SAN MARTIN, El Salvador — The mother of a man who drowned alongside his 23-month-old daughter while trying to cross the Rio Grande into Texas says she finds a heartbreaking photograph of their bodies hard to look at, but also comforting for how they clung to each other in their final moments.

“You can see how he protected her, they died in each other’s arms,” Rosa Ramirez said.

Her son, Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez, 25, and his daughter, Valeria, were swept away by the current near Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas, this week. The photo showed the girl tucked inside her father’s shirt for protection with her arm draped over his neck — an image that underscores the dangers migrants face trying to make it to the United States.

“It’s tough, it’s kind of shocking, that image,” Ramirez said from their home. “But at the same time, it fills me with tenderness. I feel so many things because at no time did he let go of her.”

Ramirez had shared the brick home with barred windows in San Martin on the outskirts of the capital, San Salvador, with her son, his wife, Tania Vanessa Avalos, 21, and their daughter until the young family decided to make the journey north.

In their working-class neighborhood of about 40,000, Martinez worked in a pizzeria and Avalos as a cashier in a fast-food restaurant, Ramirez said.

Ramirez said the couple dreamed of saving money for a place of their own and that drove the family to head to the United States in April.

“I told him, ‘Son, don’t go. But if you do go, leave me the girl,’ ” Ramirez said.

“ ‘No, mama,’ ” she said he replied. “ ‘How can you think that I would leave her?’ ”

Now she feels a hole that “nobody can fill, but God gives me strength,” she said.