Veronica Escobar on Cruelty and Chaos at the Southern Border

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You know it’s very, very hard to look at these pictures of Oscar, the father, and his little daughter washed up like — I mean, really like trash on the sides of the Rio Grande. What do you think, A, of the fact this happened in the United States and, I guess, B, the effect that this terrible tragedy and this terrible evidence will have?

REP. VERONICA ESCOBAR (D-TX): Well, number one, it is unfortunately an all too common sight for those that live on the border. We know the realities of the perilous journey that migrants take with their children, with their family, sometimes all alone. We have frequently tried to educate our colleagues to let them know that this perilous journey is not something that families or parents would do unless they were so desperate that they felt they had to run from something. And so, I hope that these deaths, like all of the deaths that we see consistently at our front door on the U.S.-Mexico border, I hope these two innocent souls have not died in vain and that this is a wakeup call to the country. The more hardened our asylum laws are, the more hardened we are as a nation and the more that we look the other way to what is happening, the reality behind why people flee their country, the reality behind our laws that we need people to wake up in America and to feed into their compassion and their humanity. And I hope that this very painful photograph is that wakeup call.

AMANPOUR: I wonder if, at all in your mind, it resembles the impact of that tinny little Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean during the terrible 2015 migrant crisis. And that, obviously, sparked a massive global uproar and outrage. Do you feel that this might have the same impact in the U.S.?

ESCOBAR: I hope it does. It needs to. You know, we have a global refugee crisis that is happening all around us but we become, I think, numb to what is happening. But I hope the same compassion that people have felt for refugees across the globe, they will tap into for the refugees at our door.