In the 1840s, an elderly abolitionist Ohio farmer, John Van Zandt, lost all his property for assisting nine runaway slaves from Kentucky and thus violating state and federal fugitive slave laws. His case was litigated all the way to the US Supreme Court, where it was argued by leading antislavery politicians Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s future Secretary of Treasury and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State. They lost that legal battle but would eventually win the political war against Southern slavery. Van Zandt himself died in 1847, refusing to divulge the whereabouts of the slaves he had assisted, his small estate liable for the penalties incurred by his courageous actions. As Chase put it, Van Zandt had gone to “another bar where aid to the weak and suffering will not be imputed as a crime.” One does not have to look far to find our contemporary Van Zandts—or renewed attempts to criminalize humanitarian aid.
Scott Warren, a volunteer for the group No More Deaths that provides relief, usually in the form of supplies of food and water left in desert areas, to migrants attempting to cross the harsh, arid southern border of the United States, was arrested last year in Arizona for rendering care to two dangerously dehydrated and injured migrants. His case was brought to trial recently. Warren was charged with providing food, water, clothes, medical care, and shelter to two undocumented immigrants attempting to cross the Sonoran Desert. Last month, a jury in Arizona refused to convict him, eight finding him not guilty and four guilty.
Warren, an academic by profession, was—like many volunteers with No More Deaths, Ajo Samaritans, and other humanitarian aid groups working in the desert—motivated simply to save lives. He told The Intercept that he had come across human remains during his hikes in wilderness areas—a shocking spectacle that moved him much as the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy was moved by the “savage barbarity” he witnessed in St. Louis in 1836 when a black man was burned to death by a white mob. Lovejoy wrote an editorial condemning the appropriately named Judge Lawless for setting the dead man’s lynchers free, an exercise of free speech for which Lovejoy was driven out of town (and he was later murdered by proslavery rioters).