Dan Millis will never forget what took place on Feb. 20, 2008. As a volunteer with the group No More Deaths, he was leaving gallon-sized water jugs scattered along the trails in the Arizona desert used by undocumented migrants.
This Good Samaritan and his companions came across the dead body of a young Salvadorian girl who weeks ago had vanished in that unforgiving desert. Two days later, Dan was rewarded by agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service by serving him with a ticket for littering on federal property with the water jugs.
This legal process -- he rightly calls it "absurd" and "ridiculous" -- culminated more than two and half years later when a federal appeals court acquitted him, alleging that "water didn't meet the definition of waste." What the judges should have considered wasteful was the attempt to punish a humane and exemplary act of kindness.
"It's definitely pretty insulting to have to fight the federal government on something so basic and of common sense as trying to protect people's human rights," says Dan, who to this day continues offering his help to those who dare to cross this terrifying desert.
Dan, however, is not only trying to bring down the wall of cruelty. As coordinator of the Sierra Club's Borderlands Program, he is also determined to topple another "nightmare," the wall built along the US-Mexico border.
"We have 649 miles of walls and barriers that have been constructed by mostly ignoring environmental laws," he says. "As a result, we see floods, erosion, the wildlife being blocked, we see their habitat being destroyed."
The wall was built as part of the REAL ID Act, which in 2005 bestowed on the federal government the unprecedented authority to waive any law that would stand in the way of this project. To date, the building of the wall has eliminated at least 36 laws and cost close to $3 billion. And to top it all off, the General Accountability Office has stated that this effort has had little impact on the number of migrants crossing into the United States.
"The walls don't work at all," Dan says. "If anything, they wall people into the United States because it makes it harder to cross back and forth."
But regardless of this spectacular failure, Congress and its myopic legislative approach to this problem is digging deeper into the same hole they dug for taxpayers.
The House of Representatives' Natural Resources Committee recently passed the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act (HR 1505). This legislative boondoggle would extend the waivers of those 36 laws to a swath of land 100 miles deep into the U.S. and all along both the U.S.-Mexico and the U.S.-Canada borders.
"This is very dangerous," warns Dan. "It's an assault on federal lands and environmental laws that uses border security as a convenient Trojan horse."
The failure of the border wall confirms once again that we need to address the root causes of migration.
"The wall doesn't do anything to address the real problems at the root of this issue, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has really pushed a lot of people off of their lands in Mexico and made them travel north," he says.
And he adds that investing in international aid to improve education, health care and sustainable development south of the border costs much less that this current waste of the taxpayers' money.
In this age of thieves disguised as bankers and of polluters portraying themselves as job creators, we all are left with an insatiable thirst for heroes of admirable moral strength such as Dan Millis.
He is actually fulfilling his duty to bring water to the thirsty.
Javier Sierra is a Sierra Club columnist. Follow him on Twitter @javier_sc.