Giovanna Dell’Orto, religion team, Minneapolis; Morgan Lee, reporter, Santa Fe; Lekan Oyekanmi, videographer, Houston; Marcio Sanchez, photographer, Los Angeles; Rebecca Santana, reporter, Washington; and Elliot Spagat, immigration team leader, San Diego, teamed up in two locations along the U.S.-Mexico border leading up to the expected expiration of a Trump-era asylum ban as unusually large numbers of migrants gathered to enter the United States.
When the Supreme Court temporarily kept Title 42 in place at the 11th hour, Dell’Orto had already published a story on the critical and demanding role that faith-based groups have played receiving hundreds of thousands of migrants in recent months. One team based in the El Paso, Texas, area; while a second focused on the crossing to San Diego. Both AP teams hired photo and video journalists to produce stories throughout the week that mixed fast-moving policy developments with empathetic accounts of what migrants were dealing with.