Brenda- Humane Borders- Day Three

Day three was pretty uneventful. The original mission was to go to some migrant trails with a group called Samaritans and pick up migrant trash. The Samaritans are made up of mostly retired people and they look for migrants in distress and offer them help. They can’t transport them anywhere, since that would be aiding them and thus a criminal offense for both parties involved. Trash pick up fell through and our other contact for that day, Mike Hyatt (Betzi was with us for the whole week; she’s awesome) told us that we would just be going along ‘popular’ migrant paths searching for any that need help. I chose to go in Betzi’s truck since I went in Mike Wilson’s last time. Betzi told us about a situation that happened a while back ago about two minors that took a migrant to a hospital. All they did was transport him to a hospital because Border Patrol could not get there and so they took matters into their own hands. They were charged like criminals and eventually all charges were dropped but the condition as that there be no press coverage on it. There had to be a reason they didn’t want press coverage on this case… Betzi took us out to a water station and we hiked around a bit and we stopped. She told us to hush and listen and we did, and we heard nothing. You could probably hear a pin drop. I was unsettled. I only knew where the road was because I came from that direction but these migrants crossing don’t know which direction is which. It was a powerful experience just standing there in the middle of the desert ,and thinking.  At the end of the day we didn’t find any migrants but it was still a tiring day.