One of the more striking images I saw in the news this past week was one I could barely see — the eyes of Guadalupe García de Rayos.

García de Rayos, a mother of two and an undocumented immigrant who has lived in the United States for the past 21 years, had been reporting yearly to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Phoenix since getting caught using a fraudulent Social Security card for employment in a 2008 raid on her workplace. Over the course of eight years, these visits became routine, a check-in with some questions. This time, however, authorities took García de Rayos into custody and deported her back to Nogales, Mexico.

But in the last hours leading up to her deportation, she sat locked in a van outside the Phoenix ICE offices, surrounded by protesters, one of whom locked himself to a front wheel of the van. Activists and media swarmed the vehicle, circling to get a glimpse of her face, angling their phones against the glass to get a shot.

I couldn’t see her whole face, but I could see the despair in her eyes — a misery that, were it more often seen in the context of our nation’s muddled debate on immigration, couldn’t possibly get lost in translation.

If there was any hope to be gleaned from this grim, chaotic scene, it was the way the Internet rose to the cause of raising García de Rayos’s voice. Live videos from the protests flooded Twitter and Facebook, and social media was stirred into a sudden show of solidarity. Where procedure had silenced a woman, the Internet stepped in to amplify.

We saw this happen on a more public stage this week too, as Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts found herself muzzled on the Senate floor by majority leader Mitch McConnell’s deployment of the arcane Rule 19, which states “no Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.’’

McConnell contented that Warren was impugning fellow senator and Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions by quoting from a 1986 letter to Congress from civil rights activist (and Congressional Gold Medal recipient) Coretta Scott King that harshly criticized Sessions’s fitness for a federal judgeship. McConnell’s fellow Republicans agreed, and Warren was cut off and prohibited from speaking any further about Sessions on the Senate floor.

“She was warned. She was given an explanation,’’ McConnell remarked later. “Nevertheless, she persisted.’’

If ever a hashtag was handed down perfectly formed from the Internet gods themselves, #ShePersisted was it. It had significantly more punch and shelf life than the closest runner-up, #LetLizSpeak. On a poetic level, “persist’’ bears a useful associate echo to the buzzier “resist’’; it can attach as easily to freshly distributed copies of Coretta Scott King’s original letter as to a GIF of a bat-wielding Beyoncé or a quote from Sojourner Truth. And since launching, it has inspired an ongoing parade on Twitter of notable women throughout history — known as such because they persisted.

Some have already suggested that it was too perfect — that McConnell had no reason to silence Warren because Sessions was ultimately a shoo-in, despite Democratic attempts to drag their heels.

That McConnell — perhaps the single most calculating mind (or mind capable of calculating) in the GOP establishment — threw himself so eagerly into the role of chauvinist avatar suggests his silencing of Warren was less of a stumble than a strategic move. In singling out Warren, he sent a loud signal to his base: Here is your new her.

So while the Internet has a heartening way of raising the voices we can’t hear — be it the story of an immigrant mother, the testimony of a civil rights hero, or the fire and brimstone of a sitting Senator — it’s worth remembering that volume isn’t going to be enough. García de Rayos was still sent to Mexico; Warren was still sent from the floor. No matter how loudly they were heard, standard procedure still got the last word.

Men who try to silence women haven’t been stopped by history, nor will they be halted by a hashtag. Persistence should be summoned and celebrated, but it must also be put into action in order to fix what’s broken. The reason is simple: They’ve been warned. They’ve been given an explanation. Nevertheless, they persist.

Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at michael.brodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter: @MBrodeur.