Jonathan Blitzer
speaker
358 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 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 — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And that's where he is now.
kind of back where he started, learning his way around the city, looking for work, trying to make a life for himself.
Alcini isn't the kind of person to talk much about his trauma, but clearly everything he's been through, first in Guinea, now in the U.S., had added a layer of difficulty and chaos to his life.
It's surely having an impact on how he thinks about his future.
At the time of his release, there were nearly 70,000 people being held in immigration detention, more people than ever.
And that number doesn't begin to capture the millions of lives that have been turned upside down by the president's mass deportation campaign.
In the meantime, the legal landscape was shifting.
The administration's courthouse arrests began to face legal setbacks in court.
In New York, a judge ordered the government to stop detaining people at 26 Federal Plaza, where all of this started for Alsani.
But the morning after the judge's ruling, masked ICE agents were back outside the courthouse, ready to make more arrests.
An activist named Peter Milt Cattell was there at the time.
He tried to show them copies of the decision.
The image, it reminds me of Alsaini leaving the courthouse a year ago, holding a printout from the judge listing the date and time of his next appointment.
You'd think the documentation might actually mean something.
As Cattell described it later to a local paper, he showed them the decision and the agents waved him away and said simply, we don't care.
I'm Jonathan Blitzer.
Our program continues on the next episode, when I'll speak with a Democrat and a Republican in Congress on the politics of immigration and how this is all playing out with voters.
Thanks for listening.
Showing 341–358 of 358 · page 18 of 18
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