Photographer Carol Guzy captures how ICE’s immigration crackdown has modified households

A photographer followed what came next

By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
Photographs by Carol Guzy

Published June 1, 2026

The screams are a sound Carol Guzy can’t forget.

Week after week, she heard them echoing in the hallways outside New York immigration courtrooms as masked federal agents made arrests.

She met a 10-year-old girl who called out, “Why are you taking my papa from me? He’s the only one I have.”

And she listened to the wails of a 12-year-old who watched officers arrest her father, saw an ICE agent hurl her mother to the ground and then worried that she was to blame because she hadn’t held onto her father tightly enough.

“I wouldn’t have expected to see this happening here,” Guzy says. “I go to other countries to cover this kind of stuff.”

The freelance photojournalist has won four Pulitzer Prizes covering disaster and war around the world. Now she’s shifted her focus to one of the biggest stories in the US.

For much of the past 11 months, Guzy has witnessed and photographed arrests during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, and she’s heard the cries of children like 10-year-old Scarleth, whose voice you can hear at the top of this page. But Guzy says there’s more to the story that’s often overlooked. Her photos — including many that are published here for the first time — underscore realities that are often hidden. And even the photos she takes in crowded spaces reveal details many rarely see.

A putting scene she captured throughout an arrest in New York drew worldwide consideration when the Netherlands-based World Press Photo just lately gave Guzy its high honor, “Photo of the Year.”

“This picture is chaotic. It’s terrifying. It captures a very genuine, genuine expression of fear, terror, uncertainty and powerlessness,” global jury chair Kira Pollack said in a video announcing the prestigious award. “And what brings me into the picture, of course, are the daughters’ faces, trying to keep their father from being torn away. It allows us to look in. We cannot unsee it.”

The former Washington Post photographer didn’t set out to see or hear any of this. Last June, Guzy traveled from her home in the DC area to New York City for what she thought would be a brief vacation to visit friends and check something off her bucket list. Her goal: watching the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade and taking photos of the whimsical celebration, billed as the nation’s largest art parade.

Her initially brief visit morphed into a lengthy sojourn in the city, with long hours spent not only covering arrests inside the government building, but also following the story outside its walls. For nearly a year, in homes and houses of worship across New York, and as far away as the highlands of Ecuador, Guzy has documented the lives of families that are dramatically changing as the administration’s deportation campaign intensifies.

Outside immigration court, Guzy found the sight of masked agents making arrests jarring. But something else also began to catch her attention: how the agents looked while they were waiting for their targets.

She began shooting portraits whenever she spotted them in front of white walls in the government building.

“You can really see who’s doing this, and the lack of uniforms, and the different amount of professionalism — or not — just in their wardrobes,” she says.

While the agents rarely talked on the record to the journalists observing them, to Guzy, details about their attire and demeanor spoke volumes.

“Every profession has different personality types, including ICE. There are the guys and the women who really believe in it. And then there are the people who don’t, and they’re just putting in time,” she says. “It’s very clear who’s who to us.”

In September, Guzy was among the press corps outside the immigration courtrooms documenting the moment when an ICE agent shoved a woman into a wall and pushed her to the ground after her husband’s arrest.

In a recent interview with CNN, the woman, an Ecuadorian child care worker named Monica whose family is seeking asylum in the US, said she was grateful Guzy and other photographers were there to witness what happened. Without them, she says, the situation would have been even worse. The experience made her think of threats she says her family faced in Ecuador.

“When I realized the man was practically on top of me screaming, I was terrified. … I saw in him the same face I saw in Ecuador when they told us they wanted to kill us,” Monica said.

A DHS spokesperson said shortly after the incident that the officer’s behavior was “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE,” and announced that he’d been relieved of his current duties pending an investigation. But the officer was back at work in the building days later, according to Guzy. And NPR reported in December that the DHS Office of Inspector General had decided not to open a criminal investigation into the matter.

DHS hasn’t responded to recent questions from CNN about whether the agent remains on full active duty, whether the agency stands by its initial assessment of the officer’s actions and whether the agency has any response to Monica’s concerns that the situation would have been worse if photographers hadn’t been there.

Tensions between authorities and journalists outside the immigration court increased markedly after that day, Guzy says.

But in her time at the federal building, she also saw some in authority who appeared troubled by the tactics. In one photo, she captured a tearful family and a security guard standing on opposite sides of a pillar outside the building. The guard was crying, too.

The image swiftly went viral online. TIME magazine named it one of the top 10 photos of 2025, and it was part of a portfolio of images that won Guzy a National Headliner Award in April.

“It’s been shocking how much response I’ve gotten to that photo,” she says. “It’s a quiet, quiet moment, but it really moves people.”

And for Guzy, that image and others she captured at the government building were only the beginning of a much bigger story.

“It’s like war. You can’t just cover the ‘bang-bang.’ You’ve got to show how it affects … individuals and their lives. That’s what people relate to,” she says. “Guns and bombs and detainments, yeah, they’re horrible, but you know, it’s the aftershocks, I think they’re almost worse.”

Those aftershocks are still hitting families the photographer met months ago at 26 Federal Plaza. Many of them are from Ecuador, where emigration has surged in recent years amid rising political and gang violence, bringing a new wave of immigrants to New York. But despite similarities in these families’ backgrounds, in the days since Guzy first met them, their lives have taken dramatically different — and sometimes surprising — turns.

And in the faces of the immigrants whose lives she’s documenting, the Pennsylvania-born photographer also often sees something unexpected: herself.

Guzy knows how hard it is to grow up without a father.

Her dad died when she was 6 years old. He’d been hospitalized with cirrhosis of the liver, an illness her mother believed was caused by exposure to toxic chemicals during factory work.

“I remember when she came back from the hospital and told me he was gone, I was screaming. I screamed at the top of my lungs all night. They could not console me. And then I just shut down,” Guzy recalls.

Now, she sees parallels between deportation and death.

“It’s not even like losing someone to an illness, that you have a long time to say goodbye and to prepare yourself. This happens in a nanosecond, an instant. All of a sudden, their whole lives are changed,” she says. “It’s an eternal hole when you lose a parent, no matter how you lose them.”

That reality stood out in stark relief to Guzy when she spent time in the Brooklyn home of Anita and her two children, Scarleth, who’s now 11, and Ashley, who’s 3. (In the captions accompanying her photos, Guzy identifies those with pending cases and their families by their first names to protect their privacy.)

On one of Guzy’s visits, Ashley celebrated her third birthday, wearing a tiara and a polka-dot dress as she bounced around the apartment. On another day, the 3-year-old looked more solemn as she talked on the phone with her dad. She cradled the phone and kissed it when she heard his voice.

Soon after the birthday celebration, Hermel signed voluntary departure paperwork and was returned to Ecuador.

In a statement to CNN, a DHS spokesperson described Hermel as a criminal.

“Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, if you break the law, you will face the consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.,” Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said.

The statement said Hermel had been arrested previously on charges including sex assault and family neglect — an accusation Hermel denies, stating that he never faced those charges and was detained only over immigration issues. In a text message to CNN from Ecuador, Hermel said a domestic violence case against him was dismissed and that he’d never been in custody before his nearly four-month stint in immigrant detention. CNN has reached out to New York court and police officials, but has been unable to obtain records related to the case or independently confirm details about any charges.

Life since his return to Ecuador has been devastating, Hermel says.

“The truth is I’m doing really badly. I lost my family. My house is half-built. I’m broken into pieces.”

Inside a New York hospital, Guzy sat beside Jessica Supliguicha as she looked nervously at an ultrasound monitor.

It was about a week before her baby was due, and it had been 13 days since her husband, Jorge, was arrested at a check-in with ICE at the federal building. Supliguicha grew depressed and anemic as she worried about his fate. But whenever Jorge called, he tried to keep her calm. “Everything is going to be OK,” he said. “Stay strong.”

According to DHS, Jorge had already been deported from the US once in 2021, then illegally crossed the border again a few months later — a felony. An immigration judge ordered his removal in May 2023. He was deported October 3, just two days before their daughter, Maite, was born.

Jessica, a US citizen, was suddenly on her own; taking care of a newborn and a 9-year-old son, all while juggling a job as an elder care worker.

Her son, Dylan, started having trouble in school. And Jessica realized she could no longer afford the rent on their family’s apartment on one income.

Jessica’s struggles are a telling example, Guzy says, of how the impact of one deportation can multiply many times over within a family.

“It’s very difficult. It’s very, very complicated,” Jessica says. “I run out of energy, and sometimes I lose hope. I don’t know what to do. And I shut myself in my room and try to find ways out, and I can’t.”

It all felt like too much to bear. Then Jessica’s friends did something she wasn’t expecting.

They were worried, too, about how heavily the strain was weighing on her. So they pooled their money to buy plane tickets to Ecuador for her and her family. After months of video calls, Jorge would finally meet his infant daughter in person for the first time.

And it’s something she’s holding onto now that she’s back in New York. In her bedroom, she keeps an altar with their wedding photos. Attorneys have told her that even though being married to a US citizen gives Jorge a pathway to return, it will be years before the paperwork processes for him to come to the US legally.

In the meantime, she’s trying to save enough money to pay for the lawyers she’ll need and keep providing for her kids. And she’s trying to stay calm. Dylan is 10 now and Maite is almost 8 months old, and she knows how much they need her. But life keeps throwing curveballs their way.

On a recent visit to New York, Guzy learned that Jessica and her children had just been evicted.

On the September day when ICE agents took away her husband, Monica feared they’d never be reunited. Deporting Ruben to Ecuador would be a death sentence, she told authorities at the time. Images of an ICE agent pushing her to the ground as she begged for his release circulated around the world.

But Monica’s efforts to push for Ruben’s freedom continued for weeks. In late October, Ruben was released from custody after a federal court challenge, with a judge finding that he’d been detained “without explanation while his partner and two young children were present.” In a declaration filed in that case, an ICE agent said the New York Police Department had arrested Ruben for assault in June 2024, but no charges were ever filed.

Monica says her husband has no criminal history. And she’s grateful a congressman connected her with the lawyers who won that first legal battle.

Now their family of four is back together. But their asylum cases are still pending — and fear over what’s next remains part of their daily lives.

Even as some families, like Monica’s, have managed to reunite, others are facing even more uncertain futures. Many are struggling to make ends meet without the breadwinners who previously supported their households. And some relationships have fractured beyond repair.

When Guzy returned to Anita’s New York home recently, a heaviness hung in the air.

At times, the children were still upbeat. But Anita said their circumstances had changed so drastically after Hermel’s arrest that she struggled to know where to turn or what to do.

The couple’s four-year relationship has ended now that he’s in Ecuador. She can’t find full-time work. And her debts are mounting.

“Everything changed. Everything, everything, everything. Here at home, there are days when we eat, and days when we don’t. There are days when my little girl asks me for something and I don’t know how to tell her that there isn’t anything,” Anita says. “I have given everything to them. And now, to have to tell them, ‘I have nothing,’ it makes me feel terrible.”

She’s considered returning to Ecuador, but feels like staying in the US is their family’s greatest hope for survival.

“Sometimes I just want to throw in the towel. … I’m under so, so, so much pressure,” she says, crying.

But Anita says she tries to stay strong for her children. Recently they returned to the federal building for a check-in with ICE. It went well; their next check-in is now scheduled for next year. But it was the first time they’d been back in the building since Hermel’s unexpected arrest.

As they waited for hours, Scarleth was particularly frightened, Anita says.

“She was worried that they were going to take me, and she’d be left here alone.”

Guzy is no longer spending most of her time in New York. The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown keeps shifting, and the photographer plans to keep following the story, wherever it leads.

But on a recent visit to the city, Guzy returned to the halls outside the immigration court. It was about 10 months after the first time she watched masked agents making arrests that separated families there. And it was just a few weeks after Trump administration officials stated in court documents that they’d been incorrectly relying on an ICE memo to justify immigration court arrests. The surprising admission raised big questions. Among them: Would authorities change their approach?

Last month, a federal judge issued an order blocking the immigration courthouse arrests in New York while litigation continues. US District Judge P. Kevin Castel said the government’s admission made him reconsider an earlier ruling “to correct a clear error and prevent a manifest injustice.”

In a recent federal court filing, Justice Department attorneys had argued that the law gives ICE officers discretion about where to carry out civil immigration enforcement, and that courthouses are open to the public.

“It is commonsense to take illegal aliens into custody following the completion of their removal proceedings,” a DHS spokesperson said in a written statement sent to CNN in response to questions about whether the arrests are continuing and whether the administration still believes they’re justified.

“Nothing prohibits arresting a lawbreaker the place you discover them,” the spokesperson mentioned. “We are confident we will ultimately be vindicated in this case.”

Even before the judge’s ruling last month, there were some signs of a shift. On her trip to the courthouse in late April, Guzy didn’t see any arrests. The hallways were eerily quiet.

But the photographer says she’ll keep watching and listening, and she hopes others will, too.

The screams couldn’t be heard that day. But Guzy knows they’re still echoing.

Correction: An earlier model of this story included an inaccurate description of Guzy’s New York go to to attend the Coney Island Mermaid Parade final 12 months. The photographer attended the parade after which prolonged her keep to cowl ICE arrests and their aftermath.