She was wearing a pink shirt and little pink tennis shoes and a soul crushing expression of fear and confusion on her faith as a Border Patrol agent patted down her mother in the middle of the night.
The photograph immediately became iconic. Cable news broadcast it nonstop. A Texas nonprofit, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, used it to raise nearly $17 million from half a million donors. Time magazine put a towering Trump opposite the little girl with the caption “welcome to America.”
The story behind TIME’s Trump “Welcome to America” cover https://t.co/zTTjFs9leu
— TIME (@TIME) June 22, 2018
But the narrative was inaccurate. While the photograph fueled outrage against Trump’s policy of separating children from parents at the border, that didn’t happen to this mother and daughter. The girl’s father, Denis Javier Varela Hernandez back in Honduras, told the Washington Post Thursday that his wife wasn’t, in fact, separated from his child. And the Honduran government confirmed Friday that the two remain together.
The photographer, John Moore, who had crouched six feet away to find the perfect angle, the perfect lighting, and the perfect moment to click the shutter, didn’t even bother to double check. He told the Washington Post he figured she would be separated from her mother. He just assumed.
Now the photo has been made infamous. Already outlets like Breitbart have dismissed the image as “a fake news photo” and the president’s own son, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted the story. What was the poster child for the campaign against child separation has quickly become a ready-made rebuttal to arguments against this administration’s zero tolerance policy.
The photograph says more about current journalism than the situation on the border. First there was the viral investigative piece by Reveal about immigrant children being drugged against their will by federal contractors. Then there was the AP story about teenagers being beaten in detention centers. Both are horrific but both required context.
But just like the photo, Trump had little to do with an abuse that was, contrary to what one might now take away, real. They were true stories, it’s just that they didn’t happen when journalists were interested in uncovering abuses — i.e., during this administration. Three of the four drugged children cited in the Reveal piece were abused before Trump became president. Same thing with all of the adolescents cited in the AP report.
But those facts were ignored or buried. And the issue of 2,300 children at the border who actually were separated from their families is being treated less as a problem to be solved than as an issue for Democrats to campaign on after they conspicuously prevent a legislative solution.
