On the evening of March 20 in Eagle Pass, Texas, a small town on the U.S.-Mexico border about 150 miles west of San Antonio, U.S. Border Patrol agents on riverine patrol were flagged down by people on the Mexican side of the river. They alerted the agents to a woman and her two small children, a boy and a girl, lying unconscious on a sandbar near the south side of the riverbank.

The agents, with the help of Eagle Pass Fire Department EMTs, were able to resuscitate the woman and the boy, a toddler, who was hypothermic and semi-conscious by the time Border Patrol got him safely to shore. But the other child, a nine-year-old girl, was dead.

“We tried everything to bring her back. We tried for 20 or 30 minutes,” said Eagle Pass Fire Chief Manuel Mello when I reached him by phone on Monday. The waters of the Rio Grande are cold this time of year, he said, in the low sixties at sundown, and deceptively fast-moving in places.

They pronounced the girl dead right there on the riverbank. The boy was taken to a hospital in San Antonio, and, as far as Mello knows, his mother went with him. Mello said there was no sign of other migrants in the area or a group they might have been with. “It was just those three.”

It’s unclear how the woman, a Guatemalan national, and her children, both Mexican, came to be unconscious on that sandbar. It’s also unclear who flagged down Border Patrol from Piedras Negras, the Mexican town that faces Eagle Pass.

All these people are now silent about the nine-year-old girl who drowned on March 20. Maybe it’s because there was no photo of the dead girl to rip our guts out. Maybe it’s because Trump’s not around to take the blame. Maybe it’s both.

But the incuriosity—not just about this girl’s death but about the border crisis generally—among Democrats and too many in the corporate press is becoming more obvious as the situation worsens. Beat reporters at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are doing yeoman’s work covering the crisis, but almost no one else wants to talk about it.

If they do, it’s to push back on the characterization of this as a crisis, or, as PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor did at President Biden’s first press briefing last week, muse aloud about whether all these migrants are coming because Biden is such a moral, decent man. 

If you want to see the ugly side of President Joe Biden’s “humane” immigration policy, all you have to do is look at what happened in Roma, Texas, on March 16.

According to a report from the Texas Department of Public Safety, that’s where Texas Rangers and Border Patrol agents pulled a baby out of the Rio Grande after she was thrown out by human traffickers.

The Department of Public Safety released a photo of the rescue Tuesday.

In a Facebook post, the Department of Public Safety said the child “had been thrown out of a raft and into the Rio Grande River by smugglers. The child’s mother had been assaulted by smugglers in Mexico, resulting in a broken leg.

The rescue was carried out by a member of the South Texas Special Operations Group, Texas Rangers Division.

“This specialized group is a highly trained tactical team whose primary responsibility is to carry out specific missions, usually along the Texas-Mexico border region or wherever needed,” the Department of Public Safety said in a Facebook post.