A little girl from Honduras stares into the camera, her young features contorted in anguish. She's barefoot, dusty and clad only in a diaper and T-shirt. And she's just had to run from clouds of choking tear gas fired across the border by US agents.
A second photograph, which also circulated widely and rapidly on social media, shows an equally anguished woman frantically trying to drag the same child and a second toddler away from the gas as it spread.
The three were part of a much larger group, perhaps 70 or 80 people, including men, women and children, pictured in a wider angle image fleeing the tear gas. Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon shot the photos, which provoked outrage and seemed at odds with US President Donald Trump's portrayal of the caravan migrants as "criminals" and "gang members."
Trump administration officials said authorities had to respond with force after hundreds of migrants rushed the border near Tijuana on Sunday, some of them throwing "projectiles" at Customs and Border Protection personnel.
But Democratic leaders, human rights advocates and others focused on the images of the two children in particular. Many pointed to the children left gagging from the gas attack as evidence that Trump's push against a caravan of asylum seekers from Central America had gone too far.
"Shooting tear gas at children is not who we are as Americans," Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, tweeted. "Seeking asylum is not a crime. We must be better than this."
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor-elect of California, argued that images of kids sprinting from tear gas run counter to American ideals.
"These children are barefoot. In diapers. Choking on tear gas," he tweeted. "Women and children who left their lives behind - seeking peace and asylum - were met with violence and fear. That's not my America. We're a land of refuge. Of hope. Of freedom. And we will not stand for this."
Others, like incoming Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, noted that the families at the border crossing were fleeing violent conditions in Central America and had the right to seek asylum.
Unlike the relatively bipartisan criticism of Trump's now-abandoned "family separation" method of deterring migrants, the initial outrage at the tear gassing of children appeared to come primarily from Democrats and critics of the president.
Some on the right expressed the view that if the migrants could avoid getting tear gassed by not hurling projectiles or by not attempting to cross the border "illegally."
Trump's response in an early morning Tweet on Monday was to call for Mexico to return the migrants to their home countries and to again threaten to "close the border permanently."
That's never been done and experts interviewed by The Post Sunday night knew of no provision explicitly allowing Trump to "close the borders permanently." And since most of the border, with the exception of designated crossings, is already closed it would not likely solve Trump's problems with asylum-seekers who by law, must be allowed to present their claims if in fact they are able to cross the border anywhere.
"This is yet another of several Trump attempts to change what he disparagingly calls the policy of 'catch and release' without or against legal authority," said Yale Law School's Harold Hongju Koh, legal adviser to the State Department during the Obama administration. "All have been blocked. What he does not understand," Koh said in an email, "is that everyone crossing our Southern border is not illegally present. Those with valid asylum claims have a legal right to assert those claims and remain."