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

This is not like someone who's been arrested for a crime and who is serving a prison sentence that is part of that person's punishment.

The idea of an immigration infraction is it is a civil infraction.

And you can't use...

I mean, it sounds almost quaint to say under the circumstances, but the government cannot weaponize detention.

I mean, legally, morally cannot weaponize immigration detention as a way of trying to punish people and engineer outcomes.

You know, I think one of the things – as someone who covers this stuff, I'm increasingly aware of the degree to which it sounds like a cliche to say, you know, for as long as the system is broken, these populations are unspeakably vulnerable and the country needs to have this reckoning.

I think –

If I had to boil down what's happening now that's sort of most alarming and that I think is going to continue to get worse and worse in the months ahead, there are a few kind of categories that this administration has redefined.

The first is the current administration is actually trying to effectively delegalize people right now.

So, you know, when you talk about someone like Lorenzo Salgao, who was shot by an ICE agent in Houston recently, this is someone who's lived in the country for 30 years, who didn't have a criminal record, had a family, who was, like, doing basically everything someone could possibly do under the circumstances, and who, you know, couldn't regularize his status because the system is...

broken beyond repair and the politics stand in the way of fixing the system.

You have people who, you know, have applied for asylum and who are arrested at immigration court while they're actually appearing before a judge who wind up in a place like Camp East Montana, treated miserably and in many cases agree to be deported, et cetera.

But then you have people who actually have some form of status, whether it's temporary protected status, whether it's a, you know,

Any number of forms of status, deferred action for childhood arrivals, DACA, that the current administration is trying to strip away from people.

So the administration is actually –

Not just preying on a population that's already undocumented, but it's actually trying to widen the population of people who can be targeted.

I'm actually glad you asked about that because one of the strange emotions you have reporting these stories is on the one hand, you're confronting some of the most unimaginable things being done to people by the system, you know, by the government.

But then you're also...

meeting people who are incredibly generous and committed in trying to fill this void left by the government.

And there are organizations, you know, in El Paso especially, I have to say, there's an organization called Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which was involved specifically in helping Ray and his family, but has helped countless others that operate on a shoestring budget and that basically do every single thing within their power to try to

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