Jonathan Blitzer

speaker

342 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Jul

Jonathan Blitzer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Uncovering abuse inside America's largest ICE detention center · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

I mean, we're talking about people with temporary protected status, people who entered under Biden era parole programs, people who formally applied for asylum.

is that these are all people who have interacted with the federal government, who have willingly given their information to the federal government, which now is most certainly being weaponized against them.

And one of the trends that we have seen that I can speak to with authority is that people who have interacted with

Another agency at the Department of Homeland Security – it's called Citizenship and Immigration Services.

USCIS is the full acronym.

People who show up for routine appointments there, legal adjustment interviews, fingerprinting appointments, green card interviews –

naturalization interviews, citizenship interviews, is that some people are actually getting arrested by ICE agents at those appointments.

So there is some collusion between this other agency that administers the legal immigration system and ICE, which is enforcing immigration laws and making arrests.

So that is a definite reality across the board.

I don't know in Lydia's case specifically if that's what happened or if she was flagged.

I mean, the other reality in all of this, a darker reality in some ways, is

There is also rampant racial profiling that is at the center of so much of the administration's enforcement agenda.

And in fact, the U.S.

Supreme Court basically gave ICE the green light to use race, to use the fact that someone speaks Spanish as one element of their decision to pull someone over.

And so that's also a possibility in this case.

Well, she's – Lydia's from Mexico.

And so, you know –

It's unlike, for example, someone from Cuba who faces this really grisly prospect of being deported to Mexico, which is something that's happened in large numbers, of Cubans being sent to Mexico and basically now being stuck in a country where they don't have legal status and they're back at square one only in Mexico.

For Lydia, the threat was that she would be worn down to such a point that she would just agree to be sent back to Mexico.

And one of the things that Alexis said to her, her son said to her,

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