by Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria, photography by Cengiz Yar, ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Arizona Luminaria. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Pastor Randy Mayer skillfully maneuvers his SUV over rough dirt roads, dodging giant potholes and jostling up steep inclines in the predawn darkness. The rugged terrain in this remote stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border is familiar territory. Mayer, co-founder of the Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian aid to migrants, has traveled here for nearly 25 years.

His destination on that Friday in January was a small encampment about 20 miles east of Sasabe, Arizona, where for the past two years his and other religious and humanitarian organizations have provided food, water and first aid to migrants stranded in the Pajarito Mountains.

A 30-foot-tall bollard fence built during President Donald Trump’s first term ends in the foothills. In 2022, human smugglers began exploiting the gap to move people into Southern Arizona in greater numbers, adding to a sharp increase that year in migrants crossing between ports of entry.

“There were days that we would find two, three, four, 500 people walking along out there,” Mayer says. The following year, more than 500,000 people entered between ports of entry in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Tucson Sector. Their numbers overwhelmed the agents, causing them to wait days to be picked up.

The rugged mountain range, which stretches into Mexico, can be deadly, with temperatures climbing close to 100 degrees in summer, with torrential downpours and flash floods. In winter, temperatures regularly plunge below freezing.

“People were in great danger,” says Mayer, who is also pastor of the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in Sahuarita, Arizona.

Most people who stop at the camp in the Coronado National Forest — which has two large circular tents, fire pits and portable bathrooms — want to turn themselves over to Border Patrol.

The Samaritans and other groups that run the camp, including Humane Borders and No More Deaths, said they cooperate with the U.S. Forest Service and border officials in Arizona and hope to continue working with them under the Trump administration. Border Patrol and the Forest Service allowed them to operate the camp over the past two years, Mayer added, because it didn’t disrupt their operations — and in some ways it enhanced them.

But a few weeks before Trump took office, a liaison with the Forest Service notified volunteers that they must close the camp and clear off federal land, according to Mayer.

The volunteers said they won’t willingly dismantle the camp because doing so would endanger migrants. Human smugglers on the Mexican side still drop off people in the area. And a Trump executive order effectively suspending asylum access borderwide will inevitably push migrants to attempt more remote and riskier routes through the deserts and mountains of Southern Arizona, the volunteers said.

“If he cracks down on us, we will fight back,” said Paula Miller, who........

© ProPublica