Arizona's Underground Railroad.

• Author: Vanderpool, Tim
• Position: Brief Article

In Arizona's harsh borderland, simple morality can be thornier than an old cactus patch. This is a place where life's fragility is too often measured by shreds of cloth on a mesquite tree, staggered footsteps fading into dust, brown faces turned black beneath a deadly sun.

It's also a place where resistance to inhumane U.S. policies runs high.

Just ask the Reverend John Fife. In 1986, the Tucson Presbyterian minister was prosecuted for leading the Sanctuary Movement, a church-based underground railroad for refugees fleeing war-torn Central America. Fourteen years later, Fife is channeling his energies into helping emigrants from Mexico and throughout Latin America who are forced, mostly by economic circumstance, to come to the United States. He calls U.S. immigration policy "immoral and disastrous."

Or ask Clara, a freelance Samaritan in a land crawling with Border Patrol agents. She's cautious enough to request anonymity. But she's defiant enough to continue sheltering handfuls of tattered immigrants each month in what she calls "a war zone." "We're down here dealing with people who are suffering, people who need food and water," she says. "They show up at your door and collapse in your arms weeping. How are you going to turn your back on that?"

Not everyone goes as far as Clara.

On a cold night in March 1999, Jan Weller discovered three travelers shivering outside her gate west of Bisbee. "At first, my husband said, `Don't you dare bring them in,'" she says. "But I was standing out there with them, and they were wet and cold. Then I looked back at our house and saw smoke coming out our chimney, and thought, `I know I can help these people. I can't solve their problems, but I can help them right now.'"

More immigrants were waiting on the road, and Weller eventually found twenty-two unexpected visitors--including a ten-year-old boy--gathered around her wood-burning stove. By sunrise, Border Patrol agents had picked up the group for return to Mexico.

Weller, who called the Border Patrol, says she wasn't worried about landing in jail. "The way I look at it, if you are just trying to help and not trying to break the law, it's OK to give them food or whatever until the authorities come."

"Clearly, in a situation where there's humanitarian need, any reasonable person would respond with assistance," says Russ Bergeron, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). At the same time, he says, "It is a felony to harbor...