Sarah Stillman
speaker
394 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Sarah Stillman’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
immigration court.
And what this administration chose to do was send them to an entirely different country, Ghana, where then Ghana then...
did exactly what they told me they feared would happen which is sent them back to the home country so at the moment in time that I spoke to them they were trying to get a journalist to write about their predicament because they feared they were about to be sent back it's called like chain refoulement to that other country and that was a situation where almost more complicated than interviewing children was just like what do you do when someone if you had spoken to them prior to their deportation they would never have wanted to speak about their immigration circumstances and
And maybe even once they got deported to their home country where they feared for their lives, they might not have spoken.
But I caught them in this moment when they had a profound, urgent, truly life-threatening need, and that made them willing to speak.
So that just made me think about how do we wrestle in this particular moment with the complex politics of...
what it means for someone to consent to that and with kids I often think about it through like the forms of creativity that kids bring to the table because as much as I think it's important to brainstorm like how do we make sure we build in like proper safeguards to the reporting I also think kids can bring forth so many creative ideas that the reader
can resonate with around the consequences of this administration's policies.
Like, for instance, about I did a project some years ago about people who had come here seeking asylum and who actually got deported and then were killed or harmed after their deportations.
And I wrote about a family in Texas of a woman who had lived here for many years, and she had an abusive ex-partner who had been deported to Mexico, and she got pulled over for a minor traffic violation, and she had two U.S.
citizen children.
And she wound up being sent back that same night across the border, deported.
And she told the border officers basically verbatim, when I'm killed next week, my blood will be on your hands.
And that's exactly what happened.
So I went down there and spent time with that woman, Laura's mother, but also with her kids.
And one of the ways I wrote about that in the piece and thinking about how to both honor their experience, but also not like overly violate their privacy was like they had wanted to share some writings that they had done for their mom.
Like they did an annual thing where they wrote a poem or wrote a message to her that they would like wrap up and put on a balloon and they would like release the balloons.
So I'd gone down on that birthday and was there for that ceremony and listened to that experience.
And one of them had written also a separate poem that he was willing to share with the piece.
And I thought that would be one way to kind of incorporate his voice in a way that he felt proud of.
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