Crying girl wasn’t taken from mum: father

The toddler pictured on a Time cover was not separated from her mother at the US border, according to a man who says he’s her father.

The two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker that features on an upcoming issue of Time magazine. Picture: Getty Images

The Honduran toddler pictured sobbing in a pink jacket before US President Donald Trump on an upcoming cover of Time magazine was not separated from her mother at the US border, according to a man who says he is the girl’s father. The powerful original photograph, taken at the scene of a border detention by Getty Images photographer John Moore, became one of the iconic images in the flurry of media coverage about the separation of families by the Trump administration.

Dozens of newspapers and magazines around the globe published the picture, swelling the tide of outrage that pushed Trump to back down and say families would no longer be separated.

“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 told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Valera said 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, and they were not separated after being detained near the border. Honduran deputy foreign minister Nelly Jerez confirmed Valera’s version of events.

Varela said he was awe-struck and pained when he first saw the photo of his crying daughter on TV. “Seeing what was happening to her in that moment breaks anyone’s heart,” he said.

The photo was used on a Facebook fundraiser that drew more than $US17 million in donations from close to half a million people for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas-based non-profit that provides legal defence services to immigrants and refugees.

Time magazine’s latest cover.

Moore, the photographer of the now iconic image, said he saw the girl and her mother enter the same van, the pair driven away by border authorities.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Moore said “it all happened very quickly” as border patrol searched the girl and her mother.

“I don’t know what the truth is,” Moore said. “I fear they were split up.”

The Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy had led to the separation of 2342 children from their parents at the US-Mexico border between May 5 and June 9.

Video footage of separated children sitting in cages, an audiotape of wailing children and Moore’s photo had sparked worldwide anger over Trump’s immigration policies.

Sanchez and her daughter had left Puerto Cortes, a major Honduran port north of the capital city, Tegucigalpa, without telling Valera or the couple’s three other children, he said.

Meanwhile, about 500 of the more than 2300 children separated from their families at the US-Mexico border have been reunited since May, a senior Trump administration official said.

It was unclear how many of the roughly 500 children were still being detained with their families. Federal agencies were working to set up a centralised reunification process for the remaining separated children and their families at the Port Isabel Detention Center just north of border in Texas.

Agencies