Arizona's Underground Railroad.

In Arizona's harsh borderland, simple morality can be thornier than an old cactus patch. This is a place where life's fragility is too often measured by shreds of cloth on a mesquite tree, staggered footsteps fading into dust, brown faces turned black beneath a deadly sun.

It's also a place where resistance to inhumane U.S. policies runs high.

Just ask the Reverend John Fife. In 1986, the Tucson Presbyterian minister was prosecuted for leading the Sanctuary Movement, a church-based underground railroad for refugees fleeing war-torn Central America. Fourteen years later, Fife is channeling his energies into helping emigrants from Mexico and throughout Latin America who are forced, mostly by economic circumstance, to come to the United States. He calls U.S. immigration policy "immoral and disastrous."

Or ask Clara, a freelance Samaritan in a land crawling with Border Patrol agents. She's cautious enough to request anonymity. But she's defiant enough to continue sheltering handfuls of tattered immigrants each month in what she calls "a war zone." "We're down here dealing with people who are suffering, people who need food and water," she says. "They show up at your door and collapse in your arms weeping. How are you going to turn your back on that?"

Not everyone goes as far as Clara.

On a cold night in March 1999, Jan Weller discovered three travelers shivering outside her gate west of Bisbee. "At first, my husband said, `Don't you dare bring them in,'" she says. "But I was standing out there with them, and they were wet and cold. Then I looked back at our house and saw smoke coming out our chimney, and thought, `I know I can help these people. I can't solve their problems, but I can help them right now.'"

More immigrants were waiting on the road, and Weller eventually found twenty-two unexpected visitors--including a ten-year-old boy--gathered around her wood-burning stove. By sunrise, Border Patrol agents had picked up the group for return to Mexico.

Weller, who called the Border Patrol, says she wasn't worried about landing in jail. "The way I look at it, if you are just trying to help and not trying to break the law, it's OK to give them food or whatever until the authorities come."

"Clearly, in a situation where there's humanitarian need, any reasonable person would respond with assistance," says Russ Bergeron, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). At the same time, he says, "It is a felony to harbor undocumented aliens. If you are caught harboring them, you might very well be in violation of the law."

Punishment for harboring or transporting undocumented immigrants can mean up to ten years in jail and fines of more than $250,000, according to Cathy Colbert of the U.S. Attorney's office in Arizona. "We would caution anyone about what it could be worth to their personal freedom," she says.

Between October 1999 and last September, the INS apprehended 1.65 million border crossers in the Southwest, up more than 100,000 from the year before. During that same period, 369 people died trying to cross into the United States from Mexico, compared with 231 the previous year.

Critics like Fife and Clara blame this tragic increase on INS strategies that favor heavy enforcement near border towns. In turn, immigrants are driven farther out into the desert, where they're much more vulnerable to apprehension--and to the elements.

That's why Fife and other Sanctuary veterans created Humane Borders last June. The group now includes several congregations in Tucson, as well as churches in Mexican towns flanking Arizona.

"This is not the Sanctuary movement," stresses the Reverend Robin Hoover, who is a co-founder of Humane Borders and the minister of Tucson's First Christian Church. "We're doing a different kind of work by lobbying to change immigration policies and providing only direct, emergency assistance." Among the coalition's first goals is establishing water stations in the desert, at spots where immigrants have died from dehydration.

But, unofficially, members are free to act upon their consciences--and take the resulting risks. Whether that means just providing food and temporary shelter or breaking the law by hiding and transporting immigrants "is up to each individual," Fife says. "This is going to be a movement that says, `Help as you feel it's appropriate, given the situation.'" He calls it among the "best traditions along the borderlands. People in this region have always responded to human need with compassion."

Another group, Bisbee-based Citizens for Border Solutions, is learning just how far it can go in offering food, shelter, and medical assistance without risking arrest. "We're also trying to get information to people coming across that, hey, when you cross the border, you're not just going to go a couple of miles where there's going to be a highway or a town," says member Roy Goodman. "That's why people are dying--even people with infants are going willy-nilly into the wilderness."

Meanwhile, more ominous echoes of the Sanctuary days rumble through the region. The government earned much bad press by infiltrating the earlier organization and aggressively prosecuting its members. Now activists again hear rumors of plainclothes "agents provocateurs" among their ranks. This makes people "very cautious" about discussing their assistance, says Goodman.

Bergeron of the INS doesn't deny that his agency uses informants along the border, but says he's "obviously not going to comment on specific activities."

Regardless, activists like Clara say they'll continue following their hearts--and defying the law.

"There's a scripture in the Book of Deuteronomy saying that when strangers enter your land you do not hinder them, but you treat them as if they were born there," she says. "So what law am I going to obey? Am I going to obey the government? Or am I going to obey what God says and do the Samaritan thing? Our government is creating a problem here that does not need to be created. If they stick it in my yard and in my house and in my face, I'm going to do what I think I should do."

Tim Vanderpool is a freelance writer based in Tucson.