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
What was going through your mind while you were in the elevator?
I cover immigration for The New Yorker, and quite frankly, I've been scrambling to document everything the current administration has done over the last 18 months.
It has made radical changes to the U.S.
immigration system, upending the lives of immigrants across the country.
And these major policy shifts are getting overshadowed by news of immigration agents shooting and killing people in the streets of American cities.
But more than anything else, what I see happening is that the president is trying to sabotage the system of legal immigration.
And that is making the country a much more hostile place for immigrants.
President Trump has canceled the existing legal status of hundreds of thousands of people.
Our nation's promise to be a place of refuge for the persecuted is anathema to this administration.
It wants to end that promise once and for all.
Arresting people in immigration court is unprecedented.
Had Olseni arrived in the U.S.
a year or two earlier, he would have left the courtroom that day and returned to the Bronx just like he expected.
Instead, he found himself handcuffed in an elevator headed to the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza, where ICE has a field office.
Were you put in, like, a cell?
Were there other people in that cell with you?
This ICE field office is not supposed to hold anyone for longer than 12 hours.
But last summer, ICE was arresting so many people from the immigration court and from elsewhere around the city that the field office was jam-packed.
In fact, more than 1,000 people have been held there since January 2025.
Alcini had no idea what was happening.
Showing 101–120 of 358 · page 6 of 18
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