SHAFAQNA- Rashida Tlaib, Muslim member of the US House of Representatives from Michigan reacted to the photo of drowned migrant man, daughter from El Salvador. She blamed Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, saying in a tweet “This monster and his heartless Administration must be held accountable.”
Sometimes an image is so powerful, it cuts through almost any noise.
That has happened with haunting image of a Salvadoran father and his daughter who drowned as they attempted to cross from Mexico into Texas, taken this week along the U.S.-Mexico border by journalist Julia Le Duc.
The photo, which was originally published Monday by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada and went viral on social media, shows a migrant and his less than 2-year-old daughter lying face down in the murky waters on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. The girl’s right arm rests across the back of her father’s neck.
The man and his 23-month-old daughter lay face down in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande, his black shirt hiked up to his chest with the girl tucked inside. Her arm was draped around his neck suggesting she clung to him in her final moments.
According to Le Duc’s reporting for La Jornada, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, frustrated because the family from El Salvador was unable to present themselves to U.S. authorities and request asylum, swam across the river on Sunday with his daughter, Valeria.
He set her on the U.S. bank of the river and started back for his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, but seeing him move away the girl threw herself into the waters. Martínez returned and was able to grab Valeria, but the current swept them both away, AP told.
The couple first requested asylum in southern Mexico, but later decided to try to reach the U.S. When they arrived at the U.S. border over the weekend, relatives said, they were told that they could not cross — because of the Trump administration’s policy of “metering,” which allows only a few dozen migrants to seek asylum at official crossings each day.
Democratic presidential hopefuls, activists, celebrities and Mexican politicians were among those who responded with horror to a widely shared photograph of a drowned El Salvadorean man and his 23-month-old daughter.
Calling Trump ‘a monster’, Rashida Tlaib blamed his hard-line immigration policies, saying in a tweet “This monster and his heartless Administration must be held accountable.”
“Trump is responsible for these deaths,” said Beto O’Rourke, who is campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“As his administration refuses to follow our laws – preventing refugees from presenting themselves for asylum at our ports of entry – they cause families to cross between ports, ensuring greater suffering & death. At the expense of our humanity, not to the benefit of our safety”, independent told.
Kamala Harris, a California senator also running for the nomination, struck a similar tone.
“These families are often fleeing extreme violence,” she said on Twitter.
“And what happens when they arrive? Trump says ‘Go back to where you came from.’ That is inhumane.
“Children are dying,” she added.”This is a stain on our moral conscience.”
Hundreds of migrants die while seeking to reach the U.S. each year. They drown in the swift-running Rio Grande, perish in the sweltering Sonoran Desert or suffocate in the back of tractor-trailers driven by migrant smugglers. Most of those deaths go largely unnoticed in the United States.
But Le Duc’s photo went viral and was published on the front page of the New York Times on Wednesday, with some saying it points to increasingly inhumane U.S. immigration policies.
Trump: With a wall, immigrant father and daughter “would be saved”
In response to all the criticism, US President Donald Trump claims that if his border wall had been built the lives of migrants could be saved.
Speaking at a press conference in Osaka, Trump said “The father and the beautiful daughter who drowned … if they thought it was hard to get in, they wouldn’t be coming up… Lives would be saved”, CNN reported.
Since taking office in 2017, Trump has sought to make it more difficult for all immigrants, including those seeking political asylum, to reach the U.S. Along with metering and a short-lived policy that resulted in thousands of migrant children being separated from their families last year, his administration has in the first six months of this year sent more than 17,000 asylum seekers to Mexico to wait for their cases to be heard, latimes reported.