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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I'm Jonathan Blitzer.
I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker.
This is a special episode of our program today.
I've covered immigration for more than a decade, and I think it's pretty clear that immigration is the defining political issue of our time, beyond all the other disruptions of the Trump administration.
When Trump launched his 2016 campaign, he blamed Mexico for sending rapists, drug dealers, and criminals across the border.
There was the Muslim ban, family separation, a whole host of radical actions.
But the current term has made the first one seem almost quaint, trying to overturn birthright citizenship, racially profiling U.S.
citizens, jailing tens of thousands of immigrants in appalling conditions.
And then there's been nearly two dozen shootings by immigration agents, at least six of them fatal to date.
I could go on and on.
The question of who has a right to be in the United States is absolutely central to our country right now.
In the second part of this episode, I'm going to speak with a Democrat and a Republican in Congress about how voters are receiving Trump's immigration policies and how that may affect the midterms.
But first, I'm going to tell you a story about a guy I met here in New York, a refugee from Guinea in West Africa.
His name is Alsaini.
Al-Saini was early in the process of applying for asylum in the United States when he walked into 26 Federal Plaza in June 2025.
It's a big federal office building in lower Manhattan with an immigration court on the 12th floor.
This is the building where, you might have heard, an Army veteran started a fire last week as a protest against ICE.
But Al-Saini was there a year ago.
Al-Saini is his first name.
He asked me not to use his last name.
Showing 61–80 of 358 · page 4 of 18
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