Outrage at Trump Administration as Migrant Deaths Rising (+Video)


Outrage at Trump Administration as Migrant Deaths Rising (+Video)

TEHRAN (Tasnim) - The alarming rate of migrant deaths is mobilizing angry migrant rights activists against Trump administration around the world.

A recent heartbreaking death of a dad and daughter's whose bodies have been found face down in river after they tried to get to the US have sparked outrage.

The tragedy comes amid a recent spate of other deaths on the US-Mexico border, which highlight the dangers facing Central American migrants along the route, Sky reported.

Harrowing photographs and footage of El Salvador migrant Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria show the little girl holding onto her father as their bodies lie side-by-side in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande on the Mexican side.

The man's black shirt is up around to his chest with the child tucked inside.

Valeria's arm is draped around his neck and it appears she clung close to him in the final minutes of their lives.

Their bodies were found on Monday morning near Matamoros, Mexico, across the water from Brownsville, Texas.

The location was several hundred meters from where they had tried to cross the day before and just a half a mile from an international bridge.

According to Mexican paper Le Duc, Mr Ramirez had swum the river with his daughter and then left her on the US side to go back for his wife.

However Valeria panicked and tried to reach her father. But sadly both were swept away by the current.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said of the latest deaths: "Very regrettable that this would happen.

"We have always denounced that, as there is more rejection in the United States, there are people who lose their lives in the desert or crossing" the river.

US Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke, from the border city of El Paso in Texas, tweeted: "Trump is responsible for these deaths."

Foreign policy analyst Rula Jebreal, who is a visiting professor at Miami University, tweeted: "Picture of a dad and his baby drowned in Rio Grande, her arm draped around his neck... it highlights migrants' travesty.

"As Trump brutalises and tortures kids for political gain...Republicans' remaining collective morality dies."

The 2,000-mile-long US-Mexico border has sometimes been a deadly crossing between ports of entry. A total of 283 migrant deaths were recorded last year. The death toll so far this year has not been released.

Two babies, a toddler and a woman were found dead on Sunday, overcome by the sweltering heat.

Elsewhere, three children and an adult from Honduras died in April after their raft capsized on the Rio Grande.

The spate of migrant deaths comes as John Sanders, the head of the US border protection, or ICE, resigned. He has not given a reason for his departure.

Mr Sanders said in a recent interview that the department's problems were to do with a lack of money, and he called on congress to pass a $4.5bn (£3.55bn) bill to address the so-called border crisis.

Democrats in the House of Representatives have already approved the humanitarian aid but the bill faces a tough route through the upper chamber, the Republican-controlled Senate, where there is an expected vote on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump said he did not seek Mr Sanders' resignation and added he did not think he had ever met him.

Mr Trump's hardline stance on immigration has come under intense scrutiny recently, as conditions inside border patrol facilities were found to be poor, with inadequate food and a lack of medical care.

At a migrant center in Clint, Texas, lawyers found that several children had flu and a two-year-old without a nappy was being watched over by two older children.

They also saw children in soiled clothing, covered in urine and faeces, with many of them not having washed since they entered the facility weeks ago.

Lawyers also reported children were "locked up in horrific cells where there's an open toilet in the middle of the room".

After the findings, an official said that nearly 300 children had been moved from the facility, but staff have since moved a third of those back into Clint.

Mr Trump has said he is "very concerned" over the conditions at the border, but claims things are better than they were under the previous administration.

Rebuking Mr Trump, Michael Bochenek, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, said: "We did not have the kind of overcrowded conditions for unaccompanied kids in Border Patrol holding cells like we saw in Clint."

Most Visited in World
Top World stories
Top Stories