SAN DIEGO (AP) — Gregory Bull began covering the U.S.-Mexico border in 1994 as a newspaper photographer at the Brownsville Herald in Texas. Since then, he has covered the border from both sides for The Associated Press, based in Mexico and later along the California side in San Diego. On Monday, together with staff photographers Eric Gay, Fernando Llano, Marco Ugarte and Eduardo Verdugo, and longtime AP freelance photographers Christian Chavez, Felix Marquez and Ivan Valencia, Bull won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for images that captured the harrowing global migration crisis through the Americas, a growing calamity not often covered at the human level. The photographers showed every step of the migrants’ journey, with Bull focusing on the border. Here’s what he had to say about creating this extraordinary image.

Why this photo

As the public health order that allowed the United States to quickly turn away migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border enacted during the Covid-19 pandemic ( Title 42 ) expired in 2023, many people seeking asylum were caught in between two border walls separating Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego. Hundreds of people waited anxiously, unsure of how long they would be living in this area — not quite in the United States but no longer in Mexico. Many spent all they had to get to this point in their journey. They had no way of knowing how much longer they needed to hold out.