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
He was doing exactly what someone in his situation is supposed to do.
He was seeking asylum from persecution back home in Guinea and had been in the U.S.
for a little over a year.
He had a room in the Bronx and was learning his way around New York City.
It was all new.
And I'll say he didn't know what to make of some of the horror stories he was hearing about the Trump administration.
But choosing to do things the right way, it gave him a sense of confidence.
The meeting's short.
The judge schedules another hearing so that Alsaini can begin gathering the evidence for his asylum application.
And a few minutes later, he leaves the courtroom holding a document with the date when he's supposed to return.
He's standing by the elevator when six agents come up to him.
Alseni's short and skinny, 5'5", with dark skin and short dreadlocks.
He's 28 years old, and in June of 2025, he spoke next to no English, in many of our meetings and interpreters helping us out.
This wasn't the first time Olseni had been accosted by government agents.
He fled Guinea in 2023 after he was arrested at a political protest and beaten so badly that he suffered memory loss.
In New York, when the ICE agents grabbed him, he was terrified.
You might have seen videos of people being arrested just like this at 26 Federal Plaza in New York.
This sort of footage exploded about a year ago because ICE was doing something it had never really attempted before, picking people off when they showed up to immigration court.
Olseni was a case in point.
He thought he was just seeing an immigration judge, but he'd be back in the Bronx by the end of the day.
Showing 81–100 of 358 · page 5 of 18
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