HISTORY

Humane Borders was established in the year 2000 in response to reports of a drastic increase in the number of migrant deaths on Arizona's border with Mexico. The 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) gave rise to a diaspora of desperate migrant movement to the U.S. as hundreds of thousands of landless, jobless Mexicans sought employment. 

The same year NAFTA was executed, the U.S. Customs Border Protection (CBP) revealed its strategic plan especially designed to stall diasporic movement north of the border. Known as Operation Gatekeeper in Texas, Operation Hold the Line in California, and Operation Safeguard in Arizona, the project called for an intensification of the militarization of the border in sealing off urban, high traffic areas of undocumented immigration. Labeled "prevention through deterrence," the result was a funneling effect that forced migrants into dangerous, desolate desert and mountainous areas in southern Arizona, western California, and New Mexico. While the developers of that policy thought that potential migrants would soon realize it was too dangerous to cross over mountains and desert, they were quickly proven wrong. By 1996, the deathly immigration deterrence policy had begun to take a toll. Tragically, the “prevention through deterence” policy was not changed despite the realization that the assumption about people not crossing between the ports of entry was quite wrong.

In the spring of 2000, Isabelle Garcia, Lupe Castillo, and other members of the Tucson-based human rights organization Derechos Humanos called upon the 1980's Sanctuary Movement co-founder Reverend John Fife and other Tucson-based faith leaders to bear witness to the crisis. A few months later, in June of 2000, Tucson religious leaders of different faiths gathered at the Tucson Quaker Meeting House (the Pima Religious Society of Friends), where it was decided that the group would provide material aid in the form of lifesaving water. Humane Borders was born. 

Responding to the crisis of migrant deaths with the placement of water stations in strategic sites in the Arizona/Sonoran Desert, Humane Borders looked to a model pioneered by John Hunter, a resident of San Diego. Hunter initiated the Water Station model in 1999, when more than 60 migrants died in the El Centro Sector. Hunter acted, placing one-gallon water jugs in the desert and marking each location with a flag rising above desert vegetation. Under President Reverend Robin Hoover’s direction, Humane Borders modified Hunter’s model, utilizing large, refillable 55-gallon barrels fitted with spigots resting on steel or wooden stands above the desert floor. All stations would be marked by blue flags rising thirty feet into the desert sky, signaling to crossing migrants the locations of precious water supplies. 

In March 2001, the first four stations went up, with two sites each in Organ Pipe National Monument and Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge (BANWR). By the end of that first summer, Humane Borders had erected and maintained 12 water stations on a regular basis. Today, Humane Borders maintains several dozen permitted water stations in the Arizona/Sonoran Desert. 

Mapping is intrinsic to Humane Border’s primary mission of providing lifesaving water to immigrants crossing the treacherous geographies of the Arizona/Sonoran Desert. The very first water stations were planted near satellite coordinate locations where U.S. Customs Border Protection had recovered human remains. Armed with this information, Humane Borders founders made crucial decisions about the placement of water stations where migrants would need it most. 

In 2002, Humane Borders leaders began producing annual maps pinpointing migrant deaths to educate government officials on both sides of the border to secure permits for the building of water stations. Rev. Robin Hoover hit upon the idea in 2001 when a friend, a CBP community relations officer, presented him with a 3' x 4' topographical map of the Tucson Sector plotted with tiny red dots representing the locations of migrants who had died in Fiscal Year 2000. Looking at the map, Hoover and other Humane Borders leaders recognized that if they had even better maps, they would have more knowledge to strategize on the best locations for planting water stations to save more lives. 

With this objective in mind, from 2001 to 2003, Hoover and Volunteer Kim Johnson began producing yearly Recovered Human Remains (RHR) maps, plotting with red dots the locations where the bodies of migrants were found. Using a plotter printer, consumer-grade GPS navigation software, and Adobe Photoshop proved to be a slow, painstaking, but ultimately successful process. 

In 2004, the Environmental Systems Research Institute donated a license for Arc View 9.1, a sophisticated mapping program that enabled the production of high-resolution maps, and volunteers began building a geographical information system for managing water stations and migrant death data. These high-quality, second-generation maps would provide readers with a detailed view of the relationships between deaths, geographic terrain, and water tank locations, illustrating in a graphic way how our water stations help prevent the loss of life. 

For Humane Borders, migrant lives – and deaths – count, and over the years we've been in operation members of our organization have invested time and effort unearthing data to produce maps that render an accurate count of migrant deaths for a given fiscal year. In 2013, Humane Borders began partnering with the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office (PCOME) to launch the Arizona Open GIS Initiative for Missing and Deceased Migrants. The mission of the collaborative effort is to raise awareness about migrant deaths and lessen the suffering of families by helping to provide closure through the identification of the deceased and the return of remains. The GIS project provides an online mapping tool that enables users to search for spatial data related to desert migrant deaths.

Migrant death data is derived from public information amassed from PCOME, law enforcement agencies, and first responders and is updated on a quarterly basis. Search tools enable family members and other interested parties to query and view data through the use of online-maps and tables, and the information is downloadable for further use. The online GIS tool further supports the work of first responders and various law enforcement agencies who respond to the crisis of discovering and recovering human remains. 

Humane Borders mapmakers appropriated the red dots they saw on that first CBP map back in 2001. From the beginning, our founders recognized the shock potential that the map’s red dots hold as stark visual representations of the dead for educating the public about the deleterious consequences of U.S. immigration deterrence policies. Humane Borders volunteers and other desert aid humanitarians are ever mindful and want to make the public also aware that although the deaths of different migrants appear as a red dot on a map, each one of those dots represents a human being: Each dot memorializes someone's precious son, daughter, husband, wife, mother, father, sister, or brother. Since 2001, more than 4000 human remains have been recovered in Southern Arizona. We will never know the true number of those who died in the desert because so many are never found.

Humane Borders underwent structural changes in 2010. After receiving its 501(c)(3) status, the organization moved its offices from to a community center in South Tucson where we maintain operations today. 

In 2023, Humane Borders established a larger presence in the Ajo area, with a surge of hundreds of asylum seekers daily at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. With the support of the National Park Service, volunteers mobilized to set up six water stations near the border wall in less than 24 hours. 

In April 2024, Humane Borders expanded operations to the Yuma area, with a new station in San Luis, a collaboration with the Arizona-California Humanitarian Coalition. In the same month, Humane Borders invited a team from Doctors Without Borders (Medicines Sin Fronteras) to visit for a four-week assessment of migrant conditions in Arizona.  Also in April 2024, Humane Borders received the Richard C. Holbooke Award from Refugees International for its work with refugees along the Arizona/Mexico border.

We continue to monitor the ebb and flow of migrant activity along the Arizona/Mexico border so we continue our mission of preventing deaths and creating a more just and humane border.