Daniel Millis, a volunteer with the faith-based organization No More Deaths, was arrested in 2008 for littering. His crime: leaving bottles of drinking water on trails near the Arizona-Mexico border so immigrants walking through the desert would not die of thirst.
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned Millis’ conviction, by a 2-1 vote. It was an important ruling. However the immigration debate works itself out, we do not want to be a country that puts humanitarians in prison for giving water to people dying of thirst. What is disturbing, however, is how limited the court’s decision was. As a result, people can still be arrested for doing exactly what Millis did.
On Feb. 22, 2008, Millis and three colleagues were driving through the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in a Toyota 4Runner. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officers stopped them and spotted gallon-sized bottles of water. When the officers questioned him, Millis admitted that he and his friends had been placing plastic bottles of water along the refuge’s trails, adding that they were picking up discarded water bottles as well. Millis was doing his work as a volunteer for the group No More Deaths, a ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson.
One of the officers told Millis that leaving water without a permit was littering. The government says that leaving water bottles not only clutters the refuge, but poses a danger to wildlife. The officer told Millis that if he sought a permit, he would be denied one.
Millis was given a citation for “disposal of waste” on a national wildlife refuge. When asked by the officer, Millis handed over the GPS coordinates of every location where the group had left water that day. The officers later retrieved 17 bottles of water that had been left along the trails. At his trial, Millis admitted he had left water for illegal immigrants to find on their travels, but he insisted that he had not broken the law. “Humanitarian aid,” he contended, “is never a crime.” The magistrate judge disagreed, however, finding Millis guilty and giving him a suspended sentence. On appeal, a federal district court judge affirmed the conviction. Millis appealed again.
For the San Francisco–based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — which covers Arizona, California and seven other Western states — it came down to a matter of definitions. Millis was not charged with littering per se. He was accused of disposing of “garbage, refuse sewage, sludge, earth, rocks, and other debris” in a national wildlife refuge. The government claimed that the water bottles Millis left behind for the immigrants were “garbage.”
The appeals court disagreed. The court concluded that the water bottles Millis left behind did not meet the common meaning of the word garbage, especially given that courts are inclined to interpret ambiguous criminal laws against the government.
