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Every week a group of volunteers heads to the eastern reaches of San Diego County, somewhere in the mountains, past the end of the big fence. They’re with Border Kindness, a California-based nonprofit that provides food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and legal aid to asylum-seekers, migrants, refugees, and the displaced along the United States-Mexico border. The San Diego chapter, run by James Cordero and his fiancé Jacqueline Arellano, handles the area’s water drops, which require arduous hikes into the deserts where migrants cross by foot, regardless of whether there’s searing summer temperatures or snow.

Border Kindness volunteers leave water, food, and clothing in canyons, mountains, and desert flats known to be frequented both by migrants and Customs and Border Protection (CBP, border patrol). They also remove trash from through-hikers and migrants who leave their personal effects along the rocks. The team has come across just about every likely scenario from border patrol apprehensions to encountering the remains of people who lost their lives in the final stretch of what was almost surely a long journey throughout the Americas.

Aside from witnessing and experiencing trauma in real-time, there are other risks: in 2019 a volunteer with an organization doing similar water drops in Arizona was charged with two counts of felony harboring and one count of conspiracy. In the end, he went free with a hung jury, but the legal risks of unsanctioned humanitarian aid are real.

“We provide humanitarian aid for many reasons,” Cordero says. “We have family that has immigrated to the United States. We want to help minimize the suffering and death that occurs all too frequently along the US-Mexico border. When you have a serious issue presented in front of you, it becomes a moral responsibility to do what you can to help. That is what we do.”