Pope 'Profoundly Saddened' By Image Of Drowned Migrant And Daughter At U.S. Border
Pope Francis is grieving over images of a father and his 23-month-old daughter who drowned while attempting to cross the Rio Grande into the United States, the Vatican said in a statement.
Francis, who has often spoken about the plight of migrants and refugees around the world, reacted to the widely-shared photos of the lifeless bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, a migrant from El Salvador, and his daughter Valeria, with “immense sadness.”
“The pope is profoundly saddened by their death, and is praying for them and for all migrants who have lost their lives while seeking to flee war and misery,” Alessandro Gisotti, the Vatican’s interim spokesperson, told reporters on Wednesday.
Martínez, his wife Tania Vanessa Ávalos, and their daughter Valeria left El Salvador on April 3, the Associated Press reports. Martínez’s mother, Rosa Ramírez, told the AP that her son planned to work in the U.S. for a few years to make enough money to build a house.
The family arrived in Matamoros, Mexico, on Sunday and tried unsuccessfully to get a date to request asylum at the U.S. Consulate.
Ávalos told the Mexican newspaper La Jornada that her husband, frustrated by the delay, decided to try swimming across the Rio Grande that same day. He set Valeria on the U.S. side of the river and turned back for his wife. When the child saw her father moving away, she apparently threw herself into the river. Martínez grabbed the girl, but they were both swept away by the current.
Their bodies were discovered on Monday, about half a mile away from an international bridge, the AP reports. Journalist Julia Le Duc captured the photographs of the father and daughter lying face down in the river, the child’s arm draped around her father’s neck.
The photographs spread quickly online, highlighting the dangers that Central American migrants seeking asylum face as they try to enter the United States.
The Trump administration has limited the number of asylum-seekers allowed to enter the country each day at official ports of entry, a practice that has led to increasingly lengthy waits at migrant shelters in Mexico. Some critics have said the administration’s policies are undermining migrants’ right to apply for asylum.
Francis has been critical of Trump’s approach toward immigration. During a 2016 visit to Mexico, he lambasted then-candidate Trump’s promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that “a person who only thinks about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”
In 2018, he backed U.S. bishops who decried the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border as “immoral.”
During his weekly audience at St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday, the pope complimented Mexico for being “so welcoming to migrants.”
In April, Francis donated $500,000 to help migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. The funds were distributed to Mexico-based projects associated with Catholic dioceses that are providing food, lodging and other basic necessities to migrants.
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