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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He had arrived with his half-brother, who wasn't his father's biological son.
There was tension between the two of them.
And eventually, Ray and his brother leave his father's house, live in a church in El Paso for a very brief period, then relocate to Austin.
And before long, Ray finds himself back in Miami, where a number of people he knew from Havana had begun to start an American business.
life for themselves.
And for those years, I mean, you're talking about someone who in Ray's cases in his early 20s has been overwhelmed by everything that's happened to him.
He got into trouble and eventually got arrested for his involvement in a robbery, served a five-year prison term in Florida, and then was released.
And
After his release, because the Cuban government didn't have any sort of relationship with the United States, it didn't accept Cuban immigrants whom the United States would have wanted maybe to deport.
And so as a result, he was authorized to continue to live in the United States on the condition that eventually he start to check in with a local ICE office as part of a program that ICE had.
which essentially recognized that it was impossible for ICE to detain and deport everyone who might be in some sort of complicated standing with immigration law.
And so for years, including after he relocated to El Paso in 2014, he would, every several months, check in with his local ICE officer and more or less live an ordinary life.
And I should say that for years,
Even before the second Trump administration comes into office, Ray's friends would always give him a hard time and say, you are the most naive person on the planet to think that, you know, you just keep checking in and nothing's going to happen.
They're never going to try to arrest you.
And he was always really principled in his response to them.
He said, look, we made mistakes in our past.
And the only way to kind of outrun those mistakes is to try to do things the right way.
And so that was what was happening in his life when, you know, in 2010,
At 16, he gets married to someone who he meets in El Paso.
Showing 21–40 of 342 · page 2 of 18
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