Journalist Jonathan Blitzer describes trying to cover the onslaught of Trump's immigration policies.

"Never, in my wildest dreams, did I imagine it would take the form it did."

Photo: Thea Traff

Journalist Jonathan Blitzer’s work offers some of the clearest portraits of how contemporary U.S. immigration policies are reshaping individuals’ lives. His nuanced and humanizing storytelling illuminating otherwise unstated costs of harmful policies. From his groundbreaking book Everyone Who is Gone is Here to his recent profile of Venezuelans sent to prisons in El Salvador, Blitzer’s reporting is careful, eye-opening, and urgent.

In this first part of our conversation, Blitzer reflects on what it is like trying to cover the Trump administration’s myriad and overlapping immigration actions today.

ANTERO GARCIA: You seem incredibly busy right now. How does this moment feel from your perspective?

JONATHAN BLITZER: To describe the urgency of the moment from a purely journalistic standpoint—the sense of chaos—it probably makes the most sense to compare this to the first Trump administration. I think that would lay out just how exceptional this moment is.

AG: There are no other precedents from your own experiences reporting on immigration?

JB: I wasn't covering this stuff during the mid-nineties. That might've been as crazy. I just don't know. For me, the only thing I really have to go on are the sort of tail end of the Obama years, the first Trump term, obviously the Biden administration, and now. By that limited historical standard, I've never seen anything like this.

What's so intense about covering it right now is that each of the individual things that the administration is doing at any given moment, just on a purely policy level or a legal level--the levers they're pulling or the gambits they're making--each one is so thoroughly radical and, frankly, insane that it's especially overwhelming from a journalistic standpoint.

AG: How do you keep up with everything?

JB: The game you play as a journalist through chaotic moments in politics or history is a sort of triage. You try to zero in on what feel like the biggest stories, and then you come back to the stories that are maybe a little wonky or a little bit more specific but that you think are important that need to be part of the broader conversation. Whereas right now, it's like there are at least five things at any moment that are earth-shattering in their radicalism. And a lot of them build off of each other in different ways. What makes it so chaotic is that in the most literal sense, there are so many things the government is trying to do at once that are each one more shocking and appalling than the next. At the same time, a lot of them share a kind of foundational thinking. The simplest way to put it is that there's profound racism common to all of these individual policies … I wouldn't even say that there are legal theories per se, because I don't even know that they're so fully advanced to be called theories.

AG: “Theory” feels too advanced a word for the chaos.

JB: Yeah. But there are certain baseline conceptions of what they can do to skirt any legal accountability. And those conceptions are, I think common, to so many of these policies. So, what makes it so complicated is that there is a kind of interlocking internal logic to all of these things going on. You feel like you're constantly doubling back to pick up other news and relate it to some of the more developing stuff so that people can see the through lines.

AG: Does it feel like immigration coverage is competing against other Trump-related issues?

JB: What's happening in other areas of politics are also more cataclysmic than they've ever been. And so you're competing against that noise. And so, you're constantly trying to take issues that you think are important in the news and keep them central. And I’ve got to say, it's hard when the president is collapsing the economy overnight just by fiat.

But it’s not just about coverage. Maybe most relevant to our conversation, people are terrified in immigrant communities across the country. It's hardest to negotiate what is the most foundational element of this reporting, which is talking to people and having people share their experiences and finding ways of telling stories that illustrate what the human cost of all of this political nonsense is without exposing them, without causing them further undue stress in an environment where you yourself can't even predict what's going to happen. So it's very hard.

Just as an example that will give you a sense too of why it's all so crazy: there are 250 Venezuelans in the Salvadoran maximum security prison right now. We only know the names of 235 of them because press accounts have leaked those names. The government refuses to disclose any of that information.

So if you're a reporter trying to get to the bottom of any of these individual cases, generally what you do is you speak to someone's attorney, and that person starts to open the door to you, to family members, or contexts that you can start to kind of hook into to understand who this person was, in a situation where you can't actually reach the person himself, because in this case, the person is in El Salvador.

Think about this from a reporting standpoint: You know these people are there. How do you reach their families to talk? How do you find ways? Lawyers themselves are scrambling after the fact. They can't represent these people in a formal sense because they’re incommunicado in an El Salvadorian prison, so they can't sign off on legal representation. And so lawyers themselves are trying to attend immigration hearings so that judges don't just close immigration cases of people who had open cases before judges that got interrupted by their summary deportation to El Salvador. So here you are trying to write about it. The families are freaked out for obvious reasons. They should be terrified. It's not clear to them what the smartest move is to help their loved one. Is it to bring more attention to who they are and where they are? Is it to just kind of hope for the best?

It's an environment where it's very hard to approach people in a kind of human way and explain like, "Look, I can't even begin to say how sorry I am for what you're going through. But I do think that there's value in trying to tell these stories, and here's what I'm up to. Here's what this process would look like." It feels kind of monstrous to have that conversation with someone at a time like this. So to your point, it's the most chaotic and crazy I've ever seen. And in ways that are existentially so destabilizing,

AG: In some ways, we knew this would be a rapidly chaotic and destabilizing administration. Were you surprised by the severity so far?

JB: I think in general, people thought that maybe [Trump’s] campaign talk was just campaign talk. But my experience is from covering the first Trump administration. What we know about the personnel now who are filling in at the highest levels without any guardrails to counteract them or check them, I have been basically thinking, this is going to be the worst thing in my life. I can't imagine how bad it's going to be. It's going to be horrible. It's going to be unspeakable.

AG: I guess you went in with the right mindset.

JB: Well, this is why I'm glad you asked the question because what you end up feeling is how impoverished your own imagination is. I almost started to think okay, the badness of this will proceed along lines that I've seen this administration and other administrations pursue before. But the form it will take is that they will use the existing government bureaucracy and the blunt instrument of US deportation policy and detention policy and so on, and they'll apply it. Those tools which are monstrous on their own, honestly, on a quote, unquote, "good day" in America, that they will essentially apply those things to a wider segment of the population and that that will turn the world upside down. That's what I was expecting.

Maybe this just reflects my own naivete or ignorance, but never, in my wildest dreams, did I imagine it would take the form it did. The idea that within the first 100 days, green card holders at universities would be targeted for deportation, honestly, I didn't even know it was possible. I didn't even know that that was a thing that a government could aspire to do.

Propina

We’ll continue our conversation with Jonathan Blitzer next week. Read his recent reflection on the big picture vision of the Trump administration’s immigration actions here.

And have you pre-ordered The Cost of Being Undocumented yet?

Make sure to request your free stickers here.

We’ll see you next week.