Mike Wilson of the Tohono O’odham Nation, near Tucson, Arizona has been ordered to stop providing water to illegal migrants crossing the desert from Mexico. It’s not the first time he’s been asked to stop and it’s unclear if this latest order will have any effect on his activities.
Wilson has been a flashpoint in this conflict for several years. A resource manager for a Tucson charter high school, he works in cooperation with the organization, Humane Borders, to put 55-gallon drums of water in the heavily traveled smuggling corridor across the desert. In spite of pressure from immigration officials and his own tribe, he has persisted in providing the water for the last seven years.
He has been a subject of a documentary on illegal immigration and is often a speaker for organizations seeking information on the illegal immigration problem.
Because of its location in southern Arizona, the Tohono O’odham reservation, of which Wilson is a member, regularly registers a high percentage of illegal immigrant deaths. The Arizona Daily Star, which has tracked border deaths for years, said the bodies of 70 illegal immigrants were recovered on the reservation in 2007. Eighty-three were recovered between Jan. 1 and mid-June this year, according to the newspaper. Wilson feels it is only humane to try to prevent them from dying of thirst in the heat of the desert.
Tribal officials have tried to stop Wilson’s actions for years. As far back as 2002, the reservation’s council passed a resolution prohibiting Wilson from distributing water, saying illegal smugglers were not only breaking immigration laws, but they were threatening tribal members for food and rides, breaking into homes, littering, cutting fences, and trading drugs to tribal members. Wilson said he’s been threatened with banishment by the tribe’s public safety director and attorney general’s office if he doesn’t stop putting water out for migrants.
Even his own church congregation has disagreed with Wilson’s activities. When he first began putting out water, he was a Presbyterian lay minister in the tribal capital of Sells. Given the endless migrant deaths on O’odham land, he told congregants it was his Christian obligation to help prevent a few. His congregation disagreed, and he quit before they could boot him out.
The latest request to stop came as Wilson was accompanying a group of seminary students and pastors who were studying the border problem. A tribal police officer drove up and told him that tribal officials wanted his “guests” off the reservation and then ordered him to take down his water station. "I told her I would respectfully decline the instructions to take it down," he said.