Photos of drowned father and daughter are gut-wrenching. Why we decided to publish them.

Editor's note: This story includes disturbing photos and graphic details.

On Tuesday, photographs circulated on social media of a young father and his toddler, both dead, her tiny arm draped over his shoulder. Reports say Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, drowned as they tried to cross the Rio Grande into the United States.

The family had fled El Salvador, a country that the State Department has warned Americans to reconsider traveling to because of the threat of violent crime. 

The images from the Rio Grande are gut-wrenching.

The Associated Press sent 11 photographs from the scene to its members, including USA TODAY. At first glance, the images resemble crime scene photos: two bodies, photographed from different angles, crime scene tape, law enforcement officers and a woman gesturing toward the river.

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Rather than rush to publish, we convened a video call Tuesday evening with our senior leadership team to deliberate the best way to carefully and thoughtfully present the story in words and images as the photo spread, with scant context, across social media.

Joining me on the USA TODAY call: Editor-in-Chief Nicole Carroll, Executive Editor/News Jeff Taylor, Director of Visuals Andrew Scott, Managing Editor Lee Horwich and Cristina Silva, an enterprise editor who is co-leading a border project focused on the southern border and immigration.

We unanimously agreed to publish the photographs but limit the images of the father and child. It's not a decision we took lightly.

Our goal was to inform readers, provide understanding and not be gratuitous. Each story is different, a reason why editorial decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

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This is a story that must be told — fully and truthfully, with context and perspectives from all sides, as the nation and its political leaders here, as well as in Mexico and across Central America, grapple with the complex issues surrounding legal immigration. Death is a constant along the border, but rarely is it captured in such a direct way. And photography has the power to freeze a moment in time, one that in this case encapsulates the danger and desperation surrounding the exodus of immigrants primarily from Central American countries.

To publish, we agreed it was important to provide warnings to readers that the images were graphic and to be careful in how we presented the pictures across our different platforms. We sought to avoid having readers encounter the graphic photo without ample warning and to provide important context of the story behind the photo.

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Taylor also wrote an advisory for our 110 newsrooms across the USA TODAY Network before publication, which I'm sharing here.

Here’s how we’re handling at USA TODAY:

We are going to publish the photo — but will handle it carefully and based on past practice in somewhat similar circumstances. We are NOT publishing the photo on our fronts. Instead, we will embed the photo in a story. The story will have a warning at the top, alerting readers to the fact that the disturbing photo accompanies the story.

We also are publishing a gallery that will include the photo. The gallery will have an alert to readers as well.

We also will not be highlighting the photo in any social shares of the content. The goal is to do our best to ensure that readers do not stumble across it without warning.

We believe the photo is important in telling the story of what is happening at the border.

I share our reasoning because we are committed to be transparent in our decision-making. Our leadership group has more than 100 years of experience combined in journalism. There are few things this group has not seen. This is a tough one.

Manny Garcia is Standards Editor for the USA TODAY Network. You can reach him at accuracy@usatoday.com, or call 1-800-872-7073.