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The latest cover of TIME bids "Welcome to America" and features President Donald Trump looking down at a child migrant, juxtaposing a child's anguish with the president's stark indifference.
The migrant in question, a two-year-old Honduran girl crying as her mother was being detained in McAllen, Texas, was photographed earlier this week by John Moore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for Getty Images.
“This one was tough for me. As soon as it was over, they were put into a van. I had to stop and take deep breaths,” Moore told TIME Tuesday. “All I wanted to do was pick her up. But I couldn’t.”
The TIME cover caps a most chaotic week of bipartisan opposition, nationwide protests, and repeated attempts from members of the Trump administration to obfuscate the nature of the "zero tolerance" policy, which allowed migrant children to be separated from their parents, implemented by Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, last month.
People were quick to note the cover's––forgive us––timeliness.
Yesterday, under pressure from members of his own party, President Trump signed an executive order halting his administration’s “zero tolerance” family separations policy.
“It’s about keeping families together while ensuring we have a powerful border,” Trump said of the order. He added: “I didn’t like the sight of families being separated.”
The president's daughter, Ivanka, later thanked him profusely on Twitter, a move which opened her up to a volley of criticism from many who pointed out that she was congratulating her father for “taking critical action” on a policy he could have halted with a simple phone call, not to mention the fact that it was a crisis entirely of his own making.
Earlier this week, President Trump admitted that his administration’s policy of separating families was a negotiating tool to get Democrats to cave to his demands (which include tougher border security as well as a wall erected along the nation’s southern border).
The tipping point for the end of the short-lived family separations policy appeared to be an Associated Press report confirming that the Trump administration will be operating at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas for migrant babies and toddlers.
The report details government plans to open a fourth shelter to house hundreds of young migrant children in Houston, a move which earned harsh rebukes from city leaders. Lawyers and medical providers who have visited these shelters described scenes of migrant children in crisis, many of them crying out for their families.
The day before the Associated Press report dropped, an audio clip obtained by ProPublica garnered significant attention for revealing the sounds of detained children sobbing for their parents. At one point, a Border Patrol agent jokes, “We have an orchestra here.”
The new executive order is unlikely to bring a definitive end to what activists say amounts to a humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, and the president indicated even before he signed the order that his administration maintains a hardline stance on immigration, even against those who are seeking asylum.
“We’re going to keep families together but we still have to maintain toughness or our country will be overrun by people, by crime, by all of the things that we don’t stand for and that we don’t want,” Trump said during a brief announcement at the White House.
Despite signing an order to end the "zero tolerance" policy, the president continued to use hardline immigration rhetoric while holding a campaign rally in Duluth, Minnesota.
"They're not sending their finest. We're sending them the hell back! That's what we’re doing," he told nearly 9,000 supporters. "And, by the way, today I signed an executive order. We will keep families together, but the border is going to be just as tough as it has been."
"So the Democrats want open borders," Trump continued. "'Let everybody come in, let them come in from the Middle East, let them come in from all over the place. We don't care.' We are not going to let it happen."