This year’s World Press Photo of the Year has been awarded to American photographer Carol Guzy for an image showing a father being detained by US immigration agents as his distraught daughters cling to him.
The Amsterdam-based World Press Photo organisation, which held its first competition in 1955, selected 42 winning images from more than 57,376 entries in this year’s event.
In total, works were submitted by 3,747 photographers from 141 countries.
The photo, taken on 26 August 2025 at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York, shows Luis, an Ecuadorian migrant, being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents after attending a court hearing. His family says he has no criminal record and was their sole provider.
The jury chairs said the photograph “is evidence and documentation of a government policy being applied systematically to people who followed the rules they were given,” and of the trauma of “interior separations”.
Guzy, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner, spent days at the New York courthouse documenting arrests there. It is one of the few US federal buildings where photojournalists have been granted access.
An exhibition featuring all the winning and runner-up photographs opens at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam on Friday and runs until 27 September.
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