Separated Photojournalist’s emotion over girl’s plight

It was a photograph that shocked the world. A small girl, in a pink top and pink shoes, screaming in distress on a dirt road as her mother is searched by a border agent.

The girl’s plight has come to symbolise the controversy over illegal immigrant families being separated at the Us-mexico border. It is now known that the two-year-old and her mother had spent a month travelling from Honduras before crossing the Rio Grande.

Her picture was taken by John Moore, an award-wining photographer who was with border patrol agents on the US side of the river.

Mr Moore and the agents heard the sound of rafts splashing and the crack of branches. Then they saw a group of illegal immigrants, mostly women and children.

As the guards confiscated their belongings the Honduran woman adhered to a request to remove her daughter’s shoe laces. Mr Moore said: “I took only a few photographs and was almost overcome with emotion myself.

“As a photojournalist it’s my role to keep going, even when it’s hard.

“But as a father, and I have a toddler myself, it was very difficult to see what was happening in front of my lens, and thinking what it would be like for my kids to be separated from me.”

He saw them only briefly before they were placed in a van with other immigrants and taken to a processing centre.