This appeared in The Washington Post.

For the crime of providing a pair of Central American migrants with food, water, fresh clothing and beds, a U.S. volunteer with the humanitarian group No More Deaths was handcuffed and charged with three felonies last year. The charges were implausible, and a jury, deadlocked after a weeklong trial in May, sensibly didn't convict. 

That is unlikely to deter the Trump administration from its ongoing harassment of Good Samaritans, who, motivated by humanitarian and religious principles, assist desperate migrants who risk their lives trekking across the desert to enter the United States. Thousands of migrants have died over the past couple of decades and continue to perish where water supplies are scarce and temperatures often exceed 100 degrees. 

The irony and hypocrisy of the administration's policy are unmistakable. The White House and the Department of Homeland Security, citing a humanitarian crisis, successfully pleaded with Congress to appropriate billions of dollars to improve the appalling conditions to which migrants are subjected at the border, including jam-packed government jails in which families are held for days and several children have died. Meanwhile, Border Patrol agents have gone so far as to empty jugs of water left by volunteers in the desert, and prosecutors have charged those volunteers with abandoning personal property by putting food and supplies where migrants can find them. 

Before the Trump administration took office, volunteers, who made no attempt to conceal their mission, were usually able to operate unimpeded. The overriding principle was benign indifference, as befitted a small cohort of people who posed no threat and sought mainly to prevent undocumented migrants from dying as they traversed unforgiving terrain.  

The volunteer who was tried in May, Scott Warren, was charged with harboring and transporting undocumented migrants, for helping a Salvadoran and Guatemalan who found their way to a gathering place for humanitarian workers in Arizona. Warren provided the migrants with sustenance; the government put him in handcuffs. 

The menace of criminal charges and jail for humanitarian workers is of a piece with President Donald Trump's approach to immigration, which couples draconian policies with harassment, persecution and intimidation. By and large, Americans do not see migrants as a threat. More than 125,000 people signed an online petition demanding the case against Warren be dismissed, and  a jury refused to convict.