The real story behind the viral photo of a crying toddler at the border.
Anyone who has been following news in the United States recently has probably heard about the turmoil surrounding the separation of undocumented immigrant children from their parents at the southern border of the country. One photographer documented the human face of this policy with a viral photo of a crying toddler at the border.
CNN Reporter Ana Cabrera interviewed Getty Images Photographer John Moore about his image. Moore was in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas photographing Border Patrol activities as people were crossing the Rio Grande river from Mexico at night. He spoke with the mother of the two-year-old child in the image who said they were asylum seekers from Honduras who had been traveling for a month. Federal agents asked the mother to put down her child so they could body search her. They were later transported to a U.S. Customer and Border Protection processing center.
Moore says that the series of photographs he captured that night were difficult for him to take “as a journalist, as a human being, and especially as a father” as he knew that the children would soon be separated from their parents into separate detention centers. For this particular image, he said he only had a matter of seconds to move into position and get down on a knee to be at the child’s level before taking the picture. The mother and child were put into a van and driven off soon after, presumably to a detention center for processing.
