Photo of crying migrant girl at border wins World Press Photo of the Year

A photo that became the face of the Trump administration’s controversial immigration policies in 2018 has been named the World Press Photo of the Year.

“Crying Girl on the Border” shows Yanela Sanchez, a then-2-year-old Honduran girl, in tears as U.S. Border Patrol agents search her mother near the border in Texas.

{mosads}The World Press Photo organization selected the image as its Photo of the Year at a ceremony in Amsterdam on Thursday.

The award is given to a photographer “whose visual creativity and skills made a picture that captures or represents an event or issue of great journalistic importance in that year,” the group said.

The image was taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning Getty photographer John Moore.

“I think this image touched many people’s hearts, as it did mine, because it humanizes a larger story,” Moore said, according to the organization.

“When you see Yanela’s face, and she is more than two years old now, you really see the humanity and the fear of making such a long journey and crossing a border in the dead of night,” he said.

U.S. officials confirmed that Yanela was not one of the thousands of children who were separated from their parents and detained after illegally crossing the border under the administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. But the image went viral and quickly became representative of the issues at the border.

Time magazine used another of Moore’s photos of the girl on a cover about the family separations, and quickly went on the defensive after it was criticized as “fake news.”

After widespread backlash against the zero tolerance immigration policy, President Trump signed an executive order to end the family separations.

It has been reported in recent days that Trump has sought to reinstate the practice. The president denied those reports this week, but on Friday confirmed reports that his administration is “giving strong considerations” to a controversial plan that would put migrants into so-called sanctuary cities.