Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis

<h1>WASHINGTON — A photograph of a migrant father and his 23-month-old daughter lying face down on the muddy bank of the Rio Grande added an emotional charge Wednesday to the immigration policy debate consuming Washington.</h1>

The image of the tiny girl, tucked into her father’s shirt, her right arm draped around his neck, seemed to crystallize the human tragedy playing out at the border, and it was everywhere: on cable channels, the internet, where the usual political warfare was for a moment tempered by sadness, and on the Senate floor, where the chamber’s top Democrat forced colleagues to confront a blown-up copy of the photo.

“President Trump, I want you to look at this photo,” said the minority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. “These are not drug dealers or vagrants or criminals; they are people simply fleeing a horrible situation.”

But the picture did little to narrow the partisan divide over immigration policy or even a more immediate dispute in Congress over a package of humanitarian aid Trump has requested to fund strapped immigration agencies dealing with a crush of migrants.

The Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a $4.6 billion emergency spending package to address the crisis but only after rejecting a House-passed version drafted by Democrats deeply opposed to the president’s immigration agenda, which included many restrictions on how the money could be spent.

The House, in turn, planned to take action Thursday to insist that some of its conditions of the funding be upheld. That set up a stalemate over the funding and Democrats’ insistence that the White House bow to new restrictions on its authority in order to secure it.

The photo of the migrant father, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter Valeria came at a time of mounting concern about the treatment of children at border facilities, which have been overwhelmed by the largest number of families entering the United States in more than a decade.

At one station in Texas, more than 250 children were detained for weeks without access to soap or clothing or adequate food. A group of lawyers have said they saw young children caring for infants in the facility.

Lawmakers who are deeply opposed to Trump’s immigration agenda argued that the picture of the dead father and daughter was an implied rebuke of the president’s immigration policies, which include the practice of “metering,” placing strict limits on the number of migrants who are allowed to present themselves at the border, and a new program mandating that many asylum-seekers stay in Mexico as they await their asylum claims to be processed.

“I watched young kids being turned away, and then having to go to and cross at all these terrible points,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who visited the border between San Diego and Tijuana in December.

“The reason we have this big buildup of people at the border is because of metering, because we’re slow-walking processing of asylum-seekers, because we have a ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, because we’ve cut aid to Central American countries.”

Jayapal said she worried that the tragic image would only fuel a stampede, encouraged by Trump, to approve new spending at the border that would do nothing to alleviate the suffering and potentially aggravate it.

“To say that this money would have prevented that kid and father from dying, which is so horrible, is just not true,” she said. “They’re trying to use the humanitarian crisis that they’ve created, and these conditions that they have allowed to happen, to get more money for things that we know we don’t want to fund.”

But in their public remarks, sometimes through tears, both Republicans and Democrats argued that photograph was a pivotal call to action, and an important reminder of the stakes of the immigration debate. Many of them noted that the picture, while disturbing, showed what has become a grim and all-too-common reality on the border.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, whose El Paso districts lies along the border, urged people not to look away.

“The horror is daily for us,” she said. “As heartbreaking and heart-wrenching as that photograph is — the world needs to see that.”

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Republican chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who has called for changes to asylum law to stem the influx of migrants, spoke through tears that were captured on video widely shared on Twitter.

“I realize tragedies happen all over this country — all over this world,” he said. “I don’t want to see another picture like that on the U.S. border. I hope that picture alone will catalyze this Congress, this Senate, this committee to do something.”

Trump had his own reaction to the photograph.

Before leaving on a trip to meet with world leaders in Japan and South Korea, he told reporters that he had talked with Pelosi and that he believed the two parties were making progress toward a bipartisan agreement on the funding.

But moments later, he denied any responsibility for the tragedy depicted in the photo, insisting that the blame for the deaths of the migrants fell on Democrats because of their refusal to accede to the president’s demands to change asylum laws.

“They want to have open borders, and open borders mean crime, and open borders mean people drowning in the rivers,” Trump said. “I hate it, and I know it could stop immediately if the Democrats would change the laws. And then that father, who probably was this wonderful guy, with his daughter, things like that wouldn’t happen.”

Earlier in the day, Trump went even further in trying to deflect criticism that his administration’s hard-line immigration policies had failed to address the deepening humanitarian crisis on the border, including the detention of children in horrific conditions at Border Patrol facilities.

In a speech to religious conservatives, the president said the border crisis — including the horrific conditions for migrant children held at those facilities — was the result of a “twisted obsession” by Democrats with open borders and said misery among migrants could be avoided if Democrats had “any shred of moral decency on this issue.”

During his remarks to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Trump blamed his predecessor for the conditions at Border Patrol facilities, saying — falsely — that “we’re taking care of them, much better than President Obama took care of them, I can tell you that.”

Barack Obama’s administration was criticized for detaining migrant families during a similar surge across the border in 2014. At the time, images of migrant children in cages incited public outrage. A court ultimately ordered the Obama administration not to detain families for long periods of time.

But there is no evidence that children faced the kinds of conditions that were reported in recent days at the facilities run by Trump’s administration, including not being given toothbrushes, blankets or the opportunity to take showers.

The photograph — and the debate in Washington over how to handle the humanitarian crisis at the border — also became a central issue at the Democratic debate Wednesday night as 10 candidates expressed grief over the episode and vowed to relax Trump’s aggressive policies at the border if they won the presidency.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/politics/indelible-image-shifts-debate-on-immigration.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

'Heartbreaking' Photograph Alters the Discourse on Immigration Policy

“President Trump, I want you to look at this photo,” said the minority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. “These are not drug dealers or vagrants or criminals; they are people simply fleeing a horrible situation.”

'Heartbreaking' photograph alters the discourse on immigration policy

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Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis

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'Heartbreaking' photograph alters the discourse on immigration policy