House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was visibly emotional Thursday while talking about a photograph of a father and young daughter who drowned earlier this week while trying to cross the Rio Grande, and said there is no "question of blame" to be involved.
After looking down and staying silent before answering, the California Democrat told a reporter who asked her about the photograph that the deaths are "such a tragedy," reports The Hill.
"Can you just imagine, the father put the little girl on the shore to go back to get the mother, and the little girl wanted to be with her father, she got back in, and then he couldn't save her and then he couldn't save himself," the speaker responded.
The drownings are not "a question of blame," she added. "It's a question of being prayerful" and of understanding "the consequences of policy."
Pelosi also said she thinks its a shame that the photograph, and how it represents the situation at the border, is the "face of America around the world."
The El Salvadoran migrants have been identified as Oscar Alberto Martinez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria. According to Mexican journalist Julia Le Duc, who took the picture, the father swam across the river with his daughter because his family had not been able to present themselves for U.S. asylum.
He had left the little girl on a bank on the United States side of the river to swim back for his wife, but the daughter jumped in after her father and they were swept away by the river. His wife survived.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.