Two girls press themselves against their father. Their faces are contorted — not with tears, but with something rawer. Fear, terror, uncertainty. Luis, an Ecuadorian migrant, is being detained by ICE agents inside New York’s Jacob K. Javits Federal Building. His daughters are trying to keep him from being taken. They will fail.

That image — Separated by ICE, taken by photojournalist Carol Guzy on August 26, 2025 — has been named World Press Photo of the Year, selected from 57,376 entries submitted by more than 3,000 photographers worldwide.

Global jury chair Kira Pollack called it “evidence” and “proof.” She described it as chaotic, terrifying — a record of “quite literally, a disappearance.” Her verdict was blunt: “We cannot unsee it.”

Guzy, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner shooting for the Miami Herald, spent six months documenting ICE arrests at the courthouse — one of the few federal buildings in the country where photographers were granted access. She showed up daily, capturing family after family torn apart in a public hallway where immigration hearings end in detention rather than due process.

Luis had no criminal record, according to his family, and served as his household’s sole provider. His wife, Cocha, and their three children — aged seven, 13, and 15 — were left “inconsolable, facing immediate financial hardship and profound emotional trauma,” the World Press Photo Foundation wrote.

The family has since disappeared from contact. Guzy told NPR they never arrived at a church that had been assisting detained families and stopped answering messages.

“This photo should be painful to view,” Guzy said in a statement. “I hope it stirs people out of any sense of complacency.”

The camera was there, in that hallway, because Guzy decided to show up — every day, for half a year. The photograph does not editorialize. It does not need to.

Sources