Horror builds with each new report – children kept in cages, children taking care of infants, mothers who have been torn from their babies. What if it was your child?

Warning: graphic images

For as long as I have been a mother, I’ve had recurrent nightmares about water carrying my children away. In the dreams, my sons slip quietly beneath the surface, becoming blurry underwater shapes, and then disappearing completely. My panic is animal – a pulsing in my ears, static in my brain, a scream-howl building in my chest. I wake up thrashing against the water, searching desperately for my boys.

When the news broke of 23-month-old Valeria and her father, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, Salvadoran migrants who had been swept away by the Rio Grande, I was camping along a river in northern Arizona, without access to the internet. I had been photographing plants and making videos of the river to show my desert children, who were at home in Tucson with my parents. When I emerged from the woods, I came face-to-face with a gas station newspaper and saw it.