The Reverend Robin Hoover discussed his work documenting migrant deaths on the Arizona border and his strategies to aid migrants entering the United States at a speech on immigration at the ILR Conference Center on Monday. 

Hoover has spent the past 26 years working with migrant shelters and people seeking political asylum in south Texas, he said. He is the ex-president and founder of Humane Borders, a social welfare organization that aims to support migrants crossing the Arizona border into the United States. 

Starting in 2000 as part of his work for Humane Borders, he began initiatives to set up emergency water stations in the middle of the desert to help reduce the number of migrant deaths. He worked to map migrant deaths, pushed for the expansion of cell phone coverage for safety reasons and distributed satellite rescue beacons. 

“These are persons who have no advocate — a fair advocate. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants cheap labor, but they’re not going to get out there and work with the migrants. So, I’m trying to alleviate some suffering and promote some reform,” Hoover said in his presentation, titled “Water in the Desert: Migrant Deaths and Humanitarian Aid in Arizona.” 

Hoover said the U.S. Border Patrol has done nothing to stop the increased migrant deaths in Arizona. He referred to a detention center in southern Arizona where migrants, including young children, are kept in outdoor pens while the Border Patrol agents watch their activity on a screen inside with air conditioning. 

“If I take a corridor of a road or trail … and measure the average distance from that trail to a death, it has quadrupled in the last 10 years,” Hoover said. “The measurable effect of what the United States government has done is to push the migrants away from places of safety.”

In one of his efforts to decrease migrant deaths, Hoover started setting up blue water barrels along the border in 2007. The barrels are marked by a tall blue flag designed to stand out in the Arizona desert. Hoover said that migrants know to look for these barrels when they are in the desert and trying to cross the border into the United States. 

Hoover said he has found antlers left by Yaqui, an indigenous group in the region, on a couple of the barrels. The Yaqui practice a ritual called the deer dance, which Hoover described as a symbolic devotion to God.

“This is the biggest thank you that I have ever received in my entire life … Three times we’ve had deer antlers laid on the water stations. That’s not ‘thank you,’ that’s not ‘God bless you’ — that’s ‘thank you, God bless you and your entire blood lineage for eternity.’ So, it doesn’t get any better than that,” Hoover said.

Although Hoover said he appreciates the migrant people and their traditions, he does not support opening U.S. borders to immigrants.

“Peak migration is in February. … When I go lecture in Mexico, the first thing I tell college students is: stay the hell out of my desert in February,” Hoover said.

Hoover said that he does not support either political party’s position on the immigration issue because “neither party has a solid track record.” He added that Obama has done a terrible job in improving the treatment of migrants.

At the presentation, Hoover said that he would continue working on the immigration issue after his work with Humane Borders and will initiate a research project on the status of migrant deportation in the coming months. 

Students and faculty in attendance differed on their opinions of Hoover’s presentation. 

“I think it’s really important to get this information out. I know his passion and his guts,” said Ami Kadar, a farm advocate from the Rochester region who attended the event and works directly with immigrants.

Some audience members were more critical of Hoover.

“The only thing that I didn’t enthusiastically agree with was the opposition to open borders,” Prof. Richard Bensel, government, said.

 Hoover expressed desire to change the methodology of decreasing migrants’ stay in the United States. Rather than enforcement methodology, he said he wants to give migrants incentives to return to their native countries.

“The whole idea is to make us a better, more responsible nation. It’s okay to have a border, but it’s not okay to have a border that kills people,” Hoover said.