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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Like, here's someone who I don't know who's not identifying himself as a federal officer who's accosting me with a weapon.
Like, do I run?
Can I run?
Can I push him away?
Like, how am I supposed to engage?
And it was just incredibly, like, just viscerally very jarring to hear that kind of footage because you're hearing people just try to make sense of what the hell is going on around them.
Everything about it is macabre.
It's really unbelievable.
30,000 other Cubans came basically on makeshift rafts to the United States.
He was one of them, got intercepted by the Coast Guard, spent 11 months at Guantanamo Bay at the time, interned there before he was eventually released to his father who lived in El Paso at the time.
And he kind of has a period of waywardness and gets in trouble with the law.
He's in his early 20s at the time, gets arrested in Florida for his involvement in a robbery and serves five years in prison.
finishes his prison sentence.
And because he's Cuban and because the Cuban government doesn't, well, didn't at the time and doesn't now really have relations with the United States, particularly in terms of receiving deportees, he was basically authorized to remain in the United States, was allowed to work legally.
And eventually the premise was, okay, you have to check in a couple of times a year with a local ICE office as part of
know what's generally known as an alternative to detention this is something that a lot of people even on the progressive end of the spectrum have have pushed for over the years because it's basically the idea is to recognize that the government cannot detain and deport everyone who might have fallen out of status or who might have some sort of problematic immigration history and so ray is part of a particular program or was part of a particular program
that to date includes about 200,000 people.
And the idea is very simply that, you know, you check in with your, basically your case manager, you know, maybe once or twice a year, and otherwise you're allowed to lead a normal life.
And actually Ray's friends razzed him about it for years.
They said to him, like, how naive could you be?
Showing 81–100 of 490 · page 5 of 25
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