A photo of a toddler crying while a border patrol agent searched her mother went viral after it was published last week.
The image depicts the little 2-year-old in tears as she looks up at her mother, whose face is hidden. The girl’s mother was being searched by an agent at the U.S.-Mexican border in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.
The shot was captured by Pulitzer Prize-winning Getty Images photojournalist John Moore.
“We came across a group of undocumented immigrants, mostly families, women and children,” Moore told NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro in an interview. “And I could see the fear on their faces, in their eyes.”
Moore said the agents questioned each of the adults one by one.
“When it came time for that mother and the 2-year-old daughter to be searched before transportation to the processing center, they asked the mother to set down her daughter,” the photographer explained. “At that moment, the young child broke into tears, and she started wailing.”
Moore told Garcia-Navarro the incident was over almost as soon as it began.
“I took a knee and had very few frames of that moment before it was over,” he said. “And she picked up her daughter, and they were rushed into the van and all taken away.”
Moore added he was able to speak briefly to the mother, who told him she and her daughter were from Honduras, and had been on the road for a month before they crossed the border into the U.S.
Last week after shooting the images, Moore was interviewed by the website Getty Images FOTO.
“Most of these families were scared, to various degrees,” Moore told Getty Images FOTO. “I doubt any of them had ever done anything like this before – flee their home countries with their children, traveling thousands of miles through dangerous conditions to seek political asylum in the United States, many arriving in the dead of night.”
Emotions from the left and right ran high on social media.
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