Carol Guzy’s “Separated by ICE,” which captured the heartbreaking moment an Ecuadorian father was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents moments after an immigration hearing, has been named the 2026 World Press Photo of the Year, according to NPR. Guzy, an American photojournalist who shot the image for the Miami Herald via ZUMA Press and iWitness, captured the moment Aug. 26, 2025, inside New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Federal Building.
The 2026 contest marks Guzy’s ninth World Press Photo award Digital Camera World and adds to a career that already includes four Pulitzer Prizes — in 1986, 1995, 2000 and 2011 — making her the only journalist to have won four Pulitzers.
On the day the photograph was taken, ICE agents detained Luis, an Ecuadorian migrant, immediately after his immigration court hearing concluded. His wife, Cocha, and their three children — ages 7, 13 and 15 — were left inconsolable, facing immediate financial hardship and trauma. According to his wife, Luis had no prior criminal record and was the household’s sole provider.
What distinguishes the photograph is the rarity of the access that made it possible. Photographers were confined to a single hallway — one of the few U.S. federal buildings where photojournalists had been granted any access at all — and Guzy and a handful of colleagues showed up day after day to document what was unfolding in the wake of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement.
Guzy reflected on her approach in a video statement released with the award. “I’ve been following families to put a face on the consequences of government actions and rhetoric,” she said. “This photo should be painful to view, and I hope it stirs people out of any sense of complacency.” Even after receiving the prize, she redirected credit to her subjects. “The courage to open up their lives to our cameras allowed us to tell their stories. This award belongs to them, not me,” she said.
World Press Photo Executive Director Joumana El Zein Khoury described the image as showing “the inconsolable grief of children losing their father in a place built for justice.” She also spoke to its broader significance. “In a democracy, the camera’s presence in that hallway serves as a witness to a policy that has turned courthouses into sites of shattered lives,” she said.
“It is a powerful example of why independent photojournalism matters.”
Two other photographs were named finalists. Palestinian photographer Saber Nuraldin’s “Aid Emergency in Gaza,” shot for EPA Images, depicts Palestinians clinging to a flour truck as it crossed into the Gaza Strip via the Zikim Crossing on July 27, 2025, during what the Israeli military described as a “tactical suspension” in operations to allow humanitarian aid through.
The jury said the image captures “the scale and urgency of famine” and that its “straightforward composition forces the viewer to pause.” According to the U.N., at least 2,435 people seeking food were killed near food distribution sites between May and October 2025. Nuraldin, who was living through the crisis he was documenting, described in an Instagram post the weight of that dual reality. “While I was documenting the hunger and suffering of people,” he wrote, “they too were enduring the same hardship,” referring to his children.
The second finalist, “The Trials of the Achi Women” by Victor J. Blue for The New York Times Magazine, depicts plaintiff Doña Paulina Ixpatá Alvarado — who was held captive and assaulted for 25 days in 1983 — standing with fellow Maya Achi women outside a Guatemala City court on May 30, 2025. That afternoon, three former civil defense patrollers were sentenced to 40 years in prison for assault and crimes against humanity, the latest chapter in a legal struggle that began in 2011 when 36 Achi women broke their silence by forming a support group and eventually filed a formal complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The jury praised the image’s “classical, restrained approach,” saying it emphasized the women’s dignity and authority while challenging narratives that portray survivors of such violence as powerless.