The young Honduran drowned in Greg Abbott’s Texas had a name: Norlan Bayardo Herrera

It’s a human rights crime in slow motion. Hardly anyone in the media even noticed at first when troops and law officers commanded by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott strung razor wire and placed barriers of large buoys — with sharp circular saw blades placed in the gaps — across the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas, where desperate refugees have been trying to cross.

The border barrier — with its almost medieval torture devices to hurt migrants coming to America — didn’t become news until a reporter for the Houston Chronicle obtained an email from a whistleblowing Texas trooper complaining that asylum-seekers were suffering serious injuries in the razor wire, including a 19-year-old pregnant woman who lost her baby. Immigrant rights activists, and others, were outraged. People will die, they warned.

It wasn’t a long wait. “2 bodies found in Rio Grande, one near a floating barrier,” USA Today reported on Aug. 3, joined by most other major mainstream newspapers and television networks. Some of the facts as first reported by Mexican authorities were disputed, but most news accounts agreed that one corpse had been found against the Texas barrier in Eagle Pass while the second, of a young man, was found about three miles downstream.

From more than 1,800 miles away, I’ve been avidly following the news out of Eagle Pass. When this story broke, I combed the reports to see if there would be any details about the victims — who they were, why they were so desperate to reach U.S. soil that they risked their lives. But that information was not immediately available, and the news media — which so eagerly pushes for victim information in other tragedies, like the Maui wildfires — moved on.

If I had waited on the American mainstream media to write about the human beings lost to the barbaric policies of the governor of the nation’s second-largest state, I would still be waiting. That is some serious journalistic malpractice. The young man who tried to cross the Rio Grande at a more dangerous, unguarded spot, and who was swept downstream by the currents, was a 20-year-old native of Honduras. He had a name — Norlan Bayardo Herrera — and like most refugees, he had a story to tell, if anyone had bothered to ask his survivors about it.

Thankfully, one English-language journalist named Adry Torres did write about Bayardo and his family — in the most unlikely of sources, the British-based Daily Mail, which is often criticized for various ethical sins. But in America’s border crisis, we need a lot more journalists doing what Torres and the Daily Mail did with this one article. Because every affront to human rights from xenophobic right-wing demagogues like Abbott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump — dumping busloads (or planeloads) of migrants in big cities in the dead of night, refusing to give water to pregnant women at the border in 105-degree heat — hinges on one critical thing: not seeing refugees as human beings but as a faceless Other. An “invasion.”

When we refuse to tell the story of Norlan Bayardo or even publish his name, we become accomplices to these authoritarian tactics.

And that means others will die needlessly, like 3-year-old Jismary Alejandra Barboza González. She was one of roughly 30,000 migrants whom officials in Abbott’s Texas have lured, sometimes with misleading enticements, onto buses, only to be dumped without advance warning in Democratic-run cities like Chicago, where Jismary was headed with her parents. They’d fled violence-prone Colombia to trek thousands of miles and cross the dangerous Darién Gap to reach the United States, only to suffer tragedy as pawns for Abbott’s political ambition. We’ll never know if Jismary, whose 4th birthday would have been this month, would have lived if not stuck on a bus in rural southern Illinois.

Large numbers of refugees seeking a better life than Central American streets ravaged by gang violence — or, increasingly, fields baked dry by climate change — have made this perilous journey, only to get trapped in political purgatory. The story of America’s humanitarian crisis at the southern border should be the ultimate human interest story. Instead, we succumb to the authoritarian lingo of the GOP’s wannabe tin-pot dictators, who claim they are repelling an invasion with their sawblades and their razor wire slashing at the flesh of humans yearning to breathe free.

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We need to pay less attention to the demagoguery of Abbott or DeSantis and instead listen to voices like Brian Elmore, an emergency medicine residency physician in El Paso, Texas, who cofounded a free clinic for migrants. “Many of the injuries sustained along the border — heat stroke from the hot desert sun, fractured skulls or spines after falling off the border wall, flesh torn by razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande — are what I call political pathologies, preventable injuries that are a direct result of border policies intended to enact a high cost on those who attempt to cross over,” Elmore wrote in a recent op-ed for CNN.

“I see and treat victims who are left permanently debilitated, with devastating injuries that will limit their ability to work and contribute to society and to their families,” the ER doctor added. “Ironically, many of the victims are arguably those who have the most to offer our country. No person would make the treacherous journey to our border without firmly believing in the promise of America.”

Norlan Bayardo Herrera died just yards short of fulfilling that promise. His mother, Yuri Supaya, in a Spanish-language interview with Univision picked up by the Daily Mail, said that she and her five children made the trek toward America hoping that better economic prospects could make life easier for her youngest daughter, who has Down syndrome.

Like thousands of other refugees right now, Supaya and her family ended up in a shelter just south of the Rio Grande, in the Mexican city of Piedras Negras. They were apparently caught in the cruel limbo of the current Biden administration policy, which seeks to keep lawful asylum-seekers on the other side of the border while they seek an appointment through an often glitch-prone app. After 12 days, the mom told Univision, her son Bayardo grew tired of waiting. He was eager to reach the United States and begin working to pay for his sister’s medical treatment.

Bayardo hugged his mother, and then he and a friend set out for the river, where the safest and easiest places to cross into Eagle Pass have been blocked by Abbott’s buoys and razor wire. Instead, they chose a swifter section of the Rio Grande. The friend made it across, apparently, but a friend called Supaya to inform her that her son did not. “The river swept him,” she told Univision.

When Mexican authorities found the body downriver, it was easy for Supaya to instantly identify her son. She recognized his tattoos, his sneakers, and his soccer jersey for Paris Saint-Germain, the team that until recently was led by Lionel Messi.

There is so much sin that ought instead to be swept away in the raging waters — Abbott’s insane torture barriers, the planes and buses that tyrants like Abbott and DeSantis have launched to turn human beings into captive pawns for their doomed political ambitions, and, yes, President Joe Biden’s morally weak failure to fulfill America’s promise to the world’s tired and poor. But the cleansing can’t start until we acknowledge the humanity we seek to deny at the border, and until we say their names.

Norlan Bayardo Herrera.

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