The crying Honduran girl in a pink jacket, in the photo that went viral and found its place on the cover of Time magazine alongside US President Donald Trump, was not actually separated from her mother, the US media reported on Friday, 22 June.
The viral heart-wrenching image sparked widespread condemnation of the policy. The collective outrage over this photo, along with images of children in cages and audio recordings of young children crying for their parents forced Trump to sign an executive order Wednesday, 20 June, ending the process of separating children from families on being detained after crossing the US border illegally.
Time Magazine used the image without the mother on its 2 July cover to send out a message about Trump’s policy.
The Washington Post said that the father of the little crying girl, who became the symbol of families being torn apart by Trump’s zero tolerance policy at the border, told them that the girl wasn’t actually taken away from her mother. According to CBS, who spoke with Border Patrol agent Carlos Ruiz, agents at the border only asked the mother to put down the nearly two-year old so they could search her. A US Customs and Border Protection spokesman also confirmed this, The Washington Post reported.
The mother was reportedly patted down for less than two minutes, after which she picked up the child once more.
“My daughter has become a symbol of the… separation of children at the US border. She may have even touched President Trump’s heart,” Denis Valera, who said he was her father, in a telephonic interview to Reuters.
Valera further clarified that while the little girl and her mother, Sandra Sanchez, have been detained together in the Texas border town of McAllen, where Sanchez has applied for asylum, they have not been separated.
The photo, taken by photographer John Moore, was used to promote a Facebook fundraiser that drew more than $17 million dollars in donations for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), which helps reunite separated families, reported Reuters.
Conservative media has jumped on the story, using it as an opportunity to call out the “fake news” surrounding the Trump administration’s immigration policies, The Post said.
Moore told The Washington Post in an email that Time corrected the story after he made a request minutes after it was published. According to him, the picture “is a straightforward and honest image” showing a “distressed little girl” whose mother was being searched by border officials.
“I believe this image has raised awareness to the zero-tolerance policy of this administration. Having covered immigration for Getty Images for 10 years, this photograph for me is part of a much larger story,” Moore told The Washington Post.
The girl’s father, Varela, said that the truth about this particular photgraph should not cast doubt on the “human-rights violations” taking place at the border. “This is the case for my daughter, but it is not the case for 2,000 children that were separated from their parents,” Varela told The Washington Post.
Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy led to the separation of 2,342 children from their parents at the US-Mexico border between 5 May and 9 June, reported Reuters.
(With inputs from Reuters and The Washington Post.)
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