The True Story of Two Dead Migrants

“Photo of drowned migrants triggers fight over Trump asylum clampdown.”

That’s how Reuters headlined the fallout following this week’s revelation that two Salvadorans, a father and his two-year-old child, failed in their attempt to traverse the Rio Grande. The photo is unequivocally heartbreaking. It’s the kind of picture that makes one sick to his stomach. But like most things in life, emotional incidents without proper context inevitably result in irrational knee-jerk reactions.

According to The Daily Mail, the family’s journey began on April 3, when they departed El Salvador. For the next two months, the family — which was seeking asylum in the U.S. — was lodged in a migrant camp in southern Mexico. Restless and intent on engineering a more expeditious asylum process, they jumped onto a bus that took them to the U.S. border this past weekend. “When they arrived, the consulate was closed but they also learned they were far down a list of hundreds of migrants in line for interviews,” the Mail reports. “They decided to make the crossing illegally rather than wait — a decision that led to their deaths.”

Bad choices have consequences. Furthermore, as The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh observes, “This was not a family turned coldly away as it fled violence and oppression. They were not turned away at all. They simply grew impatient waiting for the bureaucratic wheels to turn. Indeed, family members confirm that the family was not being persecuted in its home country.”

Which gets us to the other half of the story. The Mail goes on to reveal that the father had been employed at Papa John’s Pizza. Granted, his income of $350 per month was paltry, but seeking entry based on low or insufficient income, as Walsh explains, “isn’t how the asylum program is traditionally meant to be used.”

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