Jonathan Blitzer

speaker

490 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 15 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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The Bulwark Daily · Jonathan Blitzer: Our New Internment Camps · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

The government's supposed to investigate.

But under these circumstances, the government responds in writing by saying, you know,

We can't, if we were to do that, it would exacerbate an existing detention crisis.

Because of course, that's what's happening in the backdrop of all of this.

Last summer, the Trump administration is ramping up arrest operations across the country.

And it's also, in July of last year,

It's also – ICE has created a new memo basically saying in a radical reinterpretation of an old immigration law that it's going to hold undocumented people at arrests without bond.

So you basically have a situation in which ICE is trying to arrest more people and it's releasing fewer of those people.

In fact, it's blocking the release of people who are in ICE detention.

So they have an acute need for facilities to hold people.

And so when these irregularities are alleged, the government says, look, like –

We're in the midst of an emergency.

We can't deal with that.

And so acquisition logistics kind of rolls through this process.

And, you know, acquisition logistics not only never had a contract to do this kind of work before, but this is a billion dollar contract.

The highest.

value contract it ever had with the federal government was 16 million dollars for work on a naval base years before so it's like you know they're very obviously unqualified and so in that sense you know no one's surprised when there are all these complaints right out of the gate that there are these problems and irregularities the least important part of the story is how much of our money that is being pissed away

here but it is i get it is hard to even wrap your head around i mean it's like totally unnecessary right it's like to detain people the vast majority which don't need to be detained the ray system was working fine the isap system was working and by the way and by the way inside i mean like the government accountability office put out a report in june that documented all kinds of horrors but one of them and one that i de-emphasized in the story because like on a moral level as you say it sort of feels like the least of all the problems yeah

is that like all this money is being pissed away, even just on a day-to-day level.

Like they're not being efficient in how they're administering any of these contracts.

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