Tim Steller's column: Years later, divisive border activist still flouts the law

Back in 2018 I wrote a column about a local man named Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer headlined, “Nobody is stopping activist’s intimidation, vigilante tactics.”

That could be the headline again today.

Same guy, same rejection of the legal system, same claim to answer only to God. Now, though, he has a few more criminal convictions and a new focus for his zeal. Once again, nobody is stopping him.

Years ago, Meyer moved on from running a homeless camp to discovering an imagined child-sex camp in Tucson and trafficking trails in Marana. Then he began stopping people crossing the Mexican border near Sasabe. Now he’s hiding a woman and child from a custody case in Idaho.

Meyer, who is better known as Lewis Arthur (or “Screwy Louie” to his detractors), says he has put the woman and boy, Sarah and River Stanley, in a “safe house,” although the boy’s father was awarded full custody Feb. 17.

“River Stanley is safe, and he has a loving mother, and no one has the authority to take her parental rights away from her,” Meyer said in a March 2 video. “No one — not a judge, not a family court, definitely not this globalist government.”

This is much the same sort of rhetoric that came into the local public’s consciousness in 2018, when Meyer claimed to find a homeless camp on the southwest side that had been used as a child-sex-trafficking site. It was not actually a child-sex-trafficking camp, but the claim helped him gain thousands of online followers who supported his operation by sending gift cards.

That year is when Meyer made the break from operating a homeless camp on a parking lot across the street from Santa Rita Park in Tucson, and dedicated himself to what he describes as fighting child sex trafficking across the Mexican border.

That year he also demonstrated his ongoing disregard for the system. He skipped a trial in which he was a defendant — he was tried and convicted of assault in absentia in Tucson City Court in July 2018 for pepper-spraying somebody in Santa Rita Park.

The reason for his absence, he told me yesterday: He was in a tower near the supposed child-sex-trafficking site “securing the scene.”

Skipped sentencing

Meyer spent months in jail in 2019, after being charged with felony criminal trespass at a Marana-area property. Eventually he was convicted of a misdemeanor in that case and sentenced to a year of probation.

Over subsequent months and years, Meyer became focused on the water stations maintained by Humane Borders, and he damaged some of them. His argument was that Humane Borders and other humanitarian groups were facilitating child-sex-trafficking and collaborating with cartels by putting out water. He claims Border Patrol agents told him which ones to sabotage.

Obviously, that’s not the mission of these groups. Humane Borders and other humanitarian groups in Southern Arizona work to keep people from dying when they cross the borderlands, especially in the summer, by putting out water bottles or maintaining semi-permanent water stations.

“He’s probably destroyed $6,500 worth of Humane Borders equipment, most of which is paid for by Pima County, i.e. taxpayers,” said Joel Smith, Meyer’s longtime nemesis at Humane Borders. “He claims everybody is a child molester. If you don’t like him, you’re a child molester.”

In fact, Meyer was tried in December 2021 on charges related to the destruction of water stations in 2019, and convicted of four counts of criminal damage and one count of trespassing — all misdemeanors. When it came time for sentencing in January, though, he didn’t show up.

Justice of the Peace Erica Cornejo issued an arrest warrant Jan. 14, but nobody has picked him up yet. In general misdemeanor or bench warrants are not a high priority, and deputies execute them only when they encounter a person for some other reason, Pima County Sheriff’s Department spokesman James Allerton told me.

Fines for contempt

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So, even as Meyer has regularly broadcast his activities at the border near Sasabe on social media, claiming to be rescuing migrant children from sex traffickers, no authorities appear to have made him their business. Instead, he’s had steady visitors from outside the area, camping near the border and stopping groups of people as they cross through gaps in the border fence, handing some blankets, backpacks and Bibles.

One of the recent visitors was Ron Watkins, the man who is running for the GOP nomination for Congress in Congressional District 2 and is widely suspected of being a key force behind the QAnon conspiracy theory. That is the baseless theory that powerful Democrats, the “Deep State” and “globalists” are satanists running worldwide child-trafficking rings.

Meyer has convinced followers that the children crossing the border are being sex-trafficked or suffering other unspeakable horrors. While some sex trafficking undoubtedly does occur at the border, what’s happening now is a continuation of years of migration for the usual social reasons — poverty, crime, broken families and the relative ease for children to stay in the United States once they’ve crossed the border.

At the same time all of this has been going on, Pima County has also been suing Meyer for violating zoning restrictions by putting up unpermitted “tent structures” on a property he owns near Three Points. On May 24 last year, Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson ordered Meyer to bring the property into compliance.

Inspectors repeatedly visited, found he hadn’t done so, and reported back to the court. On Feb. 18, Johnson found Meyer in contempt of court and ordered him to pay $20 per day until he brings the property into compliance. That’s about $300 so far, no end in sight.

Stopping “bioweapon” injection

With all this history of ignoring or defying the courts, it’s perhaps not surprising that Meyer recently inserted himself into the custody dispute, denouncing and even vaguely threatening judges, attorneys and others involved in the case.

It involves a father living in Seattle, Gary Lee Jennings, and a mother from Idaho, Sarah Stanley, currently living in an unknown location that Meyer claims is one of his dozens of safe houses his group maintains around the country. Jennings has pursued some form of custody through the courts, and Stanley eventually allied herself with Meyer.

Meyer and I have a long history now, and he doesn’t seem to like me, because I don’t believe much of what he says and have criticized him in the past. But we talked Friday morning by phone.

He said that he has operated “safe houses” for women and children for years, but what’s new is that they are “scattered across the United States of America.”

He wouldn’t say how he got involved in Stanley’s case, but he has condemned everyone involved on the other side of the custody case as “child predators.” He has also repeatedly posted contact information for Jennings’ attorney, the attorney’s private investigator, the judge on the case and the sheriff’s department, encouraging followers to involve themselves.

Specifically, he has argued the other side wants to take the boy away from his mother so he can be vaccinated

“She’s a holistic mother,” he said of Stanley. “She’s not vaccinated herself. She doesn’t permit any vaccines or medications around her son.”

In an interview about the custody case published in the East Idaho News Thursday, Meyer is quoted as saying, “We’re not going to let anyone inject a child with a bioweapon.”

In the March 2 video, he implicitly threatened those involved in the case.

“I don’t want to see people hurt. But if God comes to stop you Brandon Hobbs, Laurie Gaffney, Judge Colton, Sheriff of Teton County. If the God of Abraham comes to stop you, that’s final. I don’t know what his wrath is. You could see you and your loves ones …,” he says before trailing off.

Jennings, the father, has argued Stanley has essentially joined a cult. She has inadvertently supported his argument by making filings filled with sovereign-citizen jargon, such as a “Declaration of no contract with Teton County,” asserting the county where the dispute is taking place a “private for-profit LEGAL FICTION ENTITY.”

It’s no wonder people are reticent to insert themselves into this craziness. But experience has shown it doesn’t go away on its own.