A photograph made in a courthouse corridor — the moment an Ecuadorian father was torn from his wife and three children by US immigration agents — has won the World Press Photo of the Year 2026 for American photojournalist Carol Guzy, shooting for ZUMA Press, iWitness and the Miami Herald.

Guzy took the winning image on August 26 last year in New York. Luis, an Ecuadorian migrant and his household's sole provider, had just attended an immigration hearing when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained him. His wife, Cocha, and their children — aged seven, 13 and 15 — are caught in the immediate aftermath, their distress raw and unfiltered, in a building designed to deliver justice.

The picture comes from a larger body of work Guzy titled ICE Arrests at New York Court. The jury framed the award in explicitly institutional terms. "What Carol Guzy has documented is not an isolated instance, but a policy indiscriminately applied to people who arrive for hearings in good faith," it said. "It is evidence and documentation of a government policy being applied systematically to people who followed the rules they were given."

Guzy redirected the honour toward 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. "This award highlights the critical importance of the story worldwide. We bear witness to the suffering of countless families, but also to their grace and resilience, which has been quite humbling."

Joumana El Zein Khoury, executive director of World Press Photo, called the photograph "a stark and necessary record". "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 — a powerful example of why independent photojournalism matters," she said.

The award lands amid intensifying scrutiny of US immigration enforcement. Footage of masked agents detaining people suspected of being undocumented — in some cases using deadly force — has fuelled public backlash in recent months and contributed to the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March.

The winning photograph emerged from a field of 57,376 submissions by 3,747 photographers from 141 countries. Two other images were named finalists. Saber Nuraldin's Aid Emergency in Gaza, shot for EPA Images on July 27 last year, shows crowds climbing onto an aid lorry in search of food amid worsening hunger in the Gaza Strip, during what the Israeli military described as a "tactical suspension" to allow humanitarian aid to enter. At the time, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned that the "worst-case scenario" of famine was rapidly unfolding. The jury said the photograph captured "the scale and urgency of famine", praising a "straightforward composition" that "forces the viewer to pause".

The second finalist, Victor J. Blue's The Trials of the Achi Women for The New York Times Magazine, was made in Guatemala, where Indigenous Maya Achi women in Rabinal stood together at the close of a decades-long legal battle that ended with three of their attackers sentenced to 40 years in prison. For decades, the women had lived in the same communities as the men who had abused them, sometimes as neighbours. The jury praised the image's "classical, restrained approach", saying it emphasised the women's dignity and authority while challenging narratives that cast survivors of sexual violence as powerless, documenting instead "a moment of collective strength at the conclusion of their long struggle for justice".

The World Press Photo Foundation, a non-profit that recently marked its 71st anniversary, describes its mission as working to "champion the power of photojournalism and documentary photography to deepen understanding, promote dialogue and inspire action". Alongside the main prize and finalists, the foundation announced regional winners across this year's contest.

All of the selected works will now travel in World Press Photo's annual exhibition, which opens at De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam on April 24 — giving Guzy's courthouse corridor, and the policy it records, a public stage far beyond the one on which it was made.