stand for.

 

[JazzHands]

Where did I say that? No one is for open borders.

But there is no reason to make legal entry through claims of asylum harder as Trump has done.

My reaction is that Trump is either an idiot who has no idea what he is doing, or an awful person who has no problem using the desperation of immigrants for his own gain. More likely, he is both.

Why not.. why make it easier... Europeans have died in millions defending territorial (and by extension, cultural) distinctions...???

 

[Shiloh Raven]

No doubt.

The rise of Trump has shown us that his followers will fall in lock-step with him even though some of his beliefs are the exact opposite of what conservatives used to stand for.

I said that because I remember many of his Christian supporters were enthusiastically praising the initiative to decriminalize homosexuality in other countries because they initially thought Trump was behind it. But as soon as the news was released that Trump knew nothing about the initiative or that someone in his own administration was behind it, then there was sudden dead silence and no more rallying for it. I'll say that it was truly ironic to hear so many conservatives stand up for gay rights.

For the record, I'm generally talking about what I saw on my other social media newsfeed.

 

[EpiscipalMe]

Why not.. why make it easier... Europeans have died in millions defending territorial (and by extension, cultural) distinctions...???

We should make it easier for people seeking asylum to present themselves at legal ports of entry. I believe that we have a duty as the most prosperous nation on Earth to help those less fortunate. That is the Christian thing to do. Not make asylum claims harder and take children from their parents.

 

[☦Marius☦]

A federal judge sentenced four women to 15 months probation and a $250 fine each on Friday as a result of charges stemming from leaving out jugs of water and cans of beans for migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The women were convicted in January of operating a vehicle without a permit at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Arizona. They were also convicted of entering a wildlife refuge without a permit and abandonment of property after a U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer stopped them in August 2017.

The women -- Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick -- all volunteer for the organization No More Deaths, which is dedicated to saving the lives of immigrants crossing into the United States illegally.

"The border crisis in this country is a matter of life and death," Huse said in a statement from the organization after the sentencing. "History will not favor those on the wrong side of it. Our border policy continues to push people into remote and dangerous parts of the desert."

More at link:

4 women fined, sentenced to probation for leaving water for migrants crossing US-Mexico border

Sounds like they were fined for littering on a wildlife refuge, just like people do every day. I get that they are trying to help, but lets not act like there wasn't any reason. I'd get fined if I threw trash out my window up to 200$ where I live. Illegally entering a wildlife refuge, and littering on it... seems like they got a fairly average punishment.

 

[JazzHands]

A kind family.. tried to save Jews and calm tensions between East and West.. the price.... unceremonious execution