However, there was one major problem with the picture: that girl was never separated from her family.
The little girl in the photo was of Yanela Sanchez, a then-2-year-old Honduran child who reached the U.S. border with her mother in June. Despite Time associating the girl with migrant family separation, Sanchez was never once actually separated from her mother when they were approached by Border Patrol. The photo was taken when the mother was asked to temporarily put Sanchez down in order to conduct a pat-down.
“We asked her to set the kid down in front of her, not away from her … and so we can properly search the mother. So, the kid immediately started crying as [Sanchez] set her down. I personally went up to the mother and asked her, ‘are you doing OK, is the kid OK?’ and she said, ‘Yes, she’s tired and thirsty and it’s 11 o’clock at night,” Border Patrol agent Carlos Ruiz, the first agent to encounter the pair, said at the time. “They’re using [the picture] to symbolize a policy and that was not the case on this picture.”
It was also discovered that the mother was not fleeing violence — she simply wanted a decent-paying job, and Sanchez’s father was upset that her mother decided to take her on the perilous journey.
Time later issued a correction for its story, acknowledging that the child was never separated.
“The original version of this story misstated what happened to the girl in the photo after she [was] taken from the scene,” the correction read. “The girl was not carried away screaming by U.S. Border Patrol agents; her mother picked her up and the two were taken away together.”
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