Sam Schultz: A heart for service on the US-Mexico border

A year ago, Sam Schultz was enjoying retirement in this remote, high-desert community that hugs California’s border with Mexico.

He, his wife, Gabrielle, and their two adult sons, nine dogs, multiple cats, chickens, and peacocks live on a compound that includes a 1923 landmark stone monument, the Desert View Tower. Mr. Schultz, a skilled carpenter, likes fixing stuff on the property, where he helps his brother, who also lives there, run the tower as a funky Airbnb with a stunning mountain vista.

But then migrants poured through gaps in the border barrier, just down from the compound. The human stream surged last May, ebbed, and then flowed into a river starting in September, churning up national headlines.

Mr. Schultz, known as a can-do relief worker, sprang into action. He organized volunteers to set up tents in three open-air encampments. His team supplied food, water, firewood, and multilingual information sheets as hundreds of migrants, including children, waited days for the overwhelmed Border Patrol to pick them up and process them. A GoFundMe page helped. So did a legal services group, Al Otro Lado, which pitched in with workers and equipment.

 “I cooked for 450-plus a day, 60 days straight,” says Mr. Schultz, his wispy, white ponytail sticking out from a gray field cap. “The Red Cross isn’t going to come. I’m living next door.”

Quaker roots fuel acts of service

For the past year, this retiree has been at the center of America’s fraught border situation, which changes daily. The tiny town of Jacumba Hot Springs is divided over his humanitarian work – some supporting it, others seeing it as aiding and abetting illegal immigration, and some wanting to stay out of the debate.

Squalid camp conditions spurred a lawsuit in February, with advocacy groups demanding enforcement of the Flores agreement, which sets standards for treatment of children in immigration custody. On April 3, a federal judge in San Diego ordered the federal government to move “expeditiously” to safely house minors entering the country unlawfully.

Mr. Schultz, a Quaker, says he doesn’t care about immigration politics or policy. “I’m just helping people.” It’s an outlook stemming from his religious, pacifist roots and his childhood in San Diego followed by years on Bali in Indonesia.

On Bali, he earned a living as a contractor building luxury villas and hotels. That supported his young family – and his parallel life as a humanitarian relief worker. In that life, he organized aid deliveries to the beaches of East Timor during the violent crisis of 1999; assisted in the overloaded morgue during the 2002 Bali terrorist bombings; and set up triage stations after an 8.5 earthquake flattened a Jakarta hospital in 2007.

The Monitor first met Mr. Schultz shortly after a 2004 tsunami killed nearly 230,000 people, many in Indonesia. It was the deadliest disaster of the 21st century so far. Reporter Daniel B. Wood rode with this “regular guy” as he helmed a cargo boat loaded with supplies for those impacted by the tsunami on Sumatra’s denuded coast.

Mr. Schultz saw the news on TV and didn’t wait around for “the clipboard men” at giant aid organizations to get underway. Instead, he found a boat and a crew, then used his own money to help fund his delivery runs of doctors, nurses, tools, cook pots, and rice. He also built 14 fishing boats to help villagers resume their livelihoods.

“The Quakers’ real name is Society of Friends,” he told the Monitor reporter 20 years ago, “and we treat everyone we deal with as if they are our friend. My friends are in trouble. That’s it.”

This is Moon Camp

It’s the first week in April, and not sun, but snow is forecast for Jacumba. Mr. Schultz, his son John, and two young volunteers are pulling a tarp over the skeleton of a large tent structure. This seasoned aid leader lugs sandbags to help secure the sides of the tent. “In relief work, you lift a lot of heavy stuff,” he remarks.

This is Moon Camp, at the base of rugged mountains on old Highway 80. It’s a desolate, open stretch of hard dirt where temperatures can fluctuate wildly and winds whip. The camp includes four portable toilets, a water tank, and an industrial-sized dumpster.

Migrants leave trash strewn about – transit documents, itineraries listing hotels and car rentals, clothes, empty water bottles. The detritus is global: a Russian pouch of dry milk, good for infants ages 6 to 12 months; a Chinese towelette; Mexican pesos. But the relief workers run a clean camp, filling countless trash bags and tossing dirty blankets into the dumpster. The good ones they spray with disinfectant for reuse.

In the middle of the camp is parked Mr. Schultz’s Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck. The bed of the all-electric vehicle is loaded with bottles of water and lunch bags. Each contains a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an orange. In recent weeks, about 100 to 200 migrants have arrived each day – about half from South America and the rest a mix of Turks, Africans, Indians, Chinese, and others, says Mr. Schultz.

Not far from the camp, down a dirt track, the steel-slat border wall abruptly ends at huge boulders – the base of a steep, mountainous area. Migrants cross over a mountain, descending on a trail in large groups. Border Patrol agents direct them to Moon Camp. After migrants eat their sandwiches, the Border Patrol separates the parents and children from the rest, and takes them to a facility for fingerprinting, background checks, a medical screening, food, and questioning.

A group of about 50 men, women, and children from countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and El Salvador, wear hoodies, jeans, and running shoes as well as looks of fatigue – and elation. “Woo-hoo,” yells one young man, on learning he is in the United States. “Gracias,” says another, hands pressed together in thanks. “I’m very tired,” says one woman, holding the hand of her husband.

Back in town at the library, Mitch, a resident who did not want his last name used, expresses frustration with illegal immigration under the Biden administration. He is also unhappy with Mr. Schultz’s relief work. “It’s a magnet.”

But the Schultz family isn’t buying it. “Like somehow people in China heard about our world-class PB&Js, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s the reason we gotta come to the United States,’” says the younger Schultz, as he rakes out a tent floor.

Constant change on the border

Things can change quickly on the border. After an avalanche of media coverage and a trip by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Mexico in late December, Mexico pitched its own tent camps and put guards on the opposite side of the fence from two camps that Mr. Schultz organized. The Mexicans’ gleaming white tents stand unoccupied; a gap in the border fence, unused. If migrants show up, the Mexicans will deport them further south.

That change eased things considerably for Mr. Schultz, his son, and his wife, who helps out. When the Monitor visited earlier this month, only the Moon Camp was operating. But migrants are still coming, says Mr. Schultz. They are being pushed west to a dangerous area in the Otay Mountain Wilderness – too far for the Schultz family to go. He says that volunteers who helped in Jacumba have since gone to San Diego to help orient migrants after the Border Patrol has processed them and dropped them at a public transit station. 

After the April 3 ruling, the Border Patrol stopped directing migrants to Moon Camp, taking them into detention as soon as they walk down the mountain trail. That lasted about a week.

The migrant stream is again surging, and this past Monday, about 400 migrants passed through the camp. Some were facing their third night there, waiting for agents to pick them up. The water tank supplied by the Border Patrol was dry, prompting fights as Mr. Schultz scrambled to find more water – and slap together more PB&J sandwiches.

“It’s been a really long day,” he says in a phone update. “It’s a confusing time.”