TUCSON, Ariz. — Man-made objects left in the desert all take on the same color.

Sun extracts the shades of blue from a pair of Wranglers, the camouflage from a backpack, the pink from a woman's blouse.

What remains is a desolate white, bleached of what made it something distinct, just another piece of trash in the desert.

On a southern Arizona ridge dotted with tall saguaros, volunteers from Humane Borders hiked a mile off the road last month to get to the refuse heap at Tortuga Ranch west of Tucson.

It's a place where migrants who have walked from Mexico camp out before one of the last legs of their journey to the United States. When they depart, they leave behind most of what they carried along the way.

Instead of looking at the mess as only litter, these volunteers are thinking about human beings in transition and at risk.

Not just words

"At the surface, it's just trash," said the Rev. Randy Mayer in a recent sermon, "but if you go a little deeper, you sense the story of their lives."

Mayer's congregation at Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in Sahuarita, Ariz., goes through so many garbage bags each year that the janitor complains he can't keep them in stock. The church, however, goes far and above cleaning up migrant trash in the community 40 miles from the international border.

A day before the pulpit message, the church and other humanitarian advocates hosted their annual border issues fair. It was a day for hundreds of Southern Arizona residents to talk about the realities of living along the border and in the midst of political complexity that accompanies the international boundary line.

"It can't just be about words. There is a spirit at work here," Mayer said at the end of the day.

In the front of the church hung dozens of embroidered cloths recovered in the desert alongside other lost and left items — each one made by a mother or sister or wife sending her loved one on an uncertain journey.

The pastor is deeply involved in spreading a message about the suffering that goes along with modern migration patterns. He works alongside others who don't necessarily share his Christian faith, but who share his view that treating immigrants with dignity is fundamental to being human.

Shura Wallin — who calls herself a "Judist" because she is a Buddhist and a Jew — helped Mayer co-found the Green Valley Samaritans, named after the biblical parable of a Samaritan who helped a robbery victim while others ignored the victim's plight.

Groups make frequent forays into the desert looking for migrants in distress, offering them food, water, medical help and an opportunity to voluntarily surrender to the Border Patrol to get a ride to a port of entry with Mexico.

The Samaritans' mission statement, which talks about saving lives and easing suffering, also includes educating others about the plight of migrants and calling on federal officials to "humanize border policy."

Wallin and others walk a fine line between abetting illegal crossing and just plain helping someone in need.

When they can't find anyone, they collect fresh socks, blankets and coats that are distributed to aid groups just over the border, or they pick up litter.

"I don't see it as trash because I see it as a life," said Wallin as she spoke about the work over lunch with a group of visitors from United Church of Santa Fe. "What people carry with them is what they have left in their life. Sometimes we see clothing in the trees if someone has been raped or there has been bloodshed. We will find a lot of underwear, for example, in the bushes."

Why would a 67-year-old woman spend her days in the face of such hardship? Out of love, explains Wallin, whose outstretched arms encircled nearly everyone she met on a recent trip into Nogales, Sonora.

"The thing that really compels me here is that I know people are dying in the desert, and I don't want to see that," she said. "I don't want to be part and parcel of sitting around doing nothing when I know that right in my backyard people are dying."

Wallin does not see a wave of Mexicans who want to take over America, like many of her neighbors do; she estimates about 25 percent are in her camp, 75 percent against. Wallin sees people who want to come here to work, to feed their children, to improve their lives.

Border changes

Southern Arizona residents look at immigration issues in a way only those with an up-close view can. Since the mid-1990s, however, the way migrants enter the country has changed and it's caused quite a difference in what they witness.

Thousands still cross into the United States every day illegally, but as border security crackdowns make it more difficult to use roads, locals say there is more death and more trash in the wilderness.

Now they see buses operated by a private government contractor carrying arrested immigrants southward — dropping them off at the international line, even if it's the middle of the night, even if they are single women with children, even if they have no shoes.

The policies, according to federal government agencies, are intended to deter migrants from entering the United States without proper documentation.

"The border is not a line, but a region," said Miriam Davidson, a journalist and author. Davidson, a Quaker, moved to Arizona from Boston in the 1980s. Her book, Lives on the Line, explores how the twin cities of Ambos Nogales have been altered by militarization at the border. An end of free travel between Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Sonora (or both, ambos, in Spanish) has changed the dynamics of life there.

Lately, she's taking on a role of advocacy instead of wearing the hat of an observer. She does not expect an "enlightened border policy" to come from Washington.

"If a meaningful change is to come, we as the people who live along the border will have to keep fighting for it," she said.

What for hundreds of years was a loosely defined boundary is now delineated by hundreds of millions of dollars worth of border walls and fences. In fiscal year 2008 alone, the capital budget for border fortification was $172 million. From Arizona ports of entry including Nogales and Sasabe, walls stretch into the horizon in a virtually unending line.

In that area, which includes 262 linear miles of the international boundary, tax dollars have already paid for more than 200 miles of fence and for high-tech gadgets such as motion detectors, weight plates, radar towers and night-vision cameras.

'Migrant-safety business'

The Rev. Robin Hoover has spent the last eight years working on a simple mission: quenching thirst. The organization he helped found, Humane Borders, maintains 97 water stations in Arizona's Sonoran Desert. Since 1999, it has been mapping the exact location of each reported death — 1,500 of them. Many more people have died undetected.

"We began these projects so we would know where to put the stations, and so we could tell the story of the migrants with some specificity," he said.

Later, the group printed what it calls "warning posters," which include maps of water stations and how far someone could get after one, two and three days walking. The maps also speak plainly about the danger, reading in Spanish "Do not go. There is not sufficient water. Do not pay the penalty."

Hoover, a Texas transplant with a sassy mouth, is not always a diplomat. He has a reputation for plain talk, such as the yearly news conferences he holds with local law enforcement, discouraging illegal migration.

"Every summer I get up and ... say, 'Get the hell out of my desert in the summertime,' he said.

On the topic of the Border Patrol preventing terrorism, for example, he snorts in retort.

"People can't carry enough water to make this trip. They can't carry a backpack nuclear device, which, by the way, does not even exist," he said.

Hoover wrote a doctoral dissertation about faith communities and border advocacy. He is tired of preaching to the choir and arguing with the Lou Dobbs crowd, however. He's realized that most of the nation thinks immigration is not broken, so fixing it is not a priority.

"It would be an error to simply think that a change in administration will bring a change to humanitarian efforts along the border," he said, adding later, "in my judgment, we are going to be in the migrant-safety business for a very long time."

The Border Patrol recognizes the good-deed perspective offered by these groups and others, but Agent Mike Scioli said their activities are a mixed bag.

"We don't really condone them, but their actions do serve a purpose," he said.

The 3,300 guards deployed in the Tucson sector are working hard at attempting to deter human trafficking and drug smuggling. Many migrants who cross through the deserts pay a guide, called a coyote, to treat them as human cargo.

"There are smugglers out there who really lie to these people," Scioli explains. "They bring people across telling them they just need to bring a gallon of water, it's two-three hour walk."

The truth is that the walk is much longer, and most of the year, the heat requires a gallon of water per person per hour. Water stations such as those provided by Humane Borders do prevent deaths, Scioli said, but they also allow smugglers to continue their practices with few consequences and provide hiding spots for bandits who prey on migrants.

Last year, agents arrested 317,696 people. While the vast majority "voluntarily returned" to Mexico, about 17 percent were classified as "serious criminals" because of prior convictions or bench warrants that require detention, according to figures provided by Scioli. About 22 percent of those arrested were funneled into one of the agency's alternative prosecution programs, including one that repatriates Mexican nationals after up to 180 days in jail in the U.S.

The agency does not keep statistics on how many of the arrested individuals lacked paperwork to justify their presence on U.S. soil, he said.

"They are all here illegally. They all come across illegally, and our job is to make the arrest on every person who is here without the proper documentation to be here legally," said Scioli, the sector public affairs spokesman. "So whatever the charge ... they are all arrested for illegal entry."

Agents use a combination of infrastructure, technology and manpower to get the job done, he said. Scioli makes the case that the border policies are working. The arrest rate in his sector was down 20 percent in 2008, for example. But the frequency of assaults on agents and the amount of drugs seized is climbing.

"We are looking at a brand-new criminal element that is coming across. This is not just mom and dad and kids looking for a better life," he said, noting that just last month a group of drug smugglers shot at agents with automatic weapons as they drove two vehicles laden with marijuana over the border.

The face of reform

Even advocates for immigration reform disagree over what it should look like. Hoover advocates for major revisions that would allow more workers to enter legally, but would require them to post a bond and only stay for limited durations. Another southern Arizona-based group called Border Action Network devotes all its time to policy advocacy for policies that better preserve human rights.

According to a United Nations report issued last year, the United States has more migrants living inside its borders than any other country. But the country is dangerously constraining human rights, wrote Jorge Bustamante, U.N. special rapporteur on migrants.

"The United States has failed to adhere to its international obligations to make the human rights of the 37.5 million migrants living in the country ... a national priority," he wrote.

Filmmaker Juan Carlos Frey, who gave a sneak preview of a documentary he is making about the topic at the border fair last month in Sahuarita, said officials he has interviewed don't seem to want to understand the root of the issue.

"Every time I brought up illegal immigration and human rights in the same sentence, you'd think there was the greatest view out the window," he said. "Human rights are the rule of law, and if a country can convince itself that it does not need recognize human rights, we are basically turning our backs on our own law."

President Barack Obama's promised immigration reform has yet to materialize, but the agenda he posted on the White House Web site says he aims to "fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill," as well as promoting economic development in Mexico.

Department of Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano, the former Arizona governor, told lower-level department officials a few days after Obama's inauguration that she wants an assessment of current programs, measures of success and suggestions for reform where needed on her desk by the end of this week.

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.

ON THE WEB

www.humaneborders.org
www.samaritanpatrol.org