• How an Occupy ICE Activist and DACA Recipient Was Deported for Tweeting
    https://theintercept.com/2019/11/02/deportation-occupy-ice-daca

    It Looks Like the Trump Campaign’s App Will Track Users’ Locations. Is That Normal ? How an Occupy ICE Activist and DACA Recipient Was Deported for Tweeting Sergio Salazar awoke around 8 a.m. on a strip of grass outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Antonio. It had been a heady summer for the 18-year-old. President Donald Trump, as part of his ongoing border crackdown, had separated thousands of migrant children from their parents. Viewing the policy as the latest in (...)

    #ICE #FBI #migration #surveillance #activisme

  • Fingerprint Analysis Is High-Stakes Work — but It Doesn’t Take Much to Qualify as an Expert
    https://theintercept.com/2019/11/29/fingerprint-examination-proficiency-test-forensic-science

    Brendan Max and two of his colleagues in the Cook County, Illinois, public defender’s office got some good news and some bad news in the spring of 2018. Actually, it was the same news : The three lawyers had nearly aced a proficiency test designed for fingerprint examiners. None of them had any training or real expertise in latent fingerprint analysis — the practice of trying to match a fingerprint collected from a crime scene to the known print of a suspect — aside from what they’d learned (...)

    #biométrie #criminalité #justice #reconnaissance #empreintes #erreur

    ##criminalité

  • Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood “Watch Lists” Built on Facial Recognition
    https://theintercept.com/2019/11/26/amazon-ring-home-security-facial-recognition

    Ring, Amazon’s crimefighting surveillance camera division, has crafted plans to use facial recognition software and its ever-expanding network of home security cameras to create AI-enabled neighborhood “watch lists,” according to internal documents reviewed by The Intercept. The planning materials envision a seamless system whereby a Ring owner would be automatically alerted when an individual deemed “suspicious” was captured in their camera’s frame, something described as a “suspicious activity (...)

    #Ring #Amazon #algorithme #CCTV #Neighbors #Ring_ #sonnette #biométrie #criminalité #facial #reconnaissance #surveillance #vidéo-surveillance #ACLU (...)

    ##criminalité ##voisinage

  • Senators Press Amazon for Answers on Ring’s Sloppy Security Practices
    https://theintercept.com/2019/11/20/amazon-ring-security-senate

    This past year has been chock full of uncomfortable revelations about Ring, the surveillance social network and home security hardware company acquired by Amazon for a reported $800 million, including reports of potentially disastrous internal security practices, an apparent disregard for user privacy, and wave after wave of detail on secret partnerships with local police. Today, in a letter addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, five Democratic senators are asking for an explanation, citing (...)

    #Ring #Amazon #Ring_ #sonnette #journalisme #écoutes #data #surveillance

  • The Story Behind the Iran Cables
    https://theintercept.com/2019/11/18/iran-cables

    The source said they wanted to “let the world know what Iran is doing in my country Iraq.” They sent The Intercept 700 pages of secret intelligence reports from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, but never revealed their own identity. This kind of leak is unprecedented for Iran, a country with a highly secretive government and spy agencies that guard their confidential information zealously. In the months after we received the intelligence reports, which are written in a (...)

    #hacking #Islam #lutte

  • The NYPD Kept an Illegal Database of Juvenile Fingerprints for Years
    https://theintercept.com/2019/11/13/nypd-juvenile-illegal-fingerprint-database

    For years, the New York Police Department illegally maintained a database containing the fingerprints of thousands of children charged as juvenile delinquents — in direct violation of state law mandating that police destroy these records after turning them over to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. When lawyers representing some of those youths discovered the violation, the police department dragged its feet, at first denying but eventually admitting that it was retaining (...)

    #NYPD #biométrie #jeunes #empreintes #surveillance #criminalité

    ##criminalité

  • The U.S. Military Is Monitoring Interfaith Group Opposed to Child Separation, Leaked Document Reveals
    https://theintercept.com/2019/11/11/border-protest-groups-surveillance

    U.S. military forces deployed to the southern border are monitoring domestic protesters, including anti-border wall groups, according to an internal Pentagon document obtained exclusively by The Young Turks and The Intercept. The military, the document reveals, has focused particular attention on an interfaith group peacefully protesting the Trump administration’s child separation policy. The document includes what’s called a “threat estimate,” an assessment detailing the risk of perceived (...)

    #ICE #activisme #migration #surveillance

  • As #Scott_Warren retrial nears, judge orders lawyer for volunteer nurse in migrant harboring case

    As Scott Warren — a No More Deaths volunteer charged with two counts of human smuggling — again faces trial, the judge has assigned a lawyer for a volunteer nurse who works with the humanitarian group, in one of several rulings issued Monday morning.

    Warren, a 36-year-old geography professor, faced trial in May on three felony charges, including one count of criminal conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens, and two counts of harboring, stemming from his January 2018 arrest by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Ajo, Ariz.

    In early June, after days of deliberation, a jury refused to convict Warren, but did not find him not guilty. The judge declared a mistrial because of the hung jury.

    Undaunted by the jury’s non-decision, federal prosecutors announced in July that they would seek a new trial, but dropped the conspiracy charge against Warren. They also announced a possible plea deal for Warren, which he did not accept by the prosecution’s deadline.

    As the case has moved toward a second trial, federal prosecutors and Warren’s defense team have issued a flurry of motions and counter-motions that will set the stage for the new court proceeding, slated to begin November 12.

    Among these motions was a request that Susannah Brown, a nurse who regularly provides medical aid to migrants crossing the desert, be assigned a lawyer. Federal prosecutors Nathaniel Walters and Anna Wright argued that Brown should retain a lawyer because “as the government argued in closing” her testimony “demonstrated that she conspired with the defendant to harbor” two men at a ramshackle building used as a staging area for humanitarian organizations, called “the Barn” in Ajo.

    Along with Warren, BP agents arrested Kristian Perez-Villanueva, a 23-year-old man from El Salvador, and Jose Arnaldo Sacaria-Goday, a 21-year-old man from Honduras. The men arrived together and stayed for four days and three nights at the Barn after crossing the desert days earlier, ending up at a gas station in Why, Ariz., in the desert west of Tucson.

    During the trial, Brown became a surprising target for federal prosecutors who tried to show that Warren was involved in a “plan,” along Brown, and an organizer of shelters in Mexico — Irineo Mujica — to smuggle the two men into the United States.

    While Brown sat in the courtroom looking shocked, federal prosecutors essentially accused her of a felony, and showed as part of their evidence video from Perez-Villanueva’s phone. In the video, Brown briefly spoke with the Salvadorian during a Christmas Day celebration at the shelter in Sonoyta, Sonora. In the video, Perez-Villanueva asks Brown her name, and she responds with the same question.

    As Perez-Villanueva turns his camera, Mujica comes into view and tells the man to put the phone down. Mujica and Warren had repeatedly emailed about the shelter and its needs, according to documents shown during the trial. This included a plan to arrange a Jan. 12 visit to the shelter, and that a group of No More Deaths volunteers went to Mexico to bring water and operate a temporary medical clinic. The next day, Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday began their journey by climbing over the fence that separates the U.S. and Mexico.

    In motions, Warren’s lawyers told the court that Brown could invoke her 5th Amendment rights during a retrial “given the accusations” made against her.

    Collins also considered a motion filed by Greg Kuykendall and Amy Knight, who argued that they should be able to submit evidence that shows Border Patrol agents may “hold biases or prejudices against No More Deaths in general and Dr. Warren in particular.”

    In their motion, Kuykendall and Knight, argued that the jury should be shown evidence that the two agents who arrested Warren—Border Patrol agents Brendan Burns and John Marquez—might have had reasons to “perceive Dr. Warren in a negative light and/or shade their testimony against him.”

    During the trial, the two Border Patrol agents said they set up an observation post about 200-300 yards from the Barn, just across from a rural road on a patch of federally owned land.

    As part of an anti-smuggling unit called the “disrupt unit,” the agents said they worked to break up smuggling organizations, but on Jan. 17—the same day that No More Deaths published a report that was highly critical of the agency, including videos of Border Patrol agents destroying water drops that immediately went viral—the two plain-clothes agents parked themselves near the Barn, and using a spotting scope, zeroed in on Warren “gesturing” to the mountains with two men they believed to be illegally in the U.S.

    Kuykendall and Knight argued that “the government depended heavily on these agents’ subjective impressions and intentions.”

    “This case was essentially a credibility contest—the agents’ interpretation set against the NMD volunteers’ explanations for their actions. The government argued that everything the defense had described was a cover-up engineered to avoid criminal liability,” Warren’s attorneys wrote. “In this context, it is crucial for jurors to understand the various possible reasons the agents may portrayed Dr. Warren as they did.”

    They also argued that Warren’s arrest was part of campaign of selective enforcement carried out by Border Patrol because the agents were upset that NMD had “that very morning, released a humiliating report and accompanying video footage exposing the Border Patrol’s gleeful destruction of humanitarian aid supplies, giving them a specific reason to resent NMD and the people associated with it.”

    Reporter profile
    More by Paul Ingram

    Posted Oct 21, 2019, 1:59 pm

    Paul Ingram TucsonSentinel.com

    As Scott Warren — a No More Deaths volunteer charged with two counts of human smuggling — again faces trial, the judge has assigned a lawyer for a volunteer nurse who works with the humanitarian group, in one of several rulings issued Monday morning.

    Warren, a 36-year-old geography professor, faced trial in May on three felony charges, including one count of criminal conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens, and two counts of harboring, stemming from his January 2018 arrest by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Ajo, Ariz.

    In early June, after days of deliberation, a jury refused to convict Warren, but did not find him not guilty. The judge declared a mistrial because of the hung jury.

    Undaunted by the jury’s non-decision, federal prosecutors announced in July that they would seek a new trial, but dropped the conspiracy charge against Warren. They also announced a possible plea deal for Warren, which he did not accept by the prosecution’s deadline.

    As the case has moved toward a second trial, federal prosecutors and Warren’s defense team have issued a flurry of motions and counter-motions that will set the stage for the new court proceeding, slated to begin November 12.

    Among these motions was a request that Susannah Brown, a nurse who regularly provides medical aid to migrants crossing the desert, be assigned a lawyer. Federal prosecutors Nathaniel Walters and Anna Wright argued that Brown should retain a lawyer because “as the government argued in closing” her testimony “demonstrated that she conspired with the defendant to harbor” two men at a ramshackle building used as a staging area for humanitarian organizations, called “the Barn” in Ajo.

    Along with Warren, BP agents arrested Kristian Perez-Villanueva, a 23-year-old man from El Salvador, and Jose Arnaldo Sacaria-Goday, a 21-year-old man from Honduras. The men arrived together and stayed for four days and three nights at the Barn after crossing the desert days earlier, ending up at a gas station in Why, Ariz., in the desert west of Tucson.

    During the trial, Brown became a surprising target for federal prosecutors who tried to show that Warren was involved in a “plan,” along Brown, and an organizer of shelters in Mexico — Irineo Mujica — to smuggle the two men into the United States.

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    While Brown sat in the courtroom looking shocked, federal prosecutors essentially accused her of a felony, and showed as part of their evidence video from Perez-Villanueva’s phone. In the video, Brown briefly spoke with the Salvadorian during a Christmas Day celebration at the shelter in Sonoyta, Sonora. In the video, Perez-Villanueva asks Brown her name, and she responds with the same question.

    As Perez-Villanueva turns his camera, Mujica comes into view and tells the man to put the phone down. Mujica and Warren had repeatedly emailed about the shelter and its needs, according to documents shown during the trial. This included a plan to arrange a Jan. 12 visit to the shelter, and that a group of No More Deaths volunteers went to Mexico to bring water and operate a temporary medical clinic. The next day, Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday began their journey by climbing over the fence that separates the U.S. and Mexico.

    In motions, Warren’s lawyers told the court that Brown could invoke her 5th Amendment rights during a retrial “given the accusations” made against her.

    Collins also considered a motion filed by Greg Kuykendall and Amy Knight, who argued that they should be able to submit evidence that shows Border Patrol agents may “hold biases or prejudices against No More Deaths in general and Dr. Warren in particular.”

    In their motion, Kuykendall and Knight, argued that the jury should be shown evidence that the two agents who arrested Warren—Border Patrol agents Brendan Burns and John Marquez—might have had reasons to “perceive Dr. Warren in a negative light and/or shade their testimony against him.”

    During the trial, the two Border Patrol agents said they set up an observation post about 200-300 yards from the Barn, just across from a rural road on a patch of federally owned land.

    As part of an anti-smuggling unit called the “disrupt unit,” the agents said they worked to break up smuggling organizations, but on Jan. 17—the same day that No More Deaths published a report that was highly critical of the agency, including videos of Border Patrol agents destroying water drops that immediately went viral—the two plain-clothes agents parked themselves near the Barn, and using a spotting scope, zeroed in on Warren “gesturing” to the mountains with two men they believed to be illegally in the U.S.

    Kuykendall and Knight argued that “the government depended heavily on these agents’ subjective impressions and intentions.”

    “This case was essentially a credibility contest—the agents’ interpretation set against the NMD volunteers’ explanations for their actions. The government argued that everything the defense had described was a cover-up engineered to avoid criminal liability,” Warren’s attorneys wrote. “In this context, it is crucial for jurors to understand the various possible reasons the agents may portrayed Dr. Warren as they did.”

    They also argued that Warren’s arrest was part of campaign of selective enforcement carried out by Border Patrol because the agents were upset that NMD had “that very morning, released a humiliating report and accompanying video footage exposing the Border Patrol’s gleeful destruction of humanitarian aid supplies, giving them a specific reason to resent NMD and the people associated with it.”

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    Collins accepted their argument in part, ruling that “the defense will be able to inquire as to the possible bias or prejudice of the government witnesses.” However, Collins ruled that a document released by No More Deaths itself “will not come into evidence and will not go to the jury.”

    Collins also denied and granted in part a motion filed by Warren’s lawyers to withhold the description of Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday’s journey in the United States. “The telling of the journey from Mexico to the United States is no longer relevant,” Collins wrote. However, what the two men said to Warren “is relevant and that can come in.”

    Collins also ruled that video from the Why-Not gas station could be played because the video shows the men moving around, buying sports drinks and food before they later received a ride to Ajo.

    “The Court will also allow the playing of the video at the gas station since the extent of the migrants’ injury is still an issue in the case,” Collins wrote.

    Along with this, Collins also will allow testimony that Warren made during a separate trial for misdemeanor charges that he was hit with for entering the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and leaving food and water.

    Collins did accept a motion to allow the defense to submit testimony made during the first trial by Ed McCullough, who showed maps describing where people have died attempting to cross the desert, but was unavailable to testify a second time.

    He also rejected a motion filed by prosecutors that would have kept Warren’s defense team from arguing that NMD had legal “protocols” that were established through consultation with Professor Andrew Silverman and that Warren was acting under the advice of counsel when he brought the two men into the Barn and gave them food, water, and medical care.

    During the first trial, Silverman told the jury that Warren was working under legal protocols that he had helped write, however, federal prosecutors had asked Collins to preclude the defense from “introducing evidence in support of an advice of counsel defense, including evidence pertaining to No More Deaths’ protocols and volunteer training.”

    “Such testimony is irrelevant, improper, and likely to confuse the jury about a material issue in this case,” they argued. Warren and his lawyers had “failed to establish any of the elements of an advice of counsel defense,” because they “did not offer any evidence that [Warren] consulted directly with any attorney and, in fact, objected to disclosing this information to the government.”

    “The defendant’s alleged compliance with the No More Deaths’ protocols also cannot satisfy the elements of the advice of counsel defense,” they wrote.
    First trial ended in jury deadlock

    Warren’s first felony trial began on May 29, and after a seven-day trial, jurors deliberated for about 11 hours over two days before they told the court they were struggling to reach a decision. Collins told the jurors to continue their deliberations, and issued an “Allen charge” instructing jurors to try to reach an unanimous verdict. Among the instructions read by Collins in court, jurors were told to "reexamine their own views, but not to change “an honest belief” because of the opinions of fellow jurors or “for the mere purpose of returning a verdict.”

    But,the next day, the third of deliberations, it became clear that the jury could not reach an unanimous verdict, and Collins declared a hung jury. Following the announcement, Collins set a new hearing for July 2, giving prosecutors time to consider whether they would pursue a retrial.

    During the trial, prosecutors argued that Warren “harbored and shielded from detection” two men in the country illegally at the Barn, and that he was at “hub” of a plan to transport and protect the two men after they illegally crossed the border by climbing over the border fence somewhere near Sonoyta, a Mexican border town.

    Warren, along with two men in the country without authorization, was arrested during at raid by several Border Patrol agents at “the Barn,” a ramshackle building on the town’s outskirts regularly used as a staging point for volunteers who have been working to stem an increasing number of deaths in the remote wildlife refuges west of the unincorporated town.

    As the trial loomed, Warren’s prosecution took on national and international importance, and humanitarian volunteers lead by No More Deaths collected more than 120,000 signatures and submitted them to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tucson just days before the trial began, asking for them to drop the charges.

    Warren’s prosecution also came to the attention of human rights experts from the United Nations, who wrote that “providing humanitarian aid is not a crime. We urge the U.S. authorities to immediately drop all charges against Scott Warren.”

    In a letter written by Michael Forst, a special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, the UN body said that Warren’’s work is “vital and legitimate,” and said that No More Deaths" upholds the right to life and prevents the deaths of migrants and asylum seekers at the US-Mexican border."

    “The prosecution of Scott Warren represents an unacceptable escalation of existing patterns criminalising migrant rights defenders along the migrant caravan routes,” they said.

    Forst also noted that Warren’s arrest came “hours after the release of a report” by No More Deaths which linked Border Patrol agents to the “systematic destruction of humanitarian supplies, including water stores, and denounced a pattern of harassment, intimidation and surveillance against humanitarian aid workers.”

    The decision to retry Warren will be the first high-profile test for U.S. Attorney Michael Bailey, who was nominated by President Trump in February and just confirmed by the Senate on May 23. Bailey replaced Elizabeth Strange, who served as the acting U.S. attorney for more than two years after John S. Leonardo stepped down from the position in January 2017.

    Warren’s case is one of three high-profile prosecutions launched against No More Deaths volunteers, including two misdemeanor trials — one also involving Warren — for the group’s efforts to leave food, water, medicine, and other aid in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

    Warren’s trial in the misdemeanor charges concluded in May, but Collins has not rendered a verdict in the bench trial, leaving Warren’s fate in those charges also up in the air.

    After the announcement, Warren thanked supporters supporters and castigated the government for bringing charges against him.

    “In the time since I was arrested in January 2018, no fewer than 88 bodies were recovered from the Arizona desert,” Warren said. “The government’s plan in the midst of this humanitarian crisis? Policies to target undocumented people, refugees, and their families. Prosecutions to criminalize humanitarian aid, kindness, and solidarity. And now, the revelation that they will build an enormous and expensive wall across a vast stretch of southwestern Arizona’s unbroken Sonoran Desert.”
    Re-trial would be complete re-do of case

    With the jury deadlocked and the proceedings declared a mistrial, Collins scheduled a hearing for July 2 to review the felony case. Prosecutors may attempt to re-try Warren on the charges, as the jury did not render a verdict. If they do so, the second trial would be a complete re-do, including the selection of a new jury.

    During final arguments, prosecutors argued that Warren “harbored and shielded from detection” two men in the country illegally at “the Barn,” a ramshackle house used as a staging point for aid organizations trying to stem what volunteers like Warren have called a “humanitarian crisis” in the deserts west and south of Ajo, an unincorporated town about 110 miles west of Tucson. Prosecutors said he was at “hub” of a plan to transport and protect the two men after they illegally crossed the border by climbing over the border fence somewhere near Sonoyta, a Mexican border town.

    Warren testified in his own defense telling jurors that his spiritual values compel him to help those who “stumble” out of the desert into the neighborhoods of Ajo, Ariz., and that doing so is “good and right, especially in a place that feels like a low-intensity conflict.”

    No More Deaths has maintained that the arrests of Warren and others were retribution for the release that same day of a report by the humanitarian aid group, documenting claims that Border Patrol agents vandalized water caches placed for migrants crossing the desert.

    After the trial closed, Warren noted that “the other men arrested with me that day Jose Sacaria-Goday and Kristian Perez-Villanueva, have not received the attention and outpouring of support that I have. I do not know how they are doing now, but I do hope they are safe.”

    Warren and other volunteers testified that the men needed medical care, as they were suffering from blisters on their feet, a minor cold, and injuries from being in the desert. However, prosecutors said that this was a “smokescreen,” and repeatedly referred to selfie photos captured from Perez-Villanueva’s cellphone and surveillance video from the Why-Not gas station in Why, Arizona to show that the men were not injured or sick.

    Evidence of a humanitarian crisis, and the loss of lives in the desert didn’t matter , because border crossers haven’t died in Ajo. “That’s not this case, that’s a smokescreen and a distraction for this case,” assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Wright said during her closing arguments.

    As the case went to the jury, the Border Patrol said that it recovered the body of a Guatemalan woman who died trying to cross the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range, which sits just to the north of Ajo and straddles Highway 85.

    Wright said that after Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday arrived at the barn, Warren called Brown, a registered nurse who volunteers for No More Deaths, not in an effort to get the men medical attention, but rather because she was involved in the “plan” to smuggle the men.

    Brown sat in the courtroom and appeared shocked when she heard the federal prosecutor implicate her in a felony.

    Perez-Villanueva’s phone remained a linchpin to the prosecutor’s case, and Wright highlighted as much saying that while other people who testified might have a bias, the photos and video were evidence that “doesn’t lie.”

    As the trial began, assistant U.S. Attorney Nathaniel Walters told the jury that federal authorities are not targeting humanitarian aid along the border with Mexico.

    “No More Deaths is not on trial,” Walters told the jury. “Scott Warren is.”

    But during the trial, prosecutors argued that these calls and the visit was part of a plan to illegally aid migrants, and noted later that night, Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday decided to cross the border.

    This brief interaction was enough to show a nexus of relationships between Warren, Mujica, Perez-Villanueva and Brown that could not be a coincidence, Wright argued.

    While Warren testified Wednesday, Mujica was arrested in Sonoyta by Mexican authorities.

    Mujica was later released, and the case against Mujica later collapsed, although there are signs that Mexican officials could once agains launch a case against the organizer, even as he now moves freely from Sonora to areas where there are large numbers of African and Cuban migrants seeking asylum in Tapachula.

    Questions about the timing of Mujica’s arrest and the Mexican government’s case remain.

    During the trial, a Border Patrol agent testified that he reviewed 14,000 pages of data from Warren’s phone, and from those thousands of pages the agent produced a one-page report. “They were not interested in innocence,” Kuykendall said.

    Defense attorney Greg Kuykendall said during his closing argument that it was “frankly terrifying, just terrifying” that his client was charged with a “total lack of evidence.”

    “It’s just supposition,” he said.

    In his opening statement two weeks ago, Kuykendall said Warren did not intend to break the law when he came across two undocumented immigrants early last year.

    “Scott intended to perform basic human kindness,” he told jurors, and was acting in accordance with his Christian faith.

    After the jury said it was deadlocked, Kuykendall was asked if “humanitarian aid being targeted by the federal government?,” Kuykendall responded, “you should ask the federal government. And use your own common sense.”

    Kuykendall also told the court last week that emails between Mujica and Warren, along with others showed that Warren was working on search and rescue and recovery efforts, and that when volunteers went to help the “Hope Shelter” there, they should contact Mujica.

    The U.S. government, he said, had all the power and resources to direct the agent to investigate and present all the evidence to the jury, he said. He also argued that the government failed to interview Mujica, noting that as one of the agents, Burns, who arrested Warren testified, he was called to a checkpoint after Mujica was held in a secondary inspection area, and yet he did not “interrogate” the man who might be at the center of the conspiracy.

    Photos from Perez-Villanueva’s phone shows the two men inside a van, after apparently leaving a gas station in Ajo. In the warrant for Warren’s phone, another agent noted that in Mujica’s vehicle Burns found black water bottles, a notebook containing a “detailed account” of travel through Mexico, and identity cards of men who were later apprehended by Border Patrol. However, Mujica wasn’t arrested by Burns, and weeks later, a passenger in his van was apprehended for being in the country illegally, leaving questions about Mujica’s role in Warren’s case.

    During opening arguments, assistant U.S. Attorney Nathaniel Walters tried to downplay the case’s consequences for humanitarian aid in the borderlands. While Warren is a “high-ranking member” of No More Deaths, the group was not on trial, rather Warren is “on trial,” Walters said.

    “This case is not about humanitarian aid or anyone in medical distress,” Walters said. “But, rather, this is about an attempt to shield two illegal aliens for several days,” from law enforcement, he said.

    However, during her closing arguments, Wright focused on the idea that Warren was a “high-ranking member” of No More Deaths, and she admitted that Warren did not receive a financial benefit, but said that instead, Warren “gets to further the goals of the organization” and “thwart the Border Patrol at every turn.”

    During the trial, the two Border Patrol agents— Burns and John Marquez —said they set up an observation post about 200-300 yards from the Barn, just across from a rural road on a patch of federally owned land.

    As part of an anti-smuggling unit called the “disrupt unit,” the agents said they worked to break up smuggling organizations, but on Jan. 17—the same day that No More Deaths published a report that was highly critical of the agency, including videos of Border Patrol agents destroying water drops that immediately went viral—the two plain-clothes agents parked themselves near the Barn, and using a spotting scope, zeroed in on Warren “gesturing” to the mountains with two men they believed to be illegally in the U.S.

    Warren said during the trial that he was trying to “orient” the men, who were preparing to head north, and that he was telling them to stay inside a valley between Child’s Mountain and Hat Peak, where they “if they got in trouble” they could head to Highway 85 and seek help. Prosecutors said that Warren was telling the men how to bypass a Border Patrol checkpoint on the highway and that Warren was giving them a pathway to follow from Ajo toward Interstate 8.

    Warren said that he stayed outside and was working on building a fire in preparation for students from a high-school in Flagstaff to come the Barn, when he saw a “convoy” of vehicles heading his way. Once agents came up to the barn, Warren said during testimony that he was handcuffed within two minutes, but that he offered to walk into the Barn with the agents.

    Burns and Marquez arrived moments later, and went around to the back where Perez-Villanueva was sitting on the threshold in the bathroom door. Inside, Sacaria-Goday was hiding behind the shower curtain.

    Wright attacked Warren’s credibility, saying that by seeking “context” he was actually trying to “distract” from the central issue and that Warren use of the word “orientation” was just a “fancy word for giving people directions.” When he was outside and spotted by Border Patrol agents, he was giving the men information so they could go “from point A, Ajo, to point B, Interstate 8.” These directions gave the men a “path” to follow away from the Border Patrol checkpoint allowing them to “further their journey,” she said.
    Warren: ’Haunting crisis’

    During his testimony, Warren said that he went to Ajo in order to work on his dissertation as a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University. He became increasingly interested in issues in Ajo and met with members of the Ajo Samaritans after he attended one of the Border Patrol’s citizen academies, a six-week course designed to inform the public about the agency’s mission.

    He said that as he stayed in Ajo, his eyes were “really opened” to the humanitarian crisis in the desert surrounding the small desert town, and that he became heavily involved in the community, becoming an elected member of the West Pima County Community Council. “It’s an elected position, but everyone runs unopposed,” Warren quipped.

    As he lived in Ajo, it became clear that everyday migrants “are stumbling” out of the wilderness aching for food, water and shelter, and that helping them is a “ubiquitous experience,” for residents in the town. After months in Ajo, Warren found himself part of an effort to recover the remains of a migrant who had perished in the nearby Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range, and the experience of finding human bones in the desert, “felt like a big transition for me,” Warren testified.

    “This crisis became real to me, in a haunting kind of way,” Warren said. He was used to finding animal bones in the desert, but the bones from a human being who had died “not long before,” stuck with him, he said.

    After finding the bones, he found that when he saw someone come out of the desert, he again saw the decaying bones at the “same time, almost like a split-screen,” and that he was struck by the “disturbing reality of how people who are living can be disappeared and lost to the desert,” he said.

    Warren testified that he has helped find and recover 18 sets of human remains in the desert around Ajo, and that the work is a “deeply profound effort.”

    During the hearing, Warren’s lawyer Kuykendall asked him, “what are you doing, spending your whole life helping strangers?”

    “It feels choice-less,” Warren said. “How could you not do that when there are people dying around you?” he asked. “How could you not respond?”

    “Everyone who enters that desert will suffer,” he said. Migrants attempt to cross the desert will have to walk a “long, long way” to cross the desert, and they’ll witness death, either of other migrants or their companions, along the way.

    “It’s an epic undertaking, you have to put everything you’ve got on the line in order to make it,” Warren said, telling the jury that migrants often have already faced danger and deprivation in Mexico before they even attempt “the hardest thing they’ve ever done in their lives.”

    Nonetheless, Warren testified that he felt it was important to follow the law, in part to protect the students and volunteers who came to the Barn.

    “Why would you want to understand the legal limits,” asked Kuykendall.

    “I want to work within the border of the law, and not be doing something illegal and put students in a situation where they’re doing something illegal,” Warren said.
    Payback?

    On the day Warren was arrested, NMD released a report that said that from 2012 to 2015, 415 caches of water left for crossers in the 800-square-mile corridor near Arivaca were vandalized, spilling nearly 3,600 gallons of water into the desert.

    During this same time period, the bodies of 1,026 people were found in the Sonoran Desert, according to records from the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner.

    Using statistical analysis, including land-use patterns, as well as video from trail cameras, and personal experiences to support their claims, the group said that U.S. Border Patrol agents “are responsible for the widespread interference with essential humanitarian efforts.”

    As part of the report’s release, NMD also published videos of Border Patrol agents intentionally destroying water bottles, including a video in which a female Border Patrol agent systematically kicks a half-dozen water bottles, spilling their contents, and a 2017 video in which an agent punctures a water bottle with a knife.

    This report embarrassed and infuriated agents, prompting one to say that NMD had “gone too far” and “messed with the wrong guy,” according to a motion filed by Warren’s defense lawyers in March.

    Previous prosecutions
    Federal officials have attempted to prosecute humanitarian volunteers before, though after two high-profile cases in 2005 and 2008, the government avoided formal prosecutions until 2017, when nine No More Deaths volunteers–including Warren—were charged with entering a wildlife refuge without a permit and leaving food, water, and other supplies on the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, a 800,000-acre wilderness, west of Ajo.

    In 2005, agents arrested Shanti A. Sellz and Daniel M. Strauss after they stopped the two volunteers, and found three people in the country without authorization in their car. However, that indictment was tossed by U.S. District Judge Raner Collins—the same judge who is overseeing Warren’s case.

    In 2008, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers cited volunteer Dan Millis for littering on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refugee after he left water jugs there, however, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction.

    But, after eight years, a detente between the group and Border Patrol began to collapse, beginning with surveillance of the group’s camp on private land south of Arivaca in 2016, and followed by a June 2017 incident when, with a warrant in hand, Border Patrol agents raided the camp and arrested four men, all migrants suspected of being in the country illegally.

    That raid followed an announcement by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions who told reporters during a press conference in Nogales on April 11, 2017 that federal prosecutors “are now required to consider for prosecution” the “transportation or harboring of aliens.”

    Sessions announcement was part of the Trump administrations “zero tolerance” policies as part of a hard-nosed crackdown on border and immigrant communities, and just nine months later, prosecutors in Tucson sought an indictment against Warren.

    Kuykendall also questioned the credibility of the agents, noting their use in messages in a group chat of the word “tonc.”

    The term “tonc” or “tonk” is widely used by agents to refer to border-crossers, but the term’s origin is unclear. Some have argued that the term refers to the sound of a metal flashlight hitting a skull, while others have said that it stands for “temporarily outside naturalized country,” or “true origin not known.”

    And, Kuykendall said that Burns did not know that the Barn remained unlocked and unsecured. After Warren’s arrest on Jan. 17, 2018, Border Patrol agents waited until Jan. 22 to execute a warrant and search the property. Burns appeared to not know that detail until he was told so by Kuykendall in court.

    “What kind of investigation is this, that leaves the building unsecured for 120 hours?,” the attorney rhetorically asked the jury.

    Kuykendall also argued that the two men who also arrested with Warren were given immunity from immigration charges so they would testify in a video deposition shown to the jury on Monday.

    “They are the government’s own witnesses” and yet they disputed some of Wright’s arguments. “This is the best the government can come up with?” he asked.

    Kuykendall said that government’s lack of evidence, “if it weren’t so scary, it would be laughable.”

    No More Deaths vows to continue aiding migrants
    “A hung jury means the government could not prove its case,” Warren defense attorney Amy Knight said. “Scott remains innocent and admirable.”

    Chris Fleischman, a volunteer with No More Deaths, said the organization plans to continue its humanitarian aid work following the announcement.

    “It’s still good to know that the Trump administration’s attempt to criminalize humanitarian aid has failed,” he said. “But we will still be working to end death and suffering in the borderlands.”

    It wasn’t immediately clear after the trial whether the government will seek a new case against Warren.

    “I would think that they wouldn’t waste their effort to do that,” Fleischman said, adding, “We’re concerned for his freedom. That he could be prosecuted for doing what we all had thought is legal anyway.”

    http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/102119_warren_trial/as-scott-warren-retrial-nears-judge-orders-lawyer-volunteer-nurse-mi

    #procès #justice #asile #migrations #réfugiés #délit_de_solidarité #solidarité #frontières #USA #Etats-Unis #USA

    Plus sur Scott Warren ici:
    https://seenthis.net/messages/784076

    ping @isskein

    • *Government Doesn’t Want Trump or His Immigration Policies

      Mentioned in Retrial of Border Aid Worker Scott Warren*


      As they prepare to make their second attempt at sending a border-based humanitarian volunteer to prison, federal prosecutors in Arizona are worried that the politics behind the policies they enforce might creep into the courtroom.

      In a late-stage motion, government lawyers have urged an Arizona judge to bar any mention of President Donald Trump or his immigration policies from the upcoming retrial of Scott Warren, a 36-year-old geographer who was indicted on felony harboring and conspiracy charges for giving two young migrants crossing a deadly stretch of desert food, water, and a place to sleep for three days in 2018. Warren is one of nine volunteers with the faith-based organization No More Deaths that the administration has charged with federal crimes for their work in the Arizona desert since Trump’s inauguration.

      The prosecutors’ concerns that Warren’s trial could become a referendum on Trump’s policies — specifically those that involve pressing charges against people for providing humanitarian aid — are not entirely misplaced. According to new research examining public opinion around the president’s hard-line border enforcement measures, Americans, regardless of political affiliation, overwhelmingly reject the notion that providing lifesaving care to people in the desert should be criminalized, suggesting that the government’s crackdown in the borderlands is well outside the bounds of what most people expect or demand from law enforcement.

      A national survey conducted in August by Chris Zepeda-Millán, an associate professor of public policy at UCLA, and Sophia Jordán Wallace, an associate professor of political science at the University of Washington, posed the question: “Do you agree or disagree that it should be a crime for people to offer humanitarian aid, such as water or first-aid, to undocumented immigrants crossing the desert along the U.S.-Mexico border?” To the researchers’ surprise, nearly 87 percent of the 1,500 American adults surveyed disagreed. When the results were broken down along party lines, the survey became even more interesting: Nearly 70 percent of Republicans said they disagreed with criminal prosecution for the provision of humanitarian aid, and nearly 38 percent said they “strongly disagreed” with the idea.

      “The findings suggest that the vast majority of Americans, including the vast majority of Republicans, do not support the criminalization of the type of work that No More Deaths and Scott Warren were doing,” Zepeda-Millán told The Intercept.

      The survey was conducted for a forthcoming book and paper looking at public opinion around Trump’s most aggressive immigration and border policies. And while there’s still work to be done on that broader project, the researchers chose to share their findings on the humanitarian aid question in advance of Warren’s retrial — he returns to court on Tuesday and faces a decade behind bars if convicted and sentenced to consecutive terms — in part because of how striking they are.

      Students of U.S. immigration enforcement history tend to agree that the Trump administration’s approach did not suddenly materialize out of nowhere, but is instead the extension of a multidecade trajectory of increased criminalization of immigration offenses and an unprecedented build-up in border security infrastructure, now infused with the hard-right rhetoric of authoritarian regimes around the world. There is one area, however, in which the current administration has distinguished itself from its White House predecessors, Zepeda-Millán noted: the targeting of immigrant rights activists. While it keeps thousands of asylum-seekers in legal limbo in some of Mexico’s most dangerous border cities, the administration is simultaneously criminalizing — and in some cases arresting and deporting — those who challenge Trump’s policies, he noted.

      It’s a pattern of “anti-movement state repression,” Zepeda-Millán argued, and it’s why understanding public opinion on these policies is so critical. Traditionally, the best indicator of a person’s stance on a given immigration policy issue is their party affiliation, he explained. “When it comes to immigration, there’s usually a really strict and stable partisan divide,” he said. “As long as we know what your political party is, we can pretty much guess what your opinion is going to be on deportation, on the wall, etc.”

      The survey results bucked that trend in a major way, reflecting a rare thing in American politics: strong, bipartisan consensus on a matter of immigration-related policy in the era of Trump.

      The same Trumpian politics and policies that Zepeda-Millán and Wallace examined, and that prosecutors have sought to banish from Warren’s trial, have served as the backdrop for the government’s criminalization campaign in southern Arizona from the beginning.

      It started in the run-up to the 2016 election, with Border Patrol agents parking their vehicles outside the humanitarian aid camp that No More Deaths has used for years and urging the volunteers to “Vote Trump!” by megaphone. Shortly after Trump’s election, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions flew to Arizona, where he encouraged his prosecutors to bring more cases like the one against Warren. “This is the Trump era,” Sessions said at the time.

      Not long after the visit, the Border Patrol raided No More Deaths’ camp in a show of force that involved a helicopter and roughly 20 agents, some carrying rifles, deployed to arrest four undocumented migrants who had crossed the desert and were receiving medical aid. Six days later, a senior Border Patrol agent in the Tucson sector told a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, who works on the issue of migrant deaths in the desert, that the humanitarian aid group had “messed with the wrong guy.” The anthropologist, in a sworn court declaration, said the agent told her his agency intended to “shut them down.”

      Throughout the summer of 2017, the Border Patrol and senior officials at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service worked together to monitor the activity of No More Deaths volunteers who were leaving food and jugs of water on the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, a profoundly remote and extraordinarily deadly stretch of the Sonoran Desert. They compiled blacklists of volunteers and kept tabs on Warren’s movements in the tiny border community of Ajo, where he lives and works. As summer turned to fall, prosecutors filed federal misdemeanor charges — for littering and trespassing — against Warren and eight other No More Deaths volunteers for driving on designated wilderness and leaving humanitarian aid supplies on the wildlife refuge.

      On the morning of January 18, 2018, No More Deaths published a scathing report implicating the Border Patrol in the destruction of thousands of gallons of water, left in jugs for migrants crossing the desert. The report, which included video evidence that soon went viral, was shared with the patrol agent in charge of the Ajo Border Patrol station. Agents from the station then set up surveillance on a building known as “the Barn,” which serves as a base for Warren, No More Deaths, and other border aid groups. Late in the afternoon, the agents spotted Warren with two young men who they suspected to be undocumented. A raiding party composed of most of Ajo’s law enforcement community was quickly organized.

      Warren and the two young men were placed under arrest. Their names were Kristian Perez-Villanueva and Jose Arnaldo Sacaria-Godoy. They had fled El Salvador and Honduras, respectively, and crossed the desert by foot, where they were chased by immigration agents and lost the food they had brought with them. In the depositions they later gave, they described how a man in Ajo dropped them off at the Barn and they let themselves inside. Warren showed up not long after. They asked him for food and water, and he welcomed them to both. Warren came and went in the days that followed, the migrants said, along with a number of other humanitarian aid volunteers using the space at the time.

      Warren was indicted a month later on two charges of harboring and one count of conspiracy, bring the total time he faced in prison to 20 years. His trial, which began in late May, ended in a hung jury.

      With Warren’s retrial approaching, the prosecution and the defense have filed several motions in recent weeks, perhaps none so unusual as the one the government’s attorneys submitted on October 29. “For the first time, the United States learned the defense might mention the President of the United States, Donald Trump, his administration, or his administration’s policies,” the motion read.

      Such references, the prosecutors argued, “would be irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial.”

      The idea that Warren’s actions should now be divorced from the politics of the world at large is a new direction for Assistant U.S. Attorneys Anna Wright and Nathaniel J. Walters — though given the events during the last trial, that is perhaps understandable.

      While Walters, in his opening statement at Warren’s trial over the summer, insisted that the prosecution was not about No More Deaths, and that the government’s concern was Warren’s actions alone, the nature of the prosecution’s case was something else entirely. Throughout the eight-day trial, Walters and Wright argued that Warren was the lynchpin in a shadowy criminal conspiracy to move people into the country illegally for political purposes. According to the prosecutors, the goal was not to make a profit, unlike most other criminal operations, but to undermine the Border Patrol and further No More Deaths’ political aim of establishing a borderless world. Over and over, both at the trial and pretrial hearings, the prosecutors asked No More Deaths volunteers if they supported the abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a policy proposal born in the midst of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

      Central to the government’s narrative was a characterization of Warren as a deceptive and “high-ranking leader” of No More Deaths who could not be trusted. In an effort to underscore this idea, Walters at one point entered into evidence an article Warren wrote for the Washington Post on the eve of his trial. The bungled and baffling attempt to draw some damning revelation from Warren’s own assessment of the case backfired spectacularly. On cross-examination, Warren’s attorney, Greg Kuykendall, argued that if Walters was going to cherry-pick details from the op-ed, the jury should hear the rest of what was written. District Judge Raner Collins directed Warren to read the piece out loud and, with that, Warren linked his case directly to Trump’s most infamous immigration enforcement policies, from the crackdown on humanitarian aid to the separation of families at the border to a pattern of potentially preventable deaths in the desert.

      For Warren’s friends and supporters, the introduction of the politics and policies that surround Warren’s prosecution into the official record felt like a turning point, a moment when the people deciding his fate were permitted to see what his case was really all about. In the end, eight jurors chose to oppose Warren’s conviction, while four supported it. In July, when the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced that it would be retry the case, it dropped the conspiracy charge.

      Any efforts to prohibit mention of Trump or his policies would violate Warren’s First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution, defense attorney Amy Knight wrote in a motion responding to the government’s request last week. Knight argued that the motion amounted to a request for an “extraordinary ban” with zero “explanation whatsoever of the prejudice” that would result from “daring to mention the President, a man who maintains ultimate authority over this prosecution (notably, the same man who appointed both the United States Attorney General and the United States Attorney for the District of Arizona).” Not only that, she noted, “the government itself introduced the only mention of President Trump into the previous trial, when, while questioning Dr. Warren, it brought up an article he had written expressing some of his views.”

      Paige Corich-Kleim, a longtime volunteer with No More Deaths, said in a statement to The Intercept that the organization worked “to expose government misconduct and intervene in the border crisis.”

      “The government’s attempts to erase the political nature of this retrial is part of their continued efforts to hide what is truly happening along the border and evade responsibility for the violence they have caused,” she added. “Deaths on the border are the predictable outcome of not just border militarization, but also U.S. intervention in Latin America. Their attempts to limit the scope of evidence are self serving.”

      Whether or not the government’s “he who shall not be named” efforts are successful, there are realities in Warren’s case that the prosecutors cannot escape.

      Since 2001, in Pima County alone, more than 3,000 people have lost their lives trying to cross the Sonoran Desert, a grim result of government policies that began two decades before Trump’s election. These deaths, predominantly resulting from dehydration and exposure to the desert sun, are horrifically agonizing and, as Zepeda-Millán and Wallace’s survey shows, most people oppose criminalizing efforts to stop them from happening. It’s a fact that Zepeda-Millán finds both heartening and deeply sad.

      “The good news is that despite Republican support for very punitive, draconian immigration policies, we seem to have found a limit or a threshold to their nativism,” he said. Though they consistently support a wall to keep undocumented immigrants out, and aggressive deportation measures to remove them once they are here, Zepeda-Millán added, “At the moment of life and death that migrants in the desert often find themselves in, Republicans seem to be willing to throw undocumented migrants at least a momentary lifesaver. That’s the good news.”

      “The bad news,” he said, “is that’s a pretty low bar.”

      https://theintercept.com/2019/11/11/immigration-aid-scott-warren-retrial