FLOATERS: OUR REFLECTION IN THE RIO GRANDE

Migrant children are drowning at the border, their deaths met with indifference. Rescue workers call these bodies “floaters.”

Debbie Nathan
September 2 2023, 7:00 a.m.

THE MEDIA WAS filled this summer with news of migrants blocked and wounded by orange buoys and sharp wire that the governor of Texas placed on the Rio Grande, the river bordering Mexico. A poll taken in August found that 51 percent of Americans approve of these hostile barriers — including four of every 10 Democrats. This is so even though it’s increasingly dangerous for migrants to try to enter the U.S. without going through official ports of entry. During the last three fiscal years, more people have died trying to cross the border than at any other time in recorded U.S. immigration enforcement history.

The dead include hundreds of adults who’ve expired from heat, vehicle collisions during Border Patrol chases, and mishaps in rivers — mostly the Rio Grande and its canals. Children, too, have died in droves, mainly by drowning. But as current polling suggests, you don’t have to like Donald Trump to be hostile or indifferent to this suffering.

Here are the children known to have drowned or disappeared in 2022, the last year with complete data, on the 55-mile length of the Rio Grande between the towns of Del Rio and Eagle Pass, Texas:

Victoria Mayor, 7, of Venezuela. Ismael Patiño, 4, from Uruguay. Angelica Silva, 4, Nicaragua. A 7-year-old boy from Angola; his 9-year-old brother also swept away but not reported found. Another 4-year-old Nicaraguan, no name provided to the media. A 3-year-old from Nicaragua and his 2-month-old brother dead weeks later of injuries sustained in the water. Christopher Alvarado, 14, from Honduras, drowned while trying to cross the river to reunite with his mother in Houston. A Cuban girl, 2. A 1-year-old from Brazil. A 9-year-old whose mother was trying to take her from rural Guatemala to Indiana. On Christmas Eve, an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy.



Buoys placed along the Rio Grande border with Mexico in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Aug. 24, 2023. Photo: Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images

This wave of child death has elicited nothing remotely comparable to the national outpouring of grief and anger that erupted in 2019 for Valeria Martinez. She was the 23-month-old Salvadoran toddler who died in the arms of her father, Oscar, as they tried to cross the Rio Grande to Brownsville, Texas. Their entwined bodies were photographed only minutes after they died. Valeria looked pristine, like a Victorian daguerreotype of a child just deceased from diphtheria. Her post-mortem intactness made her photo publishable, just as the image of Alan Kurdi, the 2-year-old Syrian refugee washed up on a beach in Turkey, was publishable in 2015.

More:
https://theintercept.com/2023/09/02/border-rio-grande-migrant-children-drowning/