TIME MAGAZINE’S COVER has hit out at Trump’s border separation policy by putting a photo of the US President looking down at a crying migrant child.

The photograph of the two-year-old girl went viral this week as the controversy around migrant children being separated from their parents deepened.

The cover features the photo of Trump and the young girl with the words ‘Welcome to America’ in the background.

The image was taken by Getty Images photographer John Moore. He described on Instagram how the two-year-old Honduran girl and her mother were taken into custody near the US-Mexico border.

The Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy for undocumented immigrants calls for the separation of parents and children while their cases for political asylum are adjudicated, a process that can take months — or years.

“As a father myself, this photograph was especially difficult for me to take. It is one from a series yesterday while I was on a ride-along with the Border Patrol in Texas’ Río Grande.”

Yesterday, Trump ordered an end to the separation of migrant children from their parents on the US border, reversing the tough policy after coming under heavy pressure from his fellow Republicans, Democrats and the international community.

The spectacular about-face comes after more than 2,300 children were stripped from their parents and adult relatives after illegally crossing the border since 5 May.

Since children cannot be sent to the facilities where their parents are held, they are separated from them and placed in tent camps and other facilities, with no way to contact their relatives.

Despite yesterday’s order, there is no plan in place to reunite the thousands of children already separated from their families, according to multiple US media reports citing officials from the Health and Human Services Department (HHS).

Last week Trump questioned if he would be on the cover of Time magazine after the North Korea summit in Singapore.

At the summit, he asked TIME reporter Brian Bennett, “Am I on the cover again this week?”

Bennett replied, “It’s entirely possible.”

Additional reporting from AFP