The Bulwark Podcast - Jonathan Blitzer: Our New Internment Camps

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

While ICE is still murdering people in the streets, more than 60,000 people are currently being held in ICE detention centers across the country. The largest facility is at Fort Bliss in El Paso—which was an actual Japanese internment site in WWII. Detainees there are being deprived of needed medication; some have been held incommunicado; others have reported that the tent camp was not designed for humans to live there. When the conditions are not dire enough to make detainees self-deport, guards terrorize them into submission. Plus: Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants are particularly caught in the crosshairs of the escalating deportation campaign. And Tim holds forth on Trump's goons murdering our neighbors, ICE's reckless Kavanaugh stops, the straight-up Constitutional violations the administration is encouraging, and the illegal and marauding settler groups in the West Bank.The New Yorker's Jon Blitzer joins Tim Miller.show notes Jon's piece, "Locked Away" Nick Miroff's Atlantic piece on the Maine shooting  The NYT on Marco running Venezuela (gift link) The episode of "This American Life" Jon referenced, "What Is Your Emergency?" Jon's book, "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here" The HBO Max show, "Proud," Tim referenced

Hey, everybody. We got Jonathan Blitzer today talking about his article locked away in The New Yorker, and it is enraging. And that is appropriate because my blood pressure has been getting up the last few days. I was ruminating on the various news and the podcasts we've been doing this week on the planes, trains, and automobiles that took me to get back from Des Moines on Monday night. And I was thinking about what. it is that has me so riled up about everything this week. And I think that there's an element that connects the three main stories we've been covering, the Ice Murder in Maine, my interviews with Rokane and Pete Buttigieg. And I wanted to talk about that a little bit with you guys before we got to the guest. Because I think that there's one element of it that ties everything together that really animates me and the show and the bulwark. And I'm hoping animates all of you. I'm not a superhero guy. Okay. I actually didn't even know. I was like, who said with great power comes great responsibility? This was banging around my

head on the airplane. And I guess Spider-Man said it. I was hoping it was going to be like Churchill or Locke or something, but it was Spider-Man. So anyway, it's right, though. Spider-Man got something right. With great power does come great responsibility. And there really isn't any greater responsibility than the ability to inflict state. violence onto somebody. The state's control of your body, of your person, that is the maximum amount of power. The founders recognized that the state could wield this kind of power and that there would be people that would wield it corruptly, wrongly, viciously. And so they put it right there in the 14th Amendment, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property

without due process of law. The state could not use its violence and its power against you without giving you a chance to defend yourself. Staring to rid of habeas that the president, the president we're trying to get rid of earlier this year. And it is the fundamental bedrock principle of the American rule of law, the American system. It's a principle that has spread all over the world.

And we talk about, you know, and the conservatives talk about the West and protecting democracies and, you know, defending ourselves from, you know, the enemies of the West, the enemies of freedom. Like, one of the things we're supposed to be protecting is this, like this notion that, you know, people cannot be deprived of life or of property without being able to defend themselves. You can add that to the list of American ideals that these so-called Maga Patriots don't celebrate. They're more into like Cardillo-style governance. They'd love what's happening in El Salvador. They practice what the Peruvian dictator once called, To My Friends, Everything for My Enemy's the Law. That's what they like.

That's the system that they want. This morning, Donald Trump pulled back on the, I guess, for 20 hours, the administration said that they're going to put some guardrails around the Kavanaugh stops that have led to two murders this week, two deprivations of life. The president said this, we cannot give up one of ICE's most important and effective crime fighting tools, the traffic stop. Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal's hands. But the people that the state killed this week, and the criminals this week were the ICE agents. The people they killed weren't criminals. In Maine, Johan Guerrera was in the country legally on a work permit.

Houston, Lorenzo O'Rahoe, entered illegally 30 years ago, 30 plus years ago. But since then, he's been working, raising a family. He has no criminal record. And both were summarily executed in the street for existing while Hispanic. So on Friday, when Stuart Stevens is on the podcast talking about death squads, I have to admit, there was a moment when I was like, that might feel slightly overwrought. But within days of him calling them death squads, that killed another innocent person.

They shot him six times in front of his daughter. Not that it would have made it better if he was the person they're looking for, but he wasn't even the person they're looking for. It's fucking clowns. And, you know, some of you resonated. It seemed like with a comment I made last night on the next level. You know, Sarah was talking about the focus groups

and how people are just kind of numb by all the news right now. And I was like, I'm not fucking numb. And like, this is the thing to not be fucking numb about. if you're not going to protest, if you're not going to petition, if you're not going to post, if you're not going to show up when the state is murdering our neighbors, then like what is the point of all this? Like what is the point of the system? There was no constitutional protection. There was no 14th Amendment protection for Yohan Guerrero. He did not have due process of law. Neither obviously did Alex Preddy. Neither did Renee Good. Neither did many of the people that we were putting. in these internment camps that John Blitzer is about to talk to you guys about. The people with the guns, the people in charge, they're not using any judgment. They're not acting with the responsibility that comes with that power. They're not considering the rights of the man.

They admitted that their agents with their guns aren't trained well enough to do these stops. And so they're going to pause them. And within a day, the president, his goons, like Stephen Miller, said, no, fuck that. We're going to keep doing it. We don't care. We don't care about your rights. So that could be any of us. It's not most likely. It's going to be protesters. It's going to be enemies to the state to my friends, everything for my enemies to the law. The other thing that's, I think, worth noting here is that part of the responsibility what they're talking about, if you take their point of view, Trump's like, well, we got to, we're keeping things safe.

You know, we're keeping things safe for the criminals, so we have to do this. But that's also a lie. They have no consideration for the safety of their community. And the whole point of having the state violence is supposed to protect the innocent, right? But these idiot murderers killed two people this week that weren't even the subject of their investigation. The guy in Maine's spraying bullets in the middle of a peaceful hamlet in Maine. They're fucking lucky that more people didn't get injured. So, like, they're not doing anything to keep people safe.

The people that Blitzer's about to talk about who have been in this country for a long time that we're putting in these fucking disgusting internment camps, a lot of them weren't had no criminal record. They weren't any danger to anybody in their community. Removing them from the community in a lot of cases, if anything, is creating more danger, creating more dislocation, creating less continuity. So he's going to talk about that a little bit more. But when you act like this, right, when a person because of their skin color, because

their tattoo or because of the way that they're protesting, like that their life can be eliminated, that their rights can be eliminated without due process, what you are doing is you're acting like Buckelai acts. That's how he's quote unquote keeping people safe in El Salvador. That's what they want for here. They want to just send people to a big gulag, and some of them will be criminals that deserve to be there, and some of them won't put tough titties. That's the kind of government that the maga patriots want for this country. And that's how Israel is governing the West Bank.

The same abuse of power we're seeing in ICE, obviously the result is not as extreme. Nobody died. But it's like the undergirding principle is what riled me up about what happened to Roe. and Pete. I want to talk about the situation with Roe first. It's obviously more complicated. Israel is not a pluralistic secular democracy like ours. You know, obviously different rules, different type of constitution, religious background. But like, what was undergirding the outrage was this irresponsible use of state power. It was these, they've got these roving bands of quasi state militias. I mean, they're not really part of the state, the hilltop gang, whatever they're called.

but they seem to have the backing of the military. They are out there detaining American citizens. They detained an American government official with the implied force of a weapon. So I'll just do a quick aside here. I saw some of the comments. And then obviously, you know, people on social media attacking Roe and Cam are talking about how like they wanted this or this was a stunt. And, you know, a lot of times when I have politicians on the show, you know, politicians are going to spend and they're going to make their points. and I'm going to try to get to the facts, and sometimes it's hard to know, and you know,

you want to give them better for the doubt, you also want to challenge. So I understand people that would be skeptical of Rose travel to the West Bank. But in this case, I have the benefit of being friends with Cam and being on the receiving end of texts while they were being detained by the violent settler youth of Israel. I promise you, Cam did not want to be detained. he was, I don't want to betray his confidence too much, but he was scared shitless as he should be. It's PTSD.

He was in a fucking school shooting. Like while he was sitting in the car for 75 minutes, he was texting me the whole time. It wasn't texting me like, wow, this is going to be great. Rose's going to get some great press out of this when we get back. And it was like, dude, I'm scared. Like, this is scary. Like, this is threatening.

Look at these guys. Look at what they're doing. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know how we're going to get out of this. So like, okay, like, I don't know, you know, call the stunt if you want. Like a stunt is just a word you use when people do politics or do diplomacy or do, you know, anything publicly and you don't like it. You know, it's like when, you know, people calling it a stunt to people who are more sympathetic to Israel, et cetera. And it's like, okay, and that's fine.

And like, politicians go to Israel and go to the Western Wall and, and, you know, meet with hostage families. I don't call that a stunt. that's not a stunt. Their perspectives, you're trying to learn. You're a politician and you're doing simultaneously doing two things. You're trying to learn what's happening. And you're also trying to project, you know, a policy that you care about. Like, that's what they were doing.

And I promise you, they were not interested in having some 20-year-old lunatic with an M4 telling them they couldn't drive in an area that was, by the way, not restricted, despite the fact that many people were saying that it was. It was, like the Jerusalem Post said it was not restricted. like when it was restricted in the past was restricted because Jewish settlers firebombed in EU school. The whole thing is a fucking outrage. And it just gets gobbled up into this political like back and forth fight.

When it's like what is underneath all that is that as Americans, if supposedly you're traveling to an ally in the West and place where the rule of law, you should be able to go and see what is happening without fear that dudes with guns are going to stop you and menace you. you know, obviously there are people with different perspectives on happening. But as I look at what's happening in the West Bank, it's like there's not really any other Western allies where this is a big risk. You know, it's like, okay, well, even if it was a stuff, like even if you take the critics at face value and it's like, oh, they really wanted this. Like we're on Cam really. We're excited about being menaced and tormented by fucking kids with guns.

Where else in the world could you do this where it's our ally? I live in Louisiana. It gets pretty hot down here. There's nowhere in Louisiana where a foreign politician could come and think that, man, if I just troll around there for two or three days, there's a decent chance dudes with guns are going to pull up on me. It's possible.

We've got a lot of guns at the country, but it's not super likely. I've lived here for three years now. I get all around the state. Nobody's pulled a gun on me. I'm going to Germany this weekend. I'm not too concerned that when I'm in Germany, if I meet with somebody that I'm opposed

the government that like there's going to be a gang prevent me from being able to go wherever I want to go. So, you know, it's not really like a great defense either for folks who are trying to criticize, bro, they're like, oh, well, you wanted this. It's like, why did you make it so fucking easy on them? And it also is, again, if like everything was on the up and up, then when the soldiers showed up, you would think that the people they would have sided with was the American politician and not like random,

what are we calling it? Quasi security, quasi gang, roving settler mob. Pretty strange, but that's who they sided with. You'd think that if you were living in a rule of law situation, you'd think that that would be the person that would be detained.

The last thing on this is, there's some like commentary about like, oh, they didn't have any reason to be scared. They're overdoing this, whatever. It's like, really? Like you're sitting on a keyboard in America, being like,

a kid has been a school shooting shouldn't be scared. When he's sitting in a car being held up by somebody with an M4, don't know what he's going to do. Don't know when you're going to get out there for 70 minutes. I get it. It's easy to minimize, you know, they'd be like, well, it's just an hour. It's that big of a deal.

It's kind of like, yeah, it is that big of a deal. We've been a rule of law country. The government doesn't get to keep me for an hour holding guns, holding weapons, and just let me sit there and piss my pants and be scared. That's not like a way that you foster a commitment to people's rights. It's not a way that you make people feel safe. People don't feel safe when they can't be allowed to go about their business without fear that quasi-government gangs and military do. and fatigues will show up and hold them for an hour. So, yeah, it is.

Is it as big of a deal as getting murdered in the street? No, but it's a big deal. And it is an affront to the underlying principle that we should all care about. And that takes us to Pete. And Pete's case is even a little different. It's almost a innovation that Trump has come up with. Here, a private citizen weaponized state power against another citizen because they disagreed with their politics.

I think they're less deserving of rights or protection because their sexuality. And that was kind of like the promise of Trumpism. Trump people love this now. So as big thing around the don't say gay bill, if you are a random parent's rights and you don't like what a teacher's doing, you can call now and report them and have the state come and investigate them because you don't like what picture they had on their desk in the classroom, showing them in their loved one.

A lot of different examples of that. We see the abortion bounty law, et cetera. This is the innovative Trump form of democratic authoritarianism where the state gets to wield its power against you because people don't like you because you're the enemy, the domestic enemy, the enemy of the people, if you will. In Pete's case, maybe it wasn't state violence that was the threat, right? I don't, you know, he wasn't afraid that somebody was going to get a,

attacked or died. They didn't have guns. I don't think. I guess I didn't even ask. But it was state power and state coercion. It was his property going back to the 14th Amendment. And there were representatives of the state in his home doing a baseless search of his home, traumatizing his children based on nothing. But I told the coincidence this week. Maybe part of the reason my blood pressure is also. I've been watching this Polish gay show on Max, recommend it called Proud. I started watching it not because I really wanted to get riled up, but because I just watched any foreign gay prestige drama.

And so I just flipped it on, didn't know what the premise was. I kind of was under the pressure base of the preview. It was just sort of a Polish party boy doing ecstasy. So that's what I thought I was going to get. Instead, the premise of the show was the Polish state wanted to take away a gay guy's adopted kit because he was gay. And the whole narrative drama of this show is based on the fear that gay men have in particular that I talked to Pete about. That people come to their door. Maybe they'll be in jackboots and guns.

Maybe they'll just be social workers with clipboards. And they'll be able to separate you from your family. That they'll be able to determine that you're unfit, that the people in power, you know, don't think that that lifestyle is appropriate, that the state knows better, that they'll get to take your kids. kid. Like, that is an awesome power that the state has. And just like the people with the guns, the people with the clipboards need to wield it with the utmost care. And even though Pete and Chasner were only separated with their kids for a night, and dad is obviously not the same level of attack on our rights as Johan Guerrero, who was separated. from his child for life forever because he was gunned down.

Both stories strike at the heart of what our rights are as people who are in America. The fascists think that they can use state violence and state power against undesirables, against people they don't like, against people based on their skin color, based on their sexuality, based on their political orientation. Like we, we, the real people, patriots, like, we believe that people's rights are protected by the Constitution. The state doesn't get to do that to people, even if we don't agree with their ideology. Like, that's the fundamental difference.

And when we talk here about, like, what the purposes of the bulwark, and we talk about these, like, broader principles defending liberal democracy. Like, this is the essential part of liberal democracy. And this is bigger than our political fights. Underneath the umbrella of liberal democracy, we will disagree on what regulations are appropriate or, you know, what level of immigration is appropriate, what tax rate is appropriate. Like, what this is, though, is our way of life, is protecting our system, is protecting our fundamental rights. The fucking heritage Americans, they love that phrase, way of life. I'm like talking about that. Heritage, not hate. We're going to protect our way of life.

And they're talking about white Christian life. They're really just talking about whatever the Mago Americans want. That's their way of life. Well, the ability to know that you can parent, that you can drive freely, that you can do an Uber Eats drop off without fear that men with guns are going to shoot you or going to detain you or going to separate your children. That is the American way of life. Okay. We've not been perfect of that, obviously, historically. We denied black people that for whatever, 100 plus years. But that was the founding principle of the country. That is the basis of the system, that we have a way of life, and we get to protect our liberty,

protect our family, protect our homes without the government using their power to take it away from us. that's what unites the small ill liberals from the dsa socialists to the libertarians on the right and we have to fight for that we have to protect it and that is going to be the shit that animates me and that is going to be what we're going to be fighting about when I get back from vacation in two weeks so you guys got to fucking fight for it for two weeks well I take a little breather okay we got two more podcasts between now and then but um you know I I need to at least acknowledge that that's part of our life as well. That's part of our liberty as well. Okay. I get to take a little breather. But you guys, you guys have the con in the meantime. Okay. Up next, Jonathan Blitzer. He's so good. One thing I love about summer is how easy everything feels. The day is a little more relaxed. I find myself reaching the same comfortable, go anywhere, pieces again and again. That's why I keep coming back to my friends that you know it, Quince. They focus on well-made essentials that naturally become those everyday staples that you live in all season. long. You got these 100% European linen pants and shirts that are breathable, easy to throw on.

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And I like a European trunk. The American trunks are a little too hetero for my taste. So I'm going to be eye on the Italian swim trunks. Maybe something for you as well. It's not just clothing. Quince has become a trusted favorite as well. From home to travel to everyday essentials. Go check it out.

Make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.com. The Bullwark for free shipping on your order and 365-day return is now available in Canada, too. That's QI-N-C-E.com slash the Bullwark for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash the Bullwark. Welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted welcome back to the show. Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers immigration, politics and foreign affairs. He's the author of everyone who is gone is here. The United States, Central America and the making of a crisis. Great book. We talked about a bunch here.

It's Jonathan Blitzer. What's up, John? Hey, how you doing? Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Likewise. You appear like you might be coming at us from Guantanamo Bay, which given your research, I think is important that you... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a full immersion experience.

Yeah, this is a recent move, kind of all steer settings, but we're all right. Our connection is good. Your article in the New Yorker about what's happening at Fort Bliss Camp East Montana made me, like, want to chain myself to the fence of an ice facility, kind of like the environmentalist did in the 60s, they chained themselves to the big trees. to prevent them from getting cut down. Like, that's kind of where I was. I almost stroked out.

So I want to spend the whole pot on that. But first, I just think since it's relevant, I think we should just talk briefly about the latest in Maine. You were in Maine, I guess, for a hot minute. You told me, but the big announcement yesterday was DHS said that they were going to pause these traffic stops because ICE agents have murdered two people

and they weren't even the people that they were looking for in the streets in the past week. Susan Collins, Maine Senator had said she'd called Mark Wayne Mullen, and she was encouraged that they were going to stop those ICE Kavanaugh stops. Today, this morning, right before we got on, Trump, rug pulled that. We cannot stop the traffic stop. It must continue. Otherwise, we're playing into the criminal's hands. So I was kind of curious your thoughts on what was happening in Maine.

I mean, it just in a way just confirms all of our skepticism, no, after they announced that they were going to give a pause to that policy. I mean, almost immediately, even before Trump came out, Tom Homan, the president's so-called borders are already said, oh, this is just a temporary measure. This isn't really going to change much. Obviously, it's interesting that the borders are has kind of purview over Biddeford, Maine. Well, I mean, this is the whole game. I mean, this is the whole game. You know, it's like this starts, I mean, this is this is the whole perverse logic of the president's campaign to quote unquote secure the border. It's like right now, virtually no one is crossing the border. And the whole idea has always been to convert the kind of impunity of federal

agents in the U.S., northern Mexico borderlands, into kind of free reign over the interior of the United States. And so it's actually incredibly telling that Tom Homan, as borders are, is the person who presides over all of these operations in American cities, far from the border. I mean, like everyone else, I don't have any unique insight into just the general mendacity of the administration. So, like, they announce a pause to sort of try to calm the waters, but within whatever hours, Trump is back insisting that he has nothing to apologize for. I see advance, kind of making his usual comments. Holman is saying that they're staying the course.

And so it doesn't really seem like much is going to change. I feel like we spoke around the time of Minnesota the first time. And so it's like, here we are again. And this was supposed to be part of a kind of a rebranded effort inside DHS under Mark Wayne Mullen, a secretary, to kind of be, I guess, more discreet in how it conducted its operations. But it's inevitable when the imperative is to make a huge number of arrests where agents who are totally unaccountable

or driving around in unmarked cars. I mean, this is following a period of 10 days in which ICE officers made 10,000 arrests across the country. That's 2,000 arrests a day nationwide. It's extremely high number. I don't want to say it's inevitable that these sorts of things happen.

But frankly, given how this campaign has been unleashed and the lack of accountability, this is what we're going to keep seeing. It's an unspeakable tragedy. Yeah, actually, when we last talked, this is a little bit ominous for me to say this, but it was the day before they killed René Good. So as the stuff of Minnesota is starting to happen, and it really escalated after there.

So, you know, hopefully that's not a bad omen. I guess my question for you since you've been spent so much time at the border, you know, covering the type of enforcement they do at the border. You know, on the one hand, you know, I think the latest reporting for the Atlantic is the person that killed Wilhelm Guerrero was a new recruit who was maybe not trained properly. But in some of these other cases, it's actually been people that they've taken for the border and they're using these, you know, kind of more aggressive, I don't know what word you would use, but the type of enforcement work they're doing targeting cartels, targeting innocent

immigrants, et cetera, at the border is like different. It's not what you would do in a city or in a hamlet in Maine. And so anyway, I'm just kind of curious that your thoughts are on that given the time you spent covering this. I saw that Atlantic piece as well. And in many ways that document something we would have expected. I mean, it's really valuable reporting that, you know, As part of the general recruitment push, ICE has hired, what, 8,000 new agents in a very short span, and they've rushed them through training. They've cut training time and half.

And so, you know, this demonstrates at the very least a lack of preparation, the fact that, like, people who are unqualified to do this work are getting these jobs and that they're being rushed through and put out immediately on the street, tasked with something that, frankly, ICE has never really been tasked with doing before, certainly not at this scale. So that's a recipe for disaster. Then, as you say, there's at least until recently, certainly in the case of Minnesota, a big part of that wasn't just ICE agents. It was Border Patrol and CBP Customs and Border Protection agents on these roving patrols across the country.

That's where Greg Bovino, the infamous Greg Bovino was. And so that kind of tactic, that kind of, you know, just overly aggressive, completely unapologetic. I mean, I'm trying to come up with like sort of polite words for describing. Not a lot of consideration for habeas. Yeah, for instance, you know, among other things. You know, you were seeing that unleashed in the interior of the country. And obviously, you put that in like an urban setting. And there were a lot more bystanders.

There are protesters. There are onlookers. And like, these are not people who are in any way respectful of the rights of onlookers to be protesting or to be documenting what's happening. So there was all of that. And then to go back to, you know, the case of Renee Good. in that instance, the ICE officer who shot her and killed her was an agency veteran. And so that also speaks to the fact that it's not just a matter of individual training,

but rather the circumstances in which these guys are being kind of deployed. And deployed itself is a word that's pretty suggestive. But I think the right word under the circumstances. So I think it's interesting. Deployed to Biddeford, Maine. Right, exactly. The heart of the crisis. Because it's interesting, at the start of last year, I was spending a lot of time reporting

on Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, the kind of state of his immigration enforcement crackdown, which was known as Operation Lone Star, like an $11 billion, massive enforcement operation that led to all kinds of horrors. And one of the interesting things that started to get reported, I would say, around 2023, 24, in cities like El Paso, but also elsewhere along the border, was that there were high-speed vehicle chases by border patrol agents in urban settings. And there were a series of car crashes and innocent bystanders were killed and including, you know, drivers, pedestrians. And this was also an instance in which you were unleashing, you were kind of giving freer rain

to border patrol agents to kind of conduct these almost militaristic operations. But you're grafting them now onto settings where, you know, this isn't just some sort of like open road along the border in a rural remote area. You're having a high-speed chase in the middle of a city where people are walking by. There's car traffic. And it's interesting because I know that's also cropped up again with Trump's enforcement push, really since he took office, that, you know, you have people in these, you know, cities across the country, basically saying, you're making our city a more dangerous place, not just because you have armed masked agents who are arresting people, you know, just based on racial profiling and all the rest, or who are, you know, attacking people

for documenting what's happening, but also you have these unmarked cars speeding through cities unaccountably, scaring the hell out of people. You know, regular drivers don't know what to make of an unmarked car speeding out of the blue and chasing you. And that's actually part of this, too. Right. I mean, DHS claims, and at this point we see through all of these explanations or whatever, lies. But, you know, that people are weaponizing their vehicles. And it's like all the evidence we can get contradicts those claims. But also just imagine the implications of this. You're driving down the street doing your thing and all of a sudden out of the blue, an unmarked car starts following you. I mean, that's an overwhelming thing. And it certainly leads to panic. And I will say there was a,

there was a This American Life episode several months ago that played footage from 911 calls in different cities where enforcement operations were taking place, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles. And I was incredibly struck by what these phone calls sounded like. I would encourage people to listen. A lot of reporters across the country have done amazing work filing public records requests to get 911 calls from sites of these federal incursions into American cities. And you actually have ordinary people on the phone talking to 911 operators saying, like, what do I do? Like, What am I right? Can I fight back? Like, here's someone who I don't know who's not identifying himself as a federal officer who's accosting me with a weapon. Like, do I run? Can I run? Can I push him away? Like, like, how am I supposed to engage? And it was just incredibly, like, just viscerally, very jarring to hear that kind of footage because you're hearing people just try to make sense of what the hell is going on around them. You see it in the situation in Biddeford and with Carrero, right? It's like, and thank God, nobody else got head. I mean, like they fire six. shots. It's like, why are you finding six shots? You can watch the car. It's going three miles an hour.

Totally. Three-year-old is on the scene. You can, you know, just see that it's like this downtown, little quaint main town. You know, the whole thing is. Totally. Everything about it is macab. It's really unbelievable. You mentioned El Paso was happening there and you're reporting there. So that takes us to your latest in the New Yorker. It's focused on Fort Bliss and this East Camp Montana, this camp city that they created for detentions. But it starts actually talking about the case of Ray, who was part of this intensive supervision appearance program, ISAP.

It wasn't that familiar with it. And I think that it was an important way to start the story because it shows kind of the bait and switch that we were, you know, performing on these people, have been in the country for a long time now. So Ray is a Cuban man in his early 50s who came to the United States in 1994 in the midst of a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. 30,000 other Cubans came, basically on makeshift grafts to the United States. He was one of them, got intercepted by the Coast Guard, spent 11 months at Guantanamo Bay at the time, in turn there,

before he was eventually released to his father who lived in El Paso at the time. And he kind of has a period of waywardness and gets in trouble with the law. He's early 20s at the time, gets arrested in Florida for his involvement in robbery, and serves five years in prison, finishes his prison sentence. And because he's Cuban and because the Cuban government doesn't, well, didn't at the time and doesn't now really have relations with the United States, particularly in terms of receiving deportees, he was basically authorized to remain in the United States, was allowed to work legally. And eventually, the premise was, okay, you have to check in a couple times a year with a local ICE office as part of, you know, what's generally known as

an alternative to detention. This is something that a lot of people, even on the progressive end of the spectrum have pushed for over the years. Because it's basically, the idea is to recognize that the government cannot detain and deport everyone who might have fallen out of status or who might have some sort of problematic immigration history. And so Ray is part of a particular program or was part of a particular program that to date includes about 200,000 people. And the idea is very simply that, you know, you check in with your basically your case manager, you know, maybe once or twice a year. And otherwise you're allowed to lead a normal life. And actually, Ray's friends razzed him about it for years. They said to him, like, how naive could you be? Like, you're going to a local ice office. Don't you

think at a certain point they're going to arrest you? And I have to say, I was pretty moved by what he told me. He said, you know, look, we all made mistakes in our past. The only way we can correct for those now is we're older is to try to do things the right way. And so that was very much his plan. He starts a family in El Paso. He marries a woman. He falls in love with. She has a one-year-old son. He adopts that son as his own. They have an incredibly close family life. and all the while through the George W. Bush administration, the Obama administration, the first Trump administration, the Biden administration up until now has these routine check-ins with the so-called ISAP office and doesn't think much of it. And then in October of 25, he basically gets arrested at one of these routine appointments. He gets a call from his case manager. The case manager doesn't let on it there's anything out of the ordinary. She says, hey, why don't you stop by? We need to just check something in your file. And when, he shows up that morning. And of course, he's got his whole day planned. He's got $2,000 in his pocket because he has to buy a pizza oven because he's running a pizzeria. He just dropped his kid off at school. He's meeting his wife later that afternoon for lunch. It's her birthday. And then just goes in around 9 o'clock in the morning. And that's it. He doesn't come out. I mean, this is sadly an increasingly common experience for people who are in raised situation, who have these check-ins scheduled. But it's also true across the board. I mean, you even have people outside of the context of ICE itself who are showing up at an agent, at an agency called Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is

the agency at DHS that administers the legal immigration system, who are showing up for routine appointments, green card interviews, biometrics, you know, doing everything by the book, and find themselves basically getting arrested by ICE agents because that other agency is colluding with ICE. And so it's people who are trying to do things the right way, who are trying to do everything kind of above board, interact with the government, take the government at its word after, you know, essentially decades of playing by these rules and then they find themselves kind of all of a sudden getting arrested and then this new nightmare begins for all of it. I might have a heart attack over the course of this podcast, so we're going to do my best.

Yeah, yeah, it's really. I just, and obviously, as you mentioned, you know, this is happening to so many people, but it's just pretty stark in the article where, you know, Ray, it's like, okay, it's twice birthday, he's going to have lunch with her and then, you know, he gets detained and he gets put on a bus to this ice city and he tells him, he's like on this bus. us with a woman who's like crying, bawling because her kids are at school and she doesn't know where she's going. And it's insane. Yeah. Who's going to pick up her kids? I mean, it's like, you know, anytime you report these stories, it's like you focus in on one particular person and Ray

and I spent months talking. And so, you know, his world is so important to mine. And then, you know, they relate these kinds of moments, like hearing that woman sobbing about who's going to pick up her kids. And then it kind of for a second, it just takes you in that different direction. You think, oh, my God. I mean, think about. Think about that plot. You know what I mean? And it's like, oh, it's really, it's nightmarish, though. Okay.

So they get to Fort Bliss, which is a military base. So it's not meant for this. And they create this tent encampment called Camp East Montana, which is, I guess, the Texas alligator Alcatraz, basically. That's right. That's right. Yep. And the two, their fates are intertwined because the first group of detainees

to arrive at Camp East Montana. At a time, by the way, way when it was a literal active construction site. I mean, the tents are being erected in August when people get there. And there's testimony from people. I'm going to interview people, but there's also pretty extensive testimony at this point of people arriving and basically describing like dust everywhere, dust getting inside the tents, people coughing, people struggling to breathe. You know, things weren't set up, that there weren't visitation booths. There wasn't an outside recreation area, so people weren't allowed to leak the tents. The tablets that people are supposed to use to make calls to

lawyers or family members to have some semblance of contact with the outside world aren't working. And the majority of the people who arrived in those early days at Camp East Montana came from the South Florida Dissentian Center, the Alligator Alcatraz. And many of them, and this is like an especially concerning thing. And in some ways, this is actually what the kind of core intuition was when I first started reporting the story, is that these people had effectively been, in some form or another, disappeared by the state. These are people who, if you were to look them up in what's called the ICE detainee locator. There's a website that ICE has, and you're supposed to be able to look up someone with basic information to determine whether or not ICE is holding them at a

particular detention center, and it's supposed to say where they're being held. A lot of people, the vast majority of people originally who were sent to alligator alcatraz did not appear in any of these ICE locator systems. So family members and lawyers could not locate them. And then the same was true of many of them after they were transferred to Camp East Montana. And a source an administration source told me that that was actually by design. Someone actually went into the system. I mean, I don't know, like the IT of it. Someone went into the system.

And basically, for those entries that would have, that should have read, you know, being held at Camp East Montana, Fort Bliss, instead, the kind of generic response that you'd get if you'd type someone's name in was contact a local ICE office for more information. And so these people are really being held in communicato without any obvious evidence of of where they are or what's happening to them. You wrote down a couple of the other anecdotes you had from these early days. Fetted water leaked into the dining area and under the beds. Somebody quoted telling you, since we're not given anything to mop up the dirty water,

we had to use our own underwear. People saying I had not seen the sun for a month. There wasn't an option for. It's like these aren't even prisoners. Like yard time. I mean, fucking murderers get yard time in prisons. A lot of these people were not even criminals. You know, Ray's wife at a certain point said to me, she's an incredibly smart, interesting person who is really eloquent about all of this as just like a smart, ordinary person who's like trying to make sense of what it means. Here she is an American citizen who's like watching her husband put through this ringer. She said, in many ways, the people being held at Camp East Montana were less than prisoners. And that's exactly it. It's like, you know, and this is the thing, by the way, that also scared Ray once he got inside. I mean, Ray is not.

He'd been in a couple prisons, so he knows. Yeah, he knows. And actually, his perspective was meaningful for me because it kind of put, it allowed me to put some of this stuff in context. I mean, he'd been interned at Guantanamo Bay for 11 months in the mid-1990s, had been held in a Florida state prison for five years. And these are not places that coddle detainees. And the thing that freaked him out from day one at Camp East Montana was just the level of chaos. Like the fact that there was no protocol at all in place. You know, you'd say to a guard, I'm a diabetic as Ray is.

I have medication I have to take, and the guard would say, we don't care. It seems like he never got his medication. Literally never got his medication. And that's ultimately the reason why he accepted his deportation to Mexico, because he basically feared for his life. He lasted for six weeks. And basically, at a certain point, he was experiencing, you know, really scary symptoms. He wasn't able to urinate, throbbing headaches, lethargy.

I mean, for six weeks, imagine you're a diabetic. You're not getting any of your medication. You have blood pressure medication use of sake. That's being denied to you. And this is also an important to mention of Ray's story. This is someone who lives in El Paso. A large number of people who were held and are held at Camp East Montana are not from El Paso. And so they've been dislocated from their families and from their support systems even more.

But here's an instance where Ray's wife is able to visit every day. She lives nearby. She's able to get like a doctor's note from a nearby doctor. Like, you know, this, if there is anyone who's got a fighting chance. And even still. Exactly. You know, what he told me specifically was, you know, every day an ICE official comes inside to these tents and says to the detainees there, all right, who's ready to leave? And this is true all across the country at ICE detention centers. Basically, the idea, they're weaponizing detention. These are people who have been arrested and detained for civil, not criminal infractions. The vast majority of them have no criminal records. And they're being put in settings where the specific idea from the administration is, if we treat them badly enough, If we torture them enough, they'll just throw in the towel and abandon whatever legal case they might have. This is the cruelty is the point situation.

They're torturing people because they want them to say no mass. That's right. That's exactly it. And everyone describes basically trying to withstand that pressure for as long as they can. And Ray ultimately kind of crumbled when he started to think, okay, my symptoms are getting more serious. What would happen if I went into shock and needed to be taken to an emergency room? These same people who won't even let me see a doctor, who won't even give me my medication, are they going to, like, call an ambulance for me?

No, I'm going to die in here. And he's meeting people, by the way, who've been held there for two months, three months, four months. And he's thinking, okay, so this isn't ending anytime soon. Initially, he thought, okay, whatever, I can, I can fight this out for a couple weeks. I'm tough. But he had really no choice, but to just get out of there. This is like, I kept reading the article, and I was like, it's been a while. maybe this is a good vacation read

I need to go back and read read some Japanese internment stuff here because like that's what it was striking to me I mean like that's what we're doing to people in the country right now I mean it is extremely reminiscent it's not dramatic to say oh they would let me die because people are dying in there

and you write about people dying in Campos Montana and there's one a Dutch green card holder that told the AP yeah yeah he overheard guards betting $500 about which detainee would kill themselves next. There's another story that you talk about,

about a person that died where it seems like DHS was lying about what happened there. There are witnesses that say that he was being beaten to death. Talk about that. I don't think it's a stretch at all to reach for the comparison to Japanese internment. And I have to say, you know, this is like a kind of emotional and intellectual struggle

for me reporting this stuff is, you know, you're trying to find the nearest parallel. And there certainly isn't one in my lifetime, not on a scale like this. And of course, just to underscore your point, Fort Bliss was never one of the major sites for Japanese internment in the 1940s, but it was a site. There were 56 people who were held there in the early 1940s as so-called alien enemies. That connection is also literal. You know, what happened with Camp East Montana was, from the very beginning, there were reports of just the awfulness of the conditions.

And there were so many complaints about it that in September of 2025, the government accountability office and ICE itself send officials to do a site visit, which, by the way, was the first time that someone from ICE actually went to inspect the site, which is itself a violation of ICE protocol. I mean, they've stood up a facility and no one from the agency has inspected it to be sure that it's in compliance with the most basic, you know, elements of code. Exactly. So, you know, already as early as September of 2025, you know, within. a month or so of the facility opening, the government knew just the gravity of what was being alleged there. And actually, you quoted earlier some of the testimony of people who were, you know, cleaning up the bathroom with their own underwear and so on. That wasn't even said to me. That was actually said to the American Civil Liberties Union, which around this time was also taking declarations from people who were being held there. So there was like an increasing awareness

of what was going on there. And there was very good reporting on it. But it hadn't really the monstrousness of what was happening there had really penetrated public consciousness. And And what I think changed that was between December, 2025 and mid-January, 26, in the span of like 40-odd days, there were three deaths at Camp East Montana. The second of those three deaths was a case of a Cuban man named Geraldo de Nascampos who actually, like Ray, had come to the United States in the 1990s, had family in Rochester, New York. He did have a criminal record. He also had health problems. He had asthma, and he did an asthma inhaler. He also suffered from bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression.

He was on medication for all of this. There were documented instances in which he complained that he wasn't getting the medication he needed. And basically on January 2nd, he is killed inside the facility. And ICE immediately says, okay, this appeared to be suicide. Guards found him in a state of distress. And then, over time, within days, the El Paso County medical examiner, in his office, conducts an autopsy and reveals that actually the cause of death was homicide,

and that he seemed to have been choked to death. And then the testimony of witnesses starts to emerge. ICE changes its story. Its story now makes basically no sense. They describe guards finding him while trying to commit suicide, and they try to stop him from doing it, but he kind of tries to fend them off and continues. I mean, it really, like, plot-wise doesn't make any sense what ICE is saying. But all the while, you're getting incontrovertible accounts

from at this point at least five witnesses who were held in nearby cells in this isolation wing of the facility, who described basically Mr. Linus Campos begging for his asthma medication, being denied it, and basically in the final moments getting beaten and choked to death all while he begged for his life and said explicitly to them, I can't breathe, you're choking me, you're asphyxating me. You know, I think that was a kind of turning point just in terms of how the general public understood or even registered, frankly, what was happening at Camp East Montana. You know, a week or so later, there's the third death of the facility in this 40-odd-day span. It's a 36-year-old Nicaraguan named Victor Manuel Diaz, who, you know, seems to have committed suicide.

But, again, like, after ICE is revealed to be lying about this, who even knows what's happening inside there? I mean, this facility is a black box. You know, like referenced, I mean, they were joking about people killing themselves. They wanted people to self-deport. they kind of wanted people to kill themselves. Like, it seems like, at least, or they weren't doing anything to help prevent it. I mean, talk a little bit about these isolation part of the camp.

Like, it feels like something out of an 80s movie. Like, you know, we're putting you in the hole. Totally. Like, it's crazy. There was a little tent on the south side of the facility with a string of isolation cells held, as far as I can tell, between 20 and 25 people. And when I say, as far as I can tell,

This is the other thing, by the way. It's like we know so little about what's actually happening at this facility. They're blocking members of Congress from conducting oversight. What we know is this kind of patchwork of information gleaned from direct testimony of people have been held there, little sight lines that we get through, for example, Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who's able to get into the site a few times, you know, inside sources who are able to leak or share certain, you know, documents, etc. But we have not giving New Yorker reporters a tool.

I mean, I asked, you know, I was shocked. I was surprised that they declined, because I hear it's interesting. I hear that there's nothing wrong with the facility, you know. But basically, you know, there's this wing of isolation cells. And, you know, the way I understand what was happening there was essentially anyone who complained about any of the monstrous conditions they were facing inside this facility just got sent to the isolation wing. And, I mean, almost to a person, and this is the case with Ray as well. And actually, it's one of the echoes, the really eerie and upsetting echoes between his story. and the story of Herald Lo de Nascampos, both of them said, the guards threatened us with,

you know, being sent to isolation. At a certain point, Ray, for instance, at a time when they were denying him his diabetes medication, the guards showed up one day, and there are all these independent contractors who do different things at the facility, and they were supposed to clean his little unit inside his tent, and he didn't get out of bed. And they said, why aren't you getting out of bed? And he said, I'm not getting out of bed until you guys give him a medication, simple as that. and they said, please, like, listen to us this time.

You know, we will get your medication tomorrow. And he says, okay, I'm going to do this. This time, I'm going to listen to you. But tomorrow, if I don't have my medication, I'm not getting out of bed. I don't have any choice here. I don't know how to make this clearer to you guys. The next day, the same thing happens. And they say, okay, we're going to take you to isolation.

He says, I don't care. Take me to isolation. Just give me my medication and isolation. And, of course, they send him to an isolation cell. He spends eight hours there, comes out, no medication, just things, proceed apace, Lunas Campos said the same thing. I mean, there's actual, you know, from this witness testimony, there are actual moments where he said, I don't, I don't care if you send me to the shoe, as it's known, the isolation wing. Just give me my asthma medication. I can't breathe. And it didn't

matter. And so, you know, you have that going on as well. You know, to your point, it's like, the idea is so openly to mistreat people into submission that, you know, you're at a point where, you know, the majority of people in a lot of these units are just tapping out. And actually, there's testimony. There's a series of declarations that a bunch of Cuban detainees gave to the ACLU that I mentioned in the piece and that like really just scared the shit out of me, to be honest. Let's talk about that because I don't just tell the story about what happened to these Cuban detainees, but also there's like this political subtext that this is happening to Cubans at all that I think is worth exploring.

You talk about how, according to this testimony of the ACLU, the Cuban detainees, would get handcuffed, and if they refused to be deported, they'd get driven to remote stretches along the Mexican border, buses with masked men, waited on the other side. People started screaming this as a kidnapping. I mean, Cubans can't go to Mexico. So, you know, I mean, this is like what's happening. Well, to your point, just about this humanitarian emergency set against the backdrop of what's happening in Cuba and what the U.S. is doing. in trying to sort of strangle the island into different sort of submission, the nationality that has been sent in the highest numbers to Mexico of non-Mexicants is Cubans. The Trump administration

is sent at this point over 4,000 Cubans to Mexico. And the reason for that is they can't deport them to Cuba. But of course, the reality is if you're Cuban, you now live in Mexico. It's not your home country. There are all kinds of dangers, known documented dangers when you're a foreigner, or a foreign, you know, immigrant with no resources and no protection in a country like Mexico. And what's more... And no legal standing. That's the thing. I mean, like, you now basically have people who are in Mexico who don't have legal status to be there.

So they're starting from scratch. And before long, the Mexican government is basically going to start arresting them. And until it does, these people have no support system to rely on. They're sleeping on the street. They're sleeping in shelters. They're sleeping in churches. They're the objects of all kinds of, you know, violence and crime. And so that's a whole trend line in all of this, the Cuban population specifically.

It gives, not that we need more examples of it, but it gives lie to everything the administration says about the manner and reasons for its attempted intervention in Cuba. It's like, if this is about, you know, democracy, if this is about humanity, I mean, look what it's doing to Cubans in the United States. Who are Trump voters, by the way? It does make you want to go to Little Havana or Hialeah and be like, do you, like, do you know what's happening to your people. I mean, this is, this is insane. Like, like, these are not criminals that we're treating this way because they came here to flee communism. I mean, like, has Marco

been asked about this? Like, it seems like something. It's a good question. I don't know in his capacity of Secretary of State that he's, like, really spoken to this, all that directly. Certainly when he was a senator, I mean, if you heard him. I mean, the Secretary of State would have purview over, you know, deporting people to a third country. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it would be under his, prior to his, you know, you're serving in this administration, he was always very explicit during Trump One and during the Biden years about the dangers of deporting Venezuelans back to Venezuela and Cubans back to Cuba. And so, you know, the hypocrisy is plain to see. You know, it's interesting. This is a whole other universe, as you know, like sort of Florida diaspora politics. It's like a world into itself.

But in the limited time I've spent reporting on that story in Florida, what I've seen, and I don't think This is like an original observation, is that there are these generational class and racial divides among Cuban emigres and among Venezuelan emigres such that those who have some sort of political power in the United States, you know, people who have been naturalized or were born in the United States can vote, can kind of, you know, influence their local representatives. Those are people who came to the United States at a much earlier time, you know, tend to have, you know, generally more middle, upper middle class profiles and who see the latest way of people arriving with a certain skepticism.

And so there are all kinds of divisions within these communities themselves. But, you know, it's interesting. It's like someone who's, I've just been following it in a general way, whose stance on this is interesting. And you'd probably know more about the dynamics of this than I, is Salazar. Maria Salazar, who is sort of between a rock and a hard place, just electorally speaking on this issue, because she has now tried to make some symbol.

Aolic breaks with the Trump administration when it comes to immigration enforcement. She says this is going to hurt our midterm results. We have constituents who are supportive of the Republican Party. We're seeing family members getting swept up. Of course, Miami, along with Dallas, are the two cities until recently, as far as I know, according to statistics, where there have been the greatest number of ICE arrests. And the lion's share of those arrests in those areas concern Cubans. And so it's a real tangle.

It's a real tangle from the Republican side. To call it a tangle maybe is absurd at this point. It's more than a tangle. Yeah, I guess. I mean, it's just, it's really striking, just that, like, that we had, we're taking these Cubans to an internment camp in Texas. And then I apparently exposing them to, like, Breaking Bad style, you know, drug cartel terror in order to try to convince them to self-deport to a country where they have no status. I mean, it's insane. It's insane.

I mean, that, the testimony of those guys. who were basically like spirited away in middle of the night to the border and shown these masked men on the other side of the border. It's like, I mean, it's almost this stuff. You can't believe that it's true. And then you read in declaration after declaration these testimonies. And they're all consistent in the key details. I mean, there's something to it. It's shocking.

Now I'm back to that. I wanted to have a stroke. I'm wanting to go back to a little bit. I spent a little time in a little bit of Havana. I want to go revisit with some of the, some of the Jeb supporters I met, see where they're at on this. Let's talk a little bit about the contracting side of this, because you know, you reported on that as well. Like who is in charge of the tent camps? How much money are they making? It's a really weird murky story that I'm not even satisfied now that I fully understand just because of how strange so many of the plot points are.

So, you know, when this project is announced, it's announced as, you know, a billion plus dollar commission. There are some false starts right out of the gate. So previous contractors that had done work both for the Biden administration and other administrations, including Trump One, doing these kinds of, they're known in like government circles as soft-sided facilities. It's like one of the great Orwellian descriptions of this, you know, these tent camps. They're soft like literally. Like the material is soft. Yeah, exactly. And soft enough for, you know, dust to get in and for rain to loop through.

And so, you know, the typical contractors who, you know, would have put in vits for this were initially getting. given a contract and then the Trump administration clawed it back. There was speculation that maybe that was because there were ties between one of those major contractors and the Biden administration because they did a lot of work for the Biden administration and there was some personnel overlap between members of the board of this contractor and someone tied to Doug Moff, Kamal Harris's husband. The governing claims that there was nothing untoward here. They just, for technical reasons, kind of pulled those contracts back. Sources I spoke to said, no, no, no, this was all about, you know, contractors being on a kind of no-com.

contract list because of prior contact with the Biden administration. But the short of it is, last summer, a contract goes out for this billion-plus dollar, you know, project at Camp East Montana. There are 11 bidders who put in proposals. The company wins is this completely obscure company called acquisition logistics that no one has ever heard of. Initially, when people first looked it up online, the website of acquisition logistics was password protected. It didn't really fully work. You know, people were using public databases to try to figure out, okay, how many employees actually work for acquisition logistics? You know, the numbers came back anywhere between five and 50. You looked at the headquarters listed on its filing documents. The headquarters corresponded

to just a suburban residence in Richmond, Virginia, that happened to be the residence of the CEO of the company, a 78-year-old Navy veteran named Kenneth Wagner. He himself, as far as I could tell, didn't have any overt political donations, say, to the Trump administration. I mean, who knows, but like, I couldn't find anything. Certainly, some of the subcontractors involved, and that's what happens here, too, is there's the kind of general contractor, and then there's a whole host of subcontractors. So you've got a subcontractor who's in charge of building out different aspects of this facility in July and August of 2025. And then you've got a bunch of contractors who provide guard services, medical services, food services, to the extent that to a lot of the detainees there, they're often telling me, I don't even see ICE officials here that much. I'm mostly just seeing these independent, you know, these contractors who have different briefs at the facility, but who seem mostly unprepared and uninterested and just kind of float past us. And so some of the subcontractor, some of the companies involved with subcontracting different

services of the facility did have more overt ties to the Trump administration, to, you know, campaign donations and so on. But basically, you know, one of the strange things about how this whole thing played out was one of the other companies that placed a bid last summer for this job, filed a complaint with the government saying, okay, acquisition logistics won this contract. There are all kinds of obvious flaws with their proposal. They don't, they don't comply with two of the requirements for this proposal. There's some like dear leader rhetoric in there. Exactly. We want this because Mr. Trump is so great. Exactly. Like ICE is doing such great work. You know, we want to make sure ICE is able to do the great work. You know, it's like I, you know, you look at these proposals, and it's like, it's like a different language.

I had to share it with experts, you know, who worked in government, like parse some of the language and all into a person say to me, okay, acquisition logistics proposal is this like boilerplate nonsense. There's nothing distinguishing about it. And so some of these other companies actually, you know, file a complaint with the government. And typically what's supposed to happen is when another contractor, you know, complains or alleges that there's some sort of irregularity in the contracting process. you know, that's supposed to halt the process. The government's supposed to investigate. But under these circumstances, the government responds in writing by saying, we can't. If we were to do that, it would exacerbate an existing detention crisis. Because, of course, that's what's happening, again, in the backdrop of all of this last summer, the Trump administration is ramping up arrest operations across the country. And it's also, in July of last year, it's also ISIS created a new memo, basically saying, in a radical reinterpretation of an old immigration.

law that it's going to hold undocumented people at arrests without bond. So you basically have a situation in which ICE is trying to arrest more people and it's releasing fewer of those people. In fact, it's blocking the release of people who are in ICE detention. So they have an acute need for facilities to hold people. And so when these irregularities are alleged, the government says, look, like, we're in the midst of an emergency. We can't deal with that. And so acquisition logistics kind of rolls through this process. And, you know, acquisition logistics not only never had a to do this kind of work before, but this is a billion-dollar contract. The highest value contract it ever had with the federal government was $16 million

for work on a naval base before. So it's like, you know, they're very obviously unqualified. And so in that sense, you know, no one's surprised when there are all these complaints right out of the gate that there are these problems and irregularities in the facility. The least important part of the story is how much of our money that is being pissed away here, but it is hard to even wrap your head around. I mean, it's like totally unnecessary, right? It's like to detain people, the vast majority which don't need to be detained.

The Ray system was working fine. The ISAP system was working fine. And by the way, and by the way, inside, I mean, like the government accountability office put out a report in June that documented all kinds of horrors. But one of them and one that I de-emphasized in the story because on a moral level, as you say, it sort of feels like the least of all the problems. Is that like all this money is being pissed away, even just on a day-to-day level. Like, they're not being efficient in how they're administering any of these contracts. So it's like that's a whole, the level of waste is being, has been documented by the GAO, but it's like a whole other chapter of it.

We'll get the vice president on it. He's the frauds are. He'll look at it. I'm just curious before I lose you, I wanted to just, you know, have you kind of put your everyone who has gone his here hat on and the interplay between what's happening and, you know, here and what we're doing in Venezuela and Cuba. You know, I mean, obviously, like that book was about our adventures in Central America, the 80s and the reverberations, you know, decades later.

And I'm just kind of wondering, I don't know, if there are any lessons of prop to mind or anything that you're noticing as you see what the Trump administration is trying to do in Cuba and Venezuela. The thing that to me is most striking about the American intervention in Venezuela this year is that obviously there was an ideological faction

kind of ginning for that outcome. You know, Marco Rubio had wanted some outcome like that for a while. Of course, the way he claimed it would play out would be that the opposition, which did have popular legitimacy, would in fact fill the void, and this would be about restoring democracy. Of course, that's out the window. You had people close to the president who saw this as an exercise just in the president for his muscles, oil theft, etc. But, like from my vantage point and to your question of the kind of the connection between immigration policy and foreign policy or vice versa, I mean, they sort of obviously happen hand in

hand. One of the most striking things, and I'm so grateful to how much attention you've brought to this, the Venezuelans who were sent to Sikot, the maximum security prison in El Salvador, they were sent there in March of 2025 on the grounds that they were, quote, unquote, alien enemies. And the premise of, I mean, the completely half-daked, ridiculous premise of that was that Maduro, as leader of Venezuela at the time, was somehow running a prison gang in Venezuela called Thrain Dara'a, which not only is just simply untrue, but which U.S. intelligence actually refuted. But never mind that. You know, Stephen Miller and others saw this as an opportunity to basically make literal what they have always described with hyperbole, which is that mass migration

represents a kind of foreign invasion. And so this was the kind of actual nexus in that way of thinking between immigrants arriving in the United States and this sense of kind of international threat and conflict. And so, you know, when they topple Maduro, in some ways, you know, the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that lead up to that. It's all on this continuum where you are branding Venezuelan immigrants living in the United States as alien enemies, and you're kind of using that logic to intervene in the country itself and try to topple the regime. And that's one of the ways that they can kind of square the circle of, you know, the obvious contradiction of they're trying to deport people to a regime that

they themselves are saying is repressive, which is the history of U.S. and Central America, too, you know, the U.S. propping up these regimes in the region. And when people flee to the United States to seek protection, the United States as well. Is it really repression? Well, of course, they're not going to say that because it's a U.S. ally committing to repression. So, you know, the idea now that you have the powers running Venezuela being essentially the same players that were active in the Maduro government at a time when the Trump administration is trying to cancel TPS for 350,000 Venezuelans. I mean, it's... Do you have a sense for how much things have changed in Venezuela? I feel like that's kind of hard to get a grapple around. It's a good question. I personally don't have a sense. I mean, Venezuela is not my area of expertise, and I've not been there since, you know, I've not been there at any point recently. And I mean, from the reports I read, I mean, obviously now there's this humanitarian emergency because the earthquakes. But it seems like there's the same kind of general level of political repression that existed before, only now, I mean, there was a recent Times report documenting how

basically Rubio is coordinating all of the actions of Delis de los Rodriguez. And so the U.S. now is basically running the country. What's happening in Cuba is the same sort of dynamic. I mean, it's just basically like emiserating the population and the connection, the kind of notional connection between restoring democracy and doing what is in the best interests of the, you know, the populations of these countries is just out the window. And so if you're a Cuban or if you're a Venezuelan right now and you're in the United States, you're in, you're experiencing the worst of all possible worlds because you're basically being dispossessed on both sides. And that's how you end up with, you know, Cubans in Mexico or, you know, Venezuelans right now, you know, living in the shadows because even though they had temporary protected status, even though Marco Rubio is senator, whatever, four years ago, described that being deported to Venezuela would be a death sentence to those who had TPS. Now the administration doesn't much care. And so I kind of think what you're seeing is essentially on steroids, the hypocrisy. I mean, the really horrific American hypocrisy. It's been a fact in the region now for decades.

woof okay well so people don't do self-harm i'm going to end on one positive ish thing you do have some stories of kind of the legal pushback and the success of that with kind of the frame being for plus you mentioned one guy brandon mcbride who was like had a legal practice in san antonio where he sued insurance companies but because he had was past the texas bar he was kind of helping lawyers in other states file for habeas for some of the people there so there is there's some positive stuff happening, I guess. For all the horrors of this, I have to say, it's like obviously reporting this. It's just, it's extremely upsetting.

But then there are also these moments where people just the ingenuity and the resilience and the sense of commitment of people. I mean, like what you're describing now is how in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, people were getting arrested and sent immediately to El Paso. And their immigration lawyers couldn't apply for habeas to get them out of detention because they weren't licensed in Texas to practice law. And so all these people come out of the woodwork, you know, people who don't typically work on immigration matters, who are just aghast at what's happening. And so I do think that like when ordinary people are exposed to these horrors, you see them respond in extraordinary ways.

And that does give, that does give me hope, honestly. I mean, it's maybe not as much as we'd like to cling to, but it's real, but it's real. All right. What do you got next, Blitzer? What are you working on? I don't know, man. I don't know. I, I, um, I'm trying to, I'm trying to take it one day.

a time here because this is this was a dark one and actually what happens to me with these stories is as i'm in the trenches working on them i can kind of compartmentalize and get myself through and then the story comes out and it kind of all really hits me yeah like as far as i'm concerned you know in terms of immigration enforcement stuff i mean detention i don't think we can do enough to cover what's happening inside detention and there are over 60 000 people being held by ice right now across the country so like that's one line of of reporting that has to continue i think like more of what we're seeing not just from ICE, but from citizenship and immigration services, you know, trying to basically strip people of status they already have. That's a huge plot point. So I'm going to try to

kind of gear myself back up and then dive back into that, probably that particular fray. All right. Good luck, man. Have a couple gummies in the meantime. Sure thing. Thanks for having me. It's always good at talk. We'll see you next time. And everybody else will be back tomorrow. Will it be more uplifting tomorrow? I don't know, probably not, but man. It can't be less, right? So we'll see all then. peace. The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Anzley Skipper,

and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.