Dozens of migrants sat on long benches on a U.S. military plane as it waited to leave the West Texas airport. They were shackled and handcuffed yet dressed casually, mostly in jeans and sweatshirts. All wore light blue surgical masks.
One man, an eyebrow raised, looked straight at Associated Press photographer Christian Chavez as the deportation flight sat on the tarmac at Fort Bliss, the U.S. Army base in El Paso, Texas, preparing to take the migrants to Guatemala.
It was Jan. 30, 2025. President Donald Trump had been sworn into office again just 10 days earlier, signing a series of executive orders to crack down on immigration and vowing to “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”
His focus would be on violent criminals — the “worst of the worst” as officials have repeatedly insisted — and ending what Trump called an invasion on the southern border.
But in the year since Trump returned to office, AP photographers have found a far more complex situation, with migrants arriving for routine asylum hearings being grabbed by masked immigration agents, families pulled apart and students deported.
They have followed the immigration story across the United States, to Latin America and to Africa.
Their photos show how the crackdown has torn at an already-divided nation, whether Rebecca Blackwell’s image of tourists posing at the sign for the Florida Everglades immigration detention center known as “ Alligator Alcatraz,” or Jae C. Hong’s photos of California Highway Patrol officers dodging brick-sized rocks thrown by protesters.
Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric helped him win the 2024 election, but polling shows that U.S. adults have become more likely than they were in January to think immigrants benefit the country and less likely to say the number of legal immigrants to the U.S. should be reduced.
Photographers are sometimes able to capture the myriad issues of an immigrant’s story.
And sometimes, an image can only hint at someone's story.
Like the ghostly image captured by Eric Gay outside a San Antonio immigration court, with the palms of a Peruvian woman pressed against the barred windows of a bus.
Photo editing by Jaqueline Larma.
