Claire's Brother
speaker
2,353 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 20 Jun
Claire's Brother’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I'm a journalist who lives in San Diego.
Thank you for being here, James.
Today, I'm here to talk to you about the Dominican Republic's immigration system and how it has been shaped by the US's immigration system to kind of function as a part of the US border outside of what we would normally consider the US's border.
And instead of diving in immediately to that, I want to start this episode by talking a little bit about the tragic death of Ezra Francis Hullett, a trans person from the United States in immigration detention in the Dominican Republic.
I should mention that they use both they, them and he, him pronouns.
However, I'm going to be using they, them going forward because that's what the friends and family of Hullett put as their pronouns in the GoFundMe podcast.
They were found dead in the Jaina Immigration Detention Center, the biggest immigration detention center in the Dominican Republic on June 23rd, 2025.
The GoFundMe set up by their family to bring their body back to the States describes them as a compassionate and sensitive person who lived with mental health issues and the after effects of childhood trauma.
They were 24 and a really good artist from looking at their Instagram.
Per the Dominican news show El Informe con Alicia Ortega, who interviewed Hullet's mom, Hullet traveled to Puerto Rico without their family's knowledge.
and seemed to be in contact with a social worker here.
I found a local Telemundo affiliate here in Puerto Rico that reported that they went missing on September 3rd of 2024.
However, the GoFundMe says that they were missing in PR since March of 2025, and Hullet's mom told El Informe that that's when they last spoke.
Around that same time, Hullet flew to the Dominican Republic, according to El Informe.
Shortly after that, they were detained inside a construction site where it appears that they were squatting alongside a Dominican man.
After being detained by the tourism police, they were passed on to the Dirección General de Migración, or DGM, which does immigration enforcement and manages detention centers.
Per El Informe, this was about 37 days after they entered the DR. I want to preface this next section by saying that the DR isn't particularly kind to trans folks, which I'm sure affected Pollitt's experience during immigration detention.
Hullet was initially sent to the male wing of Heine, not because the DR is particularly woke and sends people to detention based on their gender identity, but because they were male-presenting and didn't have any ID on them.
However, once the DGM was able to identify Hullet, they were transferred to the female wing of Heine.
To be honest, quite a bit of the reporting around Hullet in the DR and here in Puerto Rico is quite transphobic.
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