Border Patrol raids faith-based immigrant aid camp for second time in three months
Agents with the US Border Patrol raided a faith-based humanitarian aid camp for undocumented immigrants near the US-Mexico border on the evening of October 5—the second action taken against the camp since July.
The raid on Byrd Camp was announced on Twitter by Roy Villareal, chief patrol agent for the Tucson Sector, who referred to the camp derisively as a “so called Samaritan camp.” Villareal said the Border Patrol agents had taken 12 immigrants into custody—along with, briefly, seven volunteers—because the camp was allegedly “harboring illegal aliens with unknown health status.”
The camp is run by No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization founded in 2004 by a partnership of community and faith groups to “stop the deaths of migrants in the desert.” The group is an official ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson.
