World Press Photo Honors Carol Guzy’s ICE Detention Image
A photograph made in a federal courthouse hallway in New York has been named World Press Photo’s top winner, placing a single moment of family separation at the center of the year’s most closely watched documentary competition. Carol Guzy’s Separated by ICE shows two young girls gripping their father as he is detained at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, a scene that has come to stand for the human toll of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The image, shot for the Miami Herald in August 2025, was selected from 57,376 entries submitted by more than 3,000 photographers around the world. The foundation said the photograph was recognized for its visceral account of an immigration system in which fear, uncertainty, and bureaucratic force converge in public view.
The detained man, identified as Luis and described as being from Ecuador, was taken after his immigration court hearing. The article says the tactic has drawn criticism from the ACLU, which has argued that such courthouse arrests misuse due process and intensify trauma for families already navigating the immigration system.
Guzy, a multi-time Pulitzer Prize winner, said in a statement that journalism remains essential for documenting the effects of policy on real people. She described agents waiting outside courtrooms with photographs of their targets while children and spouses are left in distress. Her comments underscore why the image resonated beyond a single arrest: it captures a broader climate in which detention has become both administrative routine and emotional rupture.
The scale of that system remains significant. TRAC Immigration reports that more than 60,000 immigrants are currently held in detention nationwide, and 70 percent have no criminal conviction. The same report notes a rising number of children in custody, despite ICE rules that limit the placement of minors in holding facilities absent violent or unlawful behavior.
World Press Photo global jury chair Kira Pollack called the image “a record of quite literally a disappearance,” adding that it conveys “fear, terror, uncertainty, and powerlessness.” In that sense, Guzy’s photograph does more than document an arrest. It gives visual form to a policy debate that is often discussed in abstractions, and it does so with the kind of immediacy that documentary photography can still deliver at its most consequential.
