Best of the Week — First Winner

A photo and source work spark a compelling, emotional tale on migration

Migration-focused video journalist Renata Brito in Barcelona took note of a heartbreaking photo on social media to spark a story about the situation at the Tunisia-Libya border — and she used her years of source work, expertise on the border and help from around AP to confirm the story.

On July 19, the photo of a woman and child lying dead, barefoot and face down in the tawny desert sand began circulating on social media. It was retweeted by activists who accused Tunisia of abandoning migrants to their fates on the other side of Tunisia’s desert border with Libya.

But little was known about the photo or the stories of the two who had died.

On social media, some said the photo spoke to that growing crisis, but others insisted it was an old image from another country.

Three days after the photo surfaced, a source of Brito’s in Libya messaged her, saying he knew the woman and child in the photo. From afar, Brito had developed a relationship with the source for years. For this story, Brito asked the source: How did he know it was them? Could she speak to friends or family? With whom did they travel?

That resulted in a tale of dashed hope and tragedy as told to the AP by the late woman’s husband, with additional details and key context contributed by Elaine Ganley and Samy Magdy, who together are Best of the Week — First Winner.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP hours ahead on long-awaited immigration asylum decision

broke the news hours ahead of the competition that the Biden administration would end the asylum limits at the U.S.-Mexico border that were put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19.For more than a year, the administration faced growing questions — and pressure — over when it would end a Trump-era rule that has resulted in migrants being expelled at the border without a chance to seek humanitarian protection.The clean beat was the product of years of source development and seamless leveraging of reporting from the White House, the investigative team and the immigration team. The spot news break was bracketed by a series of smart stories showcasing AP’s depth of expertise on immigration matters.Read more

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP’s all-formats team delivers unmatched coverage of refugees fleeing Ukraine

With hundreds of hours of live coverage, gripping portraits of people fleeing, and broad takes on the impact of the migration wave, AP’s multiformat team covering people displaced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provided unrivaled coverage of Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

AP journalists posted at Ukraine’s borders and within the country have put a human face to the mass movement of refugees, mostly women and children who have left their homes traumatized and exhausted, sometimes after being trapped for days or weeks in their basements to escape bombardment.

AP’s coverage started a week before the war began at the Medyka border crossing in Poland, which just days later would become a main entry point for tens of thousands of Ukrainians. In the month since, text, photo and video journalists have worked tirelessly to capture the surge, from the stress on countries accepting the brunt of the new arrivals to the generosity shown by volunteers opening their homes to the refugees.

For chronicling the exodus of an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians with compassion, vigor and dedication to the story, AP’s border/refugee team earns Best of the Week — First Winner.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Iraq team reports on wave of migrant smuggling, families risking all

used interviews with returnees from Europe, relatives of some who drowned in the English Channel and both smugglers and travel agents who arrange the perilous journeys, to provide a sweeping, vivid look at how northern Iraq has been shaken by the migration crisis.The story, challenging to report, was the latest in a series by Baghdad reporter Kullab and producer Salim, in which they follow the troubled exodus of Iraqi Kurds who make up the majority of Middle Eastern migrants heading to Europe. Their reporting was anchored in the town of Ranya in northern Iraq, an impoverished region where the plight of the migrants is the talk of the town and smuggling networks are particularly active.Using Salim’s excellent contacts in the Kurdish region, the team found a family that had spent days anxiously waiting for news of their young son, who was lost at sea in the English Channel. They fear that the 18-year-old may have drowned along with at least 26 others when their flimsy boat sank near the French coast last week.The story, with photos by Baghdad chief photographer Mohammed’s and interview video for AP clients, captures the agonizing, life-changing decisions the families make, and why they risk everything for a more decent life abroad.The reporting went further still, looking at how the smuggling networks operate. AP talked to travel agents who arrange the trips and act as middle men with the smugglers abroad.https://aplink.news/49w

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP partnership examines Biden’s troubled border policy

produced an authoritative look at President Joe Biden’s border policy, drawing on interviews with administration officials, internal documents and intelligence reports, and on-the-ground reporting. The story was AP’s first collaboration in partnership with AIM Media Texas, a consortium of newspapers in the Rio Grande Valley, including The (McAllen, Texas) Monitor.Well before the arrival of some 15,000 Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in September, Spagat, AP’s lead immigration reporter, had been looking closely at the Biden administration’s border policy. The uneven and often chaotic response to that September surge underscored that Biden, despite campaign promises to overhaul immigration and now with nearly a year in office, lacked a coherent plan for the border.To uncover how Biden's policy, or lack thereof, had come to this point, Spagat teamed up with Monitor investigative reporter Gonzalez, obtaining memos that detailed early conversations about border policy, conducted interviews with high-ranking current and former U.S. officials and Mexican authorities. Exclusive internal documents, obtained through sources and Freedom of Information Act requests, included email traffic between Border Patrol officials during the surge and a tally of the thousands of migrants released into the U.S. despite the administration’s tough talk of expelling migrants.Editors Katie Oyan, Jerry Schwartz and Peter Prengaman worked closely on the text and photo editor Alyssa Goodman built a striking presentation. Video journalist Manuel Valdes produced a strong piece that elegantly broke down the weak points in Biden's border policy.The end result was arguably the most comprehensive look to date at how Biden's border went from hopeful to chaotic. The piece appeared widely in news outlets across the U.S.https://aplink.news/8ojhttps://aplink.video/8wv

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

‘I’ll walk in my broken shoes’: Mom, daughter flee Venezuela on foot

for an extraordinary all-formats piece that followed a Venezuelan mother and daughter as they made the journey by foot across four countries to Peru, joining about 650 desperate migrants who walk out of Venezuela every day to avoid the country’s desperate situation.

The poignant story was augmented by moving photos and video, and an animated map. The AP team followed them closely for nine days under difficult conditions – freezing cold in parts, burning hot in others, and exhausting miles of walking to provide AP’s audience a detailed view into what they were facing, Readers wrote to Armario praising the story and asking how they could help.https://bit.ly/2Pp0TnDhttps://bit.ly/2ykBNwrhttps://bit.ly/2D7nXkO

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP team finds first evidence of Belarus facilitating migrant wave

collaborated on an “Only on AP” package documenting Belarusian authorities’ involvement in a recent surge of immigration from Belarus into Lithuania. In the past two months more than 1,700 have crossed the border — 20 times the total for all of 2020.Lithuanian and European Union officials have accused Belarus of assisting the migration in retaliation over EU sanctions against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, but no evidence had been provided and no media outlets had been able to speak to the migrants themselves, who are held in heavily guarded, makeshift camps in Lithuania.The determined all-formats trio of Chernov, Dapkus and Kulbis, seeking to hear from the migrants themselves, drove from camp to camp, more than 600 kilometers (375 miles), eventually finding two smaller, remote camps where police allowed the journalists to speak with migrants. People confirmed they were paying to be taken to Europe via Belarus, and that Belarus had helped them get to Lithuania. AP was allowed inside one of the camps to briefly make photos and video of the migrants’ living conditions.With Karmanau reporting from Belarus and Isachakov in Moscow pulling all the reporting into a cohesive piece, the resulting all-formats exclusive revealed how migrants have once again been caught up in a game of political brinksmanship.https://aplink.news/fwdhttps://aplink.video/flk

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Memos reveal exclusive details of Trump border policy shift

for exclusively obtaining Customs and Border Protection memos that showed how the Trump administration was carrying out a program that requires asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases play out, including the instruction that border agents explicitly target Spanish speakers and migrants from Latin America. https://bit.ly/2HvWomX

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP team finds evidence of illegal migrant pushbacks by Greece

landed an all-formats interview with a Palestinian woman that hinted at a controversial tactic the Greek government has denied using: migrant pushbacks, the illegal summary deportations of migrants without giving them a chance to apply for asylum.With help from Svarnias, a reporter on the island of Samos, Athens video journalist Lefteris Pitarakis and photographer Petros Giannakouris, Becatoros unraveled the story of the Palestinian woman who said she and her three children arrived from Turkey several days earlier on a boat with other migrants, but she and the children became separated from the group and managed to apply for asylum. The other 28 members of the group ended up being found in a life raft sent back to sea.The reporting by Becatoros and Svarnias resulted in a thorough account of one of the most tangible examples yet of a systematic effort to deport migrants from Greece directly upon arrival. Greece vehemently denies the claims, but rights groups and migrants insist that Greece has been carrying out the practice.https://aplink.news/ic5https://aplink.video/ti0

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Intrepid work reveals boats built for migrant smuggling

spent a week on assignment in Western Sahara, gaining exclusive access to a little-seen but vital piece of the migrant smuggling chain — boats that are built to order, then spirited from the remote desert sand to carry migrants to the Canary Islands. A European Union agency calls it “the most dangerous migratory route in the world.”El Shamy, North Africa photographer based in Rabat, Morocco, was closely monitored by security agents in the disputed territory, but was able to slip into the desert in company with locals. There, he was introduced to a senior member of a smuggling network and was able to convince the smugglers that he would protect their anonymity while photographing them at work. His initiative and courage were rewarded with striking images and detailed reporting on the thriving trade of supplying boats for the perilous Atlantic migrant route.https://bit.ly/3t1Wc43https://bit.ly/3cmUZyo

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP reveals politics of immigration policy shifts

for two stories on how the Trump administration is dealing with the surge of migrant families at the border and a claimed lack of detention space. Merchant spotted a solicitation for contractors to build tents near the U.S.-Mexico border to temporarily detain immigrant families, and he followed up with an accountability story revealing that thousands of beds for detained families are empty at a time when President Trump was calling the country “full,” and threatening to send migrants to sanctuary cities as political retribution.https://bit.ly/2GuBJxmhttps://bit.ly/2L4OQuG

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Immigration team finds 13,000 immigrants on wait lists in Mexico to cross the border

for all-format reporting across the U.S.-Mexico border, revealing that 13,000 immigrants are stuck in Mexico on haphazard wait lists that have formed as the Trump administration placed limits on how many asylum cases it accepts each day. The team visited the eight main locations where lines were forming and tallied the number of people on the various lists, finding some migrants sleeping in tents for months on end, vulnerable to violence and shakedowns. And they broke news about a family that decided to forgo the long line and cross illegally, killing four people as they were swept away by the swift-moving Rio Grande. https://bit.ly/2Q4dF8Y

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Documenting migrant workers amid virus spike in Spain

reacted quickly to a developing story, delivering a deep, all-formats look into the plight of migrant fruit harvesters facing a coronavirus outbreak while already struggling to find work in northern Spain.AP was out first with multiformat coverage of the migrants as Spanish authorities announced that the spike in infection was forcing a lockdown in the region, Spain’s first area under restrictions since the nationwide lockdown was lifted two weeks ago. https://bit.ly/2Z5KuZ6

Best of the Week — First Winner

Stories of lives lost, told with photos: 2 remarkable projects share Best of the Week

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged across the world last week, and the confirmed U.S. death toll approached 100,000, AP photographers on two continents found unusual and meaningful ways to bring home the tragedy of lives lost. They were:

– Photographer David Goldman, who met with the families of COVID-19 victims at a Massachusetts soldiers’ home, literally projecting veterans’ images onto the exterior of the families’ homes for a series of arresting, ghostly and emotion-laden scenes.

– And Rodrigo Abd, who spent weeks with Venezuelan migrants collecting bodies in a poor area of Lima, Peru, showing the abject desperation of that city’s victims. Also honored is Lima reporter Franklin Briceño who accompanied Abd, documenting for text and video the funeral home workers on their grueling rounds.

Both projects had immense impact online and in print, drawing praise from readers and editors. For intrepid and creative multiformat storytelling emphasized by unforgettable images, Goldman, Abd and Briceño share AP’s Best of the Week honors. 

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Scoop on deportees arriving in Guatemala with virus

acted on a tip from a government source to report that a recent flight from the U.S. had 44 deportees who so far had tested positive for the coronavirus. The scoop was explosive in Guatemala where angst is growing about deportees spreading the virus and it forced the U.S. government to speak more about the virus’s spread among detained migrants. Even a story from a competitive agency had to credit the AP exclusive. https://bit.ly/2VRjda0

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

APNewsBreak: US plan to send asylum seekers to El Salvador

for breaking the astonishing news that the U.S. was signing an agreement that would send would-be asylum-seekers to one of the world's most violent countries, El Salvador. Long was was hours ahead of the official announcement and the first to get a copy of the agreement.https://bit.ly/2mt3oZh