‘It touched me emotionally’
STAMFORD — Photographer John Moore was traveling with U.S. Border Patrol officers near the riverbanks of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas late one night this month when he captured what has quickly become an iconic photo of immigrant families being separated.
Moore, a Getty Images senior correspondent and senior staff reporter, goes to work each day imagining he’ll take a photo with maximum impact. He’s covered immigration for 10 years and was doing a ride-along with border patrol officers to photograph families being detained and separated under President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy.
On the night of June 12, Moore captured a moment that has been felt across the country. Border patrol stopped a group of families entering the U.S. One officer asked a mother from Honduras to put down her child while she was being searched. The moment the girl’s feet touched the ground, she began crying. That’s when Moore snapped a photo of the child — an image that was published on the front page of The New York Times and has gone viral.
Moore, who has lived in Stamford for three years, spoke about the photo, as well as his other experiences covering immigration, at the Building One Community immigration center on Thursday night.
“It touched me emotionally at the time and it still touches me every time I see it,” Moore told a crowd of about 100. “I knew at the moment, it was important. I never could’ve imagined this picture would have quite the impact that it had.”
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order maintaining the zero-tolerance policy, but replaced family separation with detention. Many denounced the family separation policy for its negative effect on families and the mental welfare of children.
Many of these families are coming to the United States seeking political asylum. The policy, enacted by the Trump administration in April, subjects them to prosecution for doing this.
“I knew that President Trump’s zero-tolerance policy involved the separation of families,” Moore said. “For me, that was an important aspect of the story. I knew it was happening before I went down there. Did I expect to see the separation of families? No. Did I actually see it? No. But I saw what it looks like.”
Moore admits he does not know if the girl and her mother were later separated under the Trump policy. A transportation van took the migrants to a processing center where the separations occur. But he said it was the closest he could get to capturing the separation of parents and children.
“We’ll never see the actual separation because it happens behind closed doors,” he said. “There’s no way to see that.”