The Trump administration’s yearslong taxpayer-funded mission to criminalize humanitarian aid at the southern U.S. border continues to be rebuked in the courts, with a federal judge on Monday reversing the convictions of four workers who had been charged for their actions volunteering with No More Deaths, the humanitarian aid group whose sole mission has been to prevent agonizing migrant deaths in the border desert.
The Tucson Sentinel reports that Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse, and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick had been found guilty of federal misdemeanors early last year for their work leaving water and other lifesaving supplies in the searing desert, Hoffman “for operating a motor vehicle in a wilderness area and entering a national refuge without a permit while Holcomb, Huse, and Orozco-McCormick were found guilty of entering without a permit and abandonment of property.”
But in her ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez wrote, “Defendants argue that those actions, taken with the avowed goal of mitigating death and suffering, were sincere exercises of religion and that their prosecution is barred by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” According to the court document, all four are affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Church. Márquez’s ruling, noting the thousands of sets of human remains that have been found in Arizona during the past two decades, further castigated the government for “gruesome logic.”