The New Yorker Radio Hour - One Refugee’s Journey Through ICE Detention

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

In 2025, as ICE was struggling to meet an impossible goal of three thousand immigration arrests per day, the agency took an unprecedented step: picking people up when they arrived at immigration court. These were immigrants seeking legal status through appropriate channels. The staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, who has been reporting on immigration for over a decade, tells the story of one man detained this way, a Guinean refugee who was seeking asylum after a severe beating and death threats by his government. His first name is Alsainy, and his story exemplifies the ways that the Trump Administration is sabotaging the system of legal immigration.  Further reading:  “Inside ICE’s Largest Detention Center,” by Jonathan Blitzer “For the Nation’s Birthday, Making It Harder to Become an American,” by Jonathan Blitzer “Trump’s Mass-Detention Campaign,” by Jonathan Blitzer New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. 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 Al-Saini. Al-Sani was early in the process of applying for asylum in the United States when he walked into 26 Federal Plaza in June, 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-Sani was there a year ago. Al-Sani is his first name. He asked me not to use his last name. Yeah, at the beginning, I was in scared at all, because when I first went, there were a lot of people there.

Everyone was busy with their own situation. So it wasn't nothing concerning to me. 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 Alcena didn't know what to make of some of the horror stories he was hearing

about the Trump administration. But choosing to do that, things the right way. It gave him a sense of confidence. Because I had not done anything wrong, there was no reason for anything bad to happen to me. The meeting's short. The judge schedules another hearing so that Al-Sani 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. They were not wearing proper uniforms. but they also had something written on its eyes.

They had face mask right after I came out, then they grabbed me. Al-Sani'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. in my water. I told them, no, I wasn't going to go with them. Because I had just seen the judge, so one of them actually grabbed my bag and said, if I don't come with them, they will do a bad thing to me.

This wasn't the first time Alcani 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. So I was resisting at first, but they just pushed me inside the elevator and pinned me now and then put the handcuff on me. You might have seen videos of people being arrested just like this at 26 Federal Plaza, New York. This is one of the many hallways in lower Manhattan where mass immigration agents have been apprehending people outside of their routine immigration court check-ins. 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. Al-Saney was a case in point. He thought he was just seeing an immigration judge, but to be back in the Bronx by the end of the day. What was your, what was going through your mind while you were in the elevator? I said to myself, you're going to be arresting me, and you're most likely going to be sending me back to my home.

country. So I was very concerned about that. But then I said to myself, if that way to happen, you know, I would rather be detained here or even killed here than be sent back to where I had come from. 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 Al-Sania 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? Yes, we were in the room. There were more than 60 of us in that room. I was there for two days. You couldn't lay because there was no space to lay down. For you to sleep, you will have to sit down,

and they will give us some water, but they will also give us some cookies. that's what we had for food. 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 a thousand people have been held there since January 2025. Al-Sini had no idea what was happening.

Why was he being held? How long would it last? Agents kept pressuring him to sign things. He's smart and canny, but he never really learned to read or write. And in any case, the documents were in English. He refused to sign them. And good thing, too, because some of them, it turns out, could have got him sent back to Guinea. Alcini didn't have a lawyer. There was no one for him to call.

Could you communicate with other people who were in the room with you? Yes, there were many Fulani speakers. And so we will talk. And right there actually saw many who had some. document saying they would rather be sent back because they didn't want to be in that situation. Two days later, after watching more people come and go, Al-Sini heard his name called. He and some other men were taken out of the building. Again, someone handed him a document he couldn't read.

We were shackled. They said we were all being taken back to our home country. But then once we came out, I was taken to a separate direction. Eight people were loaded into a van. It's nighttime. They drive for hours through the dark. And in the early hours of the morning, they pull up near a jail in the middle of Pennsylvania.

They're at Isis-Moshannon Valley Processing Center. Al-Sahni will spend the next six months at Moshanon. So we're on the corner of Marcy Avenue in Hooper Street in Williamsburg, outside of this beautiful old church. And we go down these stairs into the basement of the church. And that's where this log, clinic has its offices. Hello.

Hi, Heather. Good to see you. Good to see you. Heather Aksford is the director of Central American Legal Assistance, known as Calla. She radiates the kind of gentle assuredness that helps when she's dealing with skeptical judges and nervous clients. So the office opened in the mid-80s, but it's sort of expanded through the years. Yeah, so we're like walking into there. There's like a few desks.

The ceilings, I have to say, are very light. I know. I'm so sorry. And, like, even more watch out for, like, the beans. Kala is in a warrant of offices in the basement of the Transfiguration Church. It's been here since the 1980s. Desks are tucked in every corner with papers piled high. Lawyers take calls in English and Spanish.

Heather has represented thousands of clients. During the first Trump administration, the advice was straightforward. File your case and start the legal process to regularize your status. You spend, you know, for me almost 20 years, Telling asylum seekers, go to all your appointments, go to court, tell the truth, get your proof. And I took for granted that implicit in that is court will be safe and you will be heard. And last year corrected that for me, right? What is most shocked you?

I think it's how lawless it is. It's like an animus against due process, right? The law is as we declare it, right? makes it really hard as an attorney advising people, because I can advise people as to what the law is. But that's increasingly at odds with what their experience will be. We know where this shift started. Late in May of 2025, the White House was angry

that the government wasn't deporting more people faster. So top officials set a target for ICE, 3,000 arrests a day nationwide, well beyond what the agency was capable of. A week after that, ICE appeared, to have given agents the green light to start arresting people at immigration courts. The administration also issued a directive to immigration judges, telling them to dismiss cases on the spot without hearing evidence or putting decisions in writing.

The idea was to set people up. Someone shows up for court. The judge dismisses the case straight away. ICE officers are waiting outside to detain and deport them. The first couple days, people didn't understand what was happening, right? And you would even have people being like, oh, yeah, dismiss my case. Great. But then pretty quickly people were educated. I jumped in on a case after the gentleman had been detained. And he was like, I had my proof.

I'm like telling the judge, no, don't dismiss my case. Look, I've got this proof. I've got these things to show you. And it doesn't matter. Alcena has caught up in all of this. And after two days in a holding cell with virtually no food, he's sent to a detention center in Pennsylvania. He's desperate to find legal help.

and he comes across a list of pro bono law offices. It's alphabetical. Kala is near the top. He calls the number and in his very limited English says he's from Guinea. Kala mainly works with Central Americans. But as he's explaining his situation, one of the staff attorneys, Andrea Noons, hears his last name and recognizes where he's from.

When I heard the last name, I was like, I bet he's a Fulani guy from Guinea, and I bet he's got a killer case. Andrea worked with Fulani people before she was at Kala. She knows about the girls. government violence that followed a coup in Guinea in 2021. He sounded like he didn't have a lot of hope and he sounded really overwhelmed. So you guys have this follow-up conversation with an interpreter.

Yes. Is that when you start to really get a kind of fuller command of the details of his case? You must, like, your lawyer brain must be going now and he must be thinking, wow, this guy's actually got a pretty strong asylum claim. Such a good claim. You're smiling as you say. I see the fire in your eye. Alcani's claim is so strong

because he's been subjected to violent and clear-cut political persecution. In 2023, he was at an anti-government protest when a group of state security agents arrested him. They beat him unconscious. He woke up hours later in a jail cell, covered in blood.

He was held for about a week, and before he could leave, the agents took his photograph and threatened him. If they saw him at another protest, They'd kill him. Claims that are so strong that you were tortured in state custody after you went to a political protest, a peaceful political protest. Oh my gosh. That's what people think of when they think of asylum, like people who don't know very much about it.

Yeah, it's like so simple. But you know, unfortunately, that no matter how strong your claim is, if you don't have representation, it's so hard to win by yourself, especially if you're detained. Because how can you call your family in Guinea to get documents? if you're detained in the U.S. Al-Sani and Andrea spend almost three months putting together the evidence for his asylum case. He shares the details of his story, and then Andrea tries to run down the evidence.

That means calling Al-Sani's sister and mother back in Guinea so they can work the bureaucracy there to get key documents, medical records, witness statements. All the while, Al-Sani is stuck in Moshanan, where he lives in a room with men from all over the world, each of them in some kind of limbo. We were about 30 people in the dorm, but each person has their own bed, and then we had about three TVs, and we could also go outside, play soccer, play basketball. Al-Sahini falls in with a guy from Sudan. When they can use the recreation yard, the two of them walk around, talking.

The other man has lived in the U.S. for decades. They speak in English. This is how Al-Sanee begins to learn the language. What did you guys talk about? We talk about getting released, sometimes he was, like, because he had been a long time. We talk about getting released. When he got detained, he used to live in Pennsylvania. He got his wife and kids in Pennsylvania. The guy came to the state when he was like a kid. All his family is here, so he doesn't even know where they're going to send him.

It's easy to forget the fundamental horror of a place like the Moshanin Processing Center, which is that many of the people who are held there have not. not committed any crime. People lose hope. They get desperate. At least two people died in Moshannon while Al-Sani was there. There were two that I still remember. There was one of a Chinese guy who actually hung himself. He committed suicide. There was another guy who complained. He was having chest pain. They called upon the guard, but no one came. And he was too late by the time he got the hospital. So there were some rough things happening in there. But you have to have courage for you to continue to survive in that situation, right? And so that's what I gave myself

so that I can continue to fight for my case. Alcena had been detained at Michanan for four months when he finally had his asylum hearing on September 29th. The judge seemed like a nice judge, but I was concerned that I was going to lose. my case. The asylum hearing was virtual. The judge was in Maryland. Al Saini was in Pennsylvania. Andrea was in New York.

It's funny because when you go into the final hearing, as the attorney, you, like, in your mind have the things that you think might be the issue. I was worried about the judge being like, he's bad at dates. I don't believe him. Because that's a big thing with asylum is credibility. And, you know, Alcini, he was severely beaten in the head,

which we had documented. But I was nervous that even when it's documented, that they would still be like, I think he's lying, or something like that. But that wasn't the issue. The judge totally believed him. She found that he was open and his responses and candid with the court. The hearing lasted several hours, and in the end, the judge was persuaded. Al-Sani had been persecuted at the hands of the Guinean government.

She made her decision that day, finding that he was being targeted because of his political opinion. If he were returned to Guinea, she wrote, Al-Sani would likely be jailed and possibly killed. by the government. As a result, legally speaking, the U.S. could not send him back there. And yet, the judge denied Al-Sanis asylum claim. The reason was technical. During the Biden administration, the government created a controversial regulation that took asylum off the table for anyone who didn't enter the country at an official port of entry. Al-Sani crossed into the country from Mexico illegally in March of 2024. He was sick at the time, likely with Chikungunya, which comes with a high fever, rash, and extreme joint pain.

Those at least were some of the symptoms Al-Sani had. So Andrea makes the case that Al-Sani had a medical emergency, which was grounds for an exemption from the Biden-era rule. But the judge disagrees. And by this point, Al-Sanis learned enough English that he can understand what the judge is saying. So, yeah, so I want to... So yeah, so at one point I heard the judge say, I'm not sure you, I'm going to be able to do it,

so yeah, so at one point I heard the judge say, they were not sure what I deserved to be granted. My asylum, so I was really getting angry and wanted to respond, but of course they would not talk to you directly. I could tell that he was understanding her decision when he looked so defeated and so bummed. But then she was like, but my alternative, is that, you know, he is eligible for withholding of removal relief.

Instead of asylum, the judge grants Al-Sanee something called withholding of removal. I'm going to parse the legalese here, because this is another major shift in how immigration law is getting reinterpreted. People who win asylum can eventually apply for permanent residency or a green card. People with withholding can't. But they also can't be deported to their home country. So this is historically counted as a win. So my lawyer explained to me we will then continue to work on my case, but also this was going to allow me to come out of detention. Be released.

I remember calling a friend who does a lot of detained representation, and he was like, that's awesome with holding is really hard to win. Like, you should definitely feel proud of yourself, but your client's not getting out. That's Andrea News, an immigration lawyer in New York. Our story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stay with us. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Jonathan Blitzer.

I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker, and I'm sitting in today for David Remnick. On today's episode, we're taking a close look at the ways that the Trump administration has been overhauling the nation's immigration system. We'll continue with the story of a man from Guinea who was detained after an immigration hearing. That's an unprecedented step that ICE began taking in 2025.

The man's name is Alessette. Al-Sani were only using his first name for his safety. At his asylum hearing, a judge denied Al-Sanis asylum status, but she granted what's called withholding of removal. That meant that Al-Sani couldn't be deported back to Guinea. Before Trump's second term, most people who had won withholding of removal would be released from government custody.

But that's not what happened to Al-Sani. He spent the rest of the fall in Mushanan. By December, he'd been locked up for six months, even though the government wasn't appealing the judge's ruling in his case. And meanwhile, the Trump administration was in the midst of a highly public battle about withholding of removal. Kilmar Abrago Garcia. Kilmar Abrago Garcia. Remember Kilmar Abrago Garcia from El Salvador? That's the Maryland man who, in the beginning of the Trump administration, was picked up and

deported to El Salvador, mistakenly put in a prison there, and then had to come back to the U.S. There's an ongoing fight to deport him to Liberia. Abrago's attorney say he should be sent to Costa Rica instead. In the first year of Trump's second term, the government deported some 15,000 people to third countries. One group wound up in South Sudan, another in Eswetini. Afghans and Iranians were sent to Panama, a Colombian woman to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It wasn't just that these people were deported to an unfamiliar country. That country was often just a short stop on the road back to the place they'd fled. This has now happened to two of Andrea's Guinea- clients. Both had one withholding of removal in immigration court, and both were deported to

Ghana. But the government of Ghana doesn't care about the ruling of a U.S. immigration judge. And so Ghana has since sent both men back to Guinea. Both of them are currently in hiding. So even with the withholding of removal decision in his case, Alseini, like Abrago Garcia, was in a new kind of jeopardy. If they sent him me to a third country, they just put him into a worse and worse situation. There was a bond hearing to determine if Alcani could be released now that he had won withholding of removal.

But it was full of mishaps. The translator kept getting the facts wrong, garbling Al Sani's answers. Instead of a rash from his illness, the interpreter said Al Sani had pimples on his skin. Sometimes the interpreter used French words, which Alcani couldn't understand. They lost the bond hearing.

Andrea filed a motion to challenge the decision. In the meantime, though, Al Sani and Andrea knew that he could be sent out of the country at any moment. They came up with plans for what to do if that seemed to be happening. We would practice. I would pretend to be ICE, and he would be Al Sani, and I would be like, oh, Al Sani, we're going to send you to Ghana.

And then Al Saini would, like, do his practice. And he'd be like, I cannot be removed to Ghana because I have an appeal pending with the BAA, and I have an automatic stay. But, like, we would do this. You had to come up with a script, essentially. We would practice it all the time, just because, you know, thankfully, again, Al Saini did speak. He speaks really, I'm really impressed by his English. Again, it's not good enough for court, but, you know, for...

Well, he essentially learned it in immigration detention. Yeah, it's so wild. But he can advocate for himself. The new American dream. It's like such an incredible dystopian version of cultural assimilation. But I thought to myself, okay, like, maybe if they accidentally try to send him somewhere, he can advocate for himself and they'll understand. ICE tends to move people with little to no warning. Often, the only way that someone finds out that they are about to be moved,

is that their commissary account is frozen. They can't buy food or make calls. One day, late in December, Al-Sani's account stopped working. He tries to make a phone call, but can't. He and Andrea have a plan for this, too. They've put money on our friends' account. He calls on Andrea and puts Al-Sani on the line.

You know, my commentary has been shut off. He was really worried. He was like, I'm scared. And those are, like, though, I feel like the worst words to hear from someone, especially in his situation. Within hours, Alcani's on a bus heading who knows where.

Once we got off the bus and then they took us into an airplane, then I said to myself, oh, wow, so they finally actually going to be deported me. So I was really, really worried at that point. When the plane finally lands, the ice agents say,

Some of you are staying here, but then others are going to be continuing. They read through a list of names, A few people get off. Al Sani does not. The plane takes off again. Another landing. Another list of names.

Al Sani stays shackled on the plane. They land for a third time. And finally... They called my name and said they pointed to a separate vehicle. They said that's where I was going to go in. A short drive later, the van pulls into a prison complex.

Al Sani and the others are still in the United States. They're in Indiana at the Miami Correctional Center. Yeah, when I first get there, One other guy was getting released, and we asked him how the place looked like. And he says, the place is no good. Immigration detention centers, like Moshannon, are not supposed to be like prisons. Most of the detainees are not criminals. But the Miami Correctional Facility is a prison.

ICE rent space there. Alcani was put in a small cell with one cellmate. He couldn't go outside for recreation. We'll be locked up for 20 hours a day. The only time you will come out is to either eat a cellmate. or go take a shower. So you spent 20 hours of every day in essentially a cell? Yes, there were two of us in a cell.

The bathroom was also within that cell. Everything was there. What was the food like? Don't know me to a lot. The food was in, there was no food, really. It was only sandwich that they gave you, like, like peanuts butter sandwich or baloney sandwich, that's what you will get. Alcani doesn't eat pork, so we'd have to trade the baloney sandwiches for something he could eat.

For me to get a peanuts butter sandwich, I needed two bologna sandwiches to get one peanuts butter sandwich. That was the going rate. Many of the people working in the ICE detention center were inmates from the prison, cleaning, doing other menial jobs. Alcani said the prisoners had more opportunities to be asked. out of their cells than the immigrants did, which reminded me of something another person being detained by ICE told me recently, were less than prisoners.

Their staff, I think, was really violent. Alcini got pepper sprayed by staff there, at least one time. Weeks go by. Alcani says officers would come by to ask who was willing to be deported. They would also look for people who were willing to be sent to third countries.

ICE will come every day and tell you, so-and-so country is willing to take you and so you just sign and get deported to that country. Did you know anyone who got sent to a third country, to a country that wasn't their home country? Yeah, I knew the Senegalese guy who got sent back to Ghana, but I knew a lot of people who got sent to a third country,

countries that they were not from. So I better be detained than get out and do some. something good for my life than being sent back and getting killed. Because if you're taking me home, they will kill me. So if you're sending me home, I'll tell you to kill me right now. Alcini and I talked about this a lot. He really means it when he says that he'd rather die in the U.S. than go back to Guinea. He and Andrea are increasingly desperate to get him out of detention.

She files a petition known as a writ of habeas corpus. Habeas is one of the bedrock legal rights in a democracy. You cannot be held indefinitely without any actual charges. Andrea wants a judge to evaluate whether ICE could go on holding Al-Saini. At the Miami Correctional Facility, things are getting worse by the day. These are men from all over the world, locked up in abysmal conditions, with no idea when they might be released. You have to understand the state of mind of people in that kind of situation

because people are hopeless. And so they feel like they have nothing to lose. And so they are always frustrated, and they can take that frustration upon to you. Fights sometimes broke out. Guards reacted harshly. They pepper-sprayed men and threw them into solitary confinement, regardless of whether they were instigators or victims. One morning, Al-Sainti is on the breakfast line when he notices another detainee having some sort of emotional breakdown.

He was screaming and crying and saying if they don't take him out of there. He's going to hurt someone. The guard said, if you want to kill yourself, kill yourself, you want to kill someone, kill someone, I don't care. Remember, Alseni is short and thin. In moments like this, he's an easy target. Before Alcini realizes what's even happening, the man is attacking him. This guy comes from behind me while we were waiting for food. He comes from behind me and whipped my dread and then almost took out my eye. When the guards finally get the man off him, Alcani's lost a chunk of hair, his scouting.

is bleeding. But worse, he's really worried about his eye. He can't open it. It's bleeding badly. When he asks for medical attention... They said they don't care about it. They told me to get out of their face and leave. If I didn't leave, they were going to pepper spray me or stuff like that. Back in the cell, later in the morning, when someone comes around to count the detainees, I'll say he asks again for medical assistance. The woman doing the count says she'll ask, but she doesn't come back. A few hours later, someone else does, though, with major news, news about a legal development.

A judge has finally decided on Al-Sani's habeas petition, and after nine months of being held in detention, the judge orders that he has to be released immediately. It's February 12, 26. I was sleeping, and then the lady came and called my name. She said, you're going home. I said going home, where? She said you're going back to New York.

You should start packing your stuff. We can't keep you here even for 20 minutes. Andreas overjoyed. She arranges for a volunteer to pick him up from the detention center, buy him a bus ticket. And by the next day, he's back in New York. And that's where he is now. Kind of back where he started. Learning his way around the city, looking for work, trying to make a life for himself.

Alcani isn't the kind of person to talk much about his trauma. But clearly, everything he's been through. First in Guinea, now in the U.S., had added a layer of difficulty and chaos to his life. It's surely having an impact on how he thinks about his future. At the time of his release, there were nearly 70,000 people being held in immigration detention, more people than ever. And that number doesn't begin to capture the millions of lives that have been turned upside down by the president's mass deportation campaign. In the meantime, the legal landscape was shifting. The administration's courthouse arrests began to face legal setbacks in court.

A federal judge in California is banning federal officials from making arrests at immigration courts. nationwide in a setback for the Trump administration's crackdown. In New York, a judge ordered the government to stop detaining people at 26 federal plaza, where all of this started for Alcini. In the ruling, the court wrote that while, quote, there is a strong governmental interest in enforcing immigration laws, there is also a serious interest in allowing migrants to pursue asylum claims without fear of arrest. But the morning after the judge's ruling,

masked ice agents were back outside the courthouse, ready to make more arrest. An activist named Peter Malk Cattel was there at the time. He tried to show them copies of the decision. The image, it reminds me of Alsani, leaving the courthouse a year ago, holding a printout from the judge, listing the date and time of his next appointment. You'd think the documentation might actually mean something. As Catell described it later to a local paper, he showed them the decision, and the agents waved him away and said simply, we don't care. I'm Jonathan Blitzer. Our program continues on the next episode

when I'll speak with a Democrat and a Republican in Congress on the politics of immigration and how this is all playing out with voters. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow,

Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. We had special assistance on this episode from Sarah Nix. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.