Girl on Time cover still with mom
WASHINGTON — U.S. Border Patrol officials said Friday that a girl who is pictured on the cover of this week’s Time magazine was not separated from her mother, despite the poignant image of the child standing alone, weeping.
Time attached a correction to the story, saying, “The original version of this story misstated what happened to the girl in the photo after she (was) taken from the scene. 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.”
The Time caption says the photo was taken when the girl and her mother were apprehended by Border Patrol officers June 12 and the mother was being searched “before being sent to a processing center for possible separation.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Friday that the mother, Sandra Sanchez, is currently being housed at one of the government’s three family detention facilities at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.
ICE would not provide information on the girl, citing privacy reasons.
Sanchez, 32, was arrested by Border Patrol agents while traveling with the little girl under the zero tol- erance policy that criminally charges anyone caught crossing the border illegally.
She was transferred to ICE custody on June 17. Her immigration case is ongoing.
The agency said in a statement that she had been previously deported to Honduras in 2013, and she had illegally re-entered. It’s not clear what will happen to her daughter, who is almost 2 years old, but immigration officials have said the goal would be to keep the family together, even if they are deported.
In Honduras, the girl’s father, Denis Varela, said he hadn’t heard from his wife or daughter in almost three weeks, and Sanchez took their daughter to the United States without telling him.
He says the Honduran foreign ministry also told him his daughter is detained with her mother and the two have not been separated.
Varela, a dockworker who lives in Puerto Cortes, Honduras, said the ministry gave him the girl’s detainee identification number a couple of days ago.