‘I wanted to stop her crying’: The image of a migrant child that broke a photographer’s heart
The night-crossers were often families, exhausted and terrified from their journeys, seeking asylum from whatever terror had driven them from home.
.. While they had been evacuating their homes and traveling — some for weeks — the United States had changed the rules. Pleas for asylum that had been accepted for years might now be rejected.
.. Mothers and fathers, who would have been released to await court hearings, would now be jailed. Their children would be seized
.. There were dozens of them, though it was hard to count in the dark. When the guards’ lights hit them, Moore saw that they were almost entirely women and children. It was about as pure a family exodus as he had seen in his career.
.. On their faces were mixtures of relief and fear. Sometimes just one or the other. “There was a boy, about a 10- or 12-year-old boy, who was visibly terrified,” Moore recalled.
.. The secretary of homeland security has suggested that the nearly 2,000 children who have been seized at the border since April were taken for their own safety. How could the government know that their parents were not their captors?
.. As the guards lined up the families on Tuesday night, Moore saw a woman breast-feed a toddler in the middle of the road.“There was no place for privacy,” Moore said, so she did it in the headlights of Border Patrol vehicle.
.. Her daughter was 2, Moore said. “She said they’d been on the road for a month, and they were from Honduras. I can only imagine what dangers she’d passed through, alone with the girl.”
Moore had been to Honduras; it is a place so dominated by gang violence and poverty that National Geographic once wrote the country’s people have lost “their right to grow old.”
.. “It was very quick,” he recalled. The mother set the girl down, and an agent began to run gloved hands across her body.
“The mother stoically had her hands against the vehicle, and the girl was crying,” Moore said. “Neither were saying words. Nothing could be said with her. She needed to be with her mother.”
He took two shots, moments apart. He understood at once that they were the photos he had been waiting for
.. According to new federal policies, he said, she would be taken from her mother when the van reached its destination. They would not reunited until their case had wound through the courts, and then likely only to return to the country they had fled.
.. He wanted to be optimistic — to believe that for some reason the girl would not have to spend weeks or months in the state of mind he had witnessed for only a few seconds, when she stood by herself in the road.
“I don’t know what the truth is,” Moore said. “I fear they were split up.”