No More Deaths Issues

My friend, Walt Staton is scheduled to be resentenced Friday, December 4 at 3:00 p.m in federal court in Tucson, Arizona, for "knowingly littering" on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge southwest of Tucson. He was placing sealed bottles of fresh water on the Refuge for migrants traveling through the Refuge on their way north. Walt was sentenced to one-year of banishment from the Refuge, one-year probation, and 300 hours of community service picking up trash. Walt is now in seminary at Claremont Seminary in California. After serious consideration, he has decided not to do the 300 hours of community service because he believes it will legitemize the sentence handed own to him. He believes that what he did was not a crime. We'll see what the judge has to say on the 4th. Perhaps he will be jailed, in which case, Amnesty International has said he will be "a prisoner of conscience."

Walt and I work for a group called No More Deaths that was established in 2004 to help prevent death and suffering in the Sonoran Desert. Since 1994 when the federal government began is policy of deterrence by forcing migrants into the most desolate parts of the desert, 5,600 migrants have died. Walt is simply doing what he can to prevent these deaths; he is not interested in promoting migration.

I will write more about what's happening in a few days. Sue