Jonathan Blitzer: Our New Internment Camps

Summary

---

The Bulwark Podcast: Jonathan Blitzer - “Our New Internment Camps”

Release Date: July 15, 2026
Host: Tim Miller
Guest: Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer at The New Yorker

---

Episode Overview

This episode is a searing, emotional exploration of the American government's intensifying use of state violence and internment-like detention centers under the current (second) Trump administration. Tim Miller and Jonathan Blitzer discuss Blitzer’s disturbing New Yorker article, Locked Away, which investigates the conditions and policy logic behind the new ICE “camp city” at Fort Bliss (Camp East Montana), the brutal and sometimes deadly consequences of aggressive ICE operations across the U.S., and the deeper dangers to American democracy when due process and constitutional protections are eroded in the name of “safety” and anti-immigrant enforcement.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Erosion of Constitutional Protections and State Violence

(00:00–21:08)

• Miller and Sykes (host and co-host) recap themes from the week: Government inflicting violence and stripping due process, linking ICE killings in Maine, overreach against dissenters, and rising state surveillance/punishment, especially against minorities.

• Central theme: The United States’ foundational rule—is that no one should be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process—is being blatantly violated.

  • Tim Miller:

    “There really isn't anything, any greater responsibility than the ability to inflict state violence onto somebody… that is the maximum amount of power.” (01:27)

• Criticism of the current administration’s “caudillo style governance” (“to my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law”)—state power used for personal/political favoritism and against out-groups.

• Angry reflection on specific ICE-related murders (Johan Guerrero in Houston & Lorenzo Araujo in Maine), both killed despite— or because of—their legal residency, clean records, or long integration into American society.

• Comparison to authoritarian practices in El Salvador (Bukele) and the West Bank (“gulag” logic), with a warning that the U.S. is adopting similar tactics.

• Miller’s call to listeners:

  “If you’re not going to show up when the state is murdering our neighbors, then what is the point of all this?” (04:03)

---

2. Case Studies: Abuse of Power in Different Contexts

(21:08–23:11 and interwoven mid-show)

• Detention of American citizens by quasi-military forces in Israel: Politicians and their aides, visiting Israel/West Bank, physically detained and menaced ("not just a stunt").

• Weaponization of state power against “enemies”: Use of state systems to punish political/ideological opponents or members of the LGBTQ+ community (e.g., Florida “Don’t Say Gay” law, social workers separating kids from gay parents).

  • Miller draws from a Polish TV drama to illustrate how state power can traumatize and threaten marginalized groups, even if violence isn’t always physical.

    “…the Polish state wanted to take away a gay guy’s adopted kid because he was gay...people will come to their door…and they'll be able to separate you from your family…” (16:50)

• Moral throughline: The principle of liberal democracy is that all rights are protected, even for those we disagree with—contrasting this with the “fascist”/MAGA worldview.

---

3. Interview with Jonathan Blitzer: Fort Bliss, Internment Camps, & Failures of Due Process

(23:11–71:56)

A. ICE Killings & Policy Backlash in Maine

(24:31–32:47)

• Blitzer explains the “pause” on traffic stops in Maine after two ICE murders—but says it’s only cosmetic:
  • Trump and border czar Tom Homan quickly make clear that hardline tactics will continue.
  • “It’s inevitable…when the imperative is to make a huge number of arrests where agents who are totally unaccountable are driving around in unmarked cars.” (25:50)
• Reckless enforcement: Untrained new agents, hyper-militarized tactics borrowed from border deployments, vehicle chases in urban areas—all imported to unwarranted raids in places like Biddeford, Maine.

B. The “Bait and Switch” of ISAP & Everyday Immigrants Trapped

(33:15–38:28)

• Ray’s story:
  • Cuban man, came in 1994, lived legally in the U.S. for decades under strict monitoring but integration, with a job, family.
  • Suddenly swept up at a routine ICE check-in and disappears into the system.
  • “He doesn't come out…this is…increasingly common for people who have these check-ins scheduled.” (35:09)
  • Describes mothers sobbing on buses, not knowing how their kids will get home—a “nightmarish” motif. (37:59)

C. The Horror of Camp East Montana (Fort Bliss)

(38:28–54:54)

• Camp East Montana:

  • Tent city built on a military base, rushed into use before construction finished, lacking basic hygiene, medical provision, sunlight, or communications.
  • Systematically “disappearing” detainees by removing them from official ICE databases.
  • Quotes from inside:
    • “We had to use our own underwear” to mop up filth. (41:06)
    • “I had not seen the sun for a month.” (41:19)

• Ray’s direct comparison:

  • Had survived Guantanamo and state prison—yet says this was worse for its chaos and indifference; denied medication, nearly dies.

    “Every day an ICE official comes inside to these tents and says…who's ready to leave?...They're weaponizing detention.” (43:15)

    • Miller: “The cruelty is the point—they’re torturing people because they want them to say no mas.” (43:51)

• Physical and psychological torture as policy: Detainees regularly threatened with isolation “the Shoe” for asking for medical care.

D. Deaths, Suicides, and Deliberate Suffering

(54:54–57:32)

• January 2026: Three deaths in 40 days at Camp East Montana.

  • Cuban detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos: ICE says suicide; medical examiner says homicide by asphyxiation; witnesses say guards beat him to death while he begged for his inhaler, “I can’t breathe”—ICE repeatedly lied and obstructed.
  • Other deaths attributed to suicide, but with unreliable, self-serving reporting by ICE.

• Quasi-covert transfers, especially for Cubans: Buses take handcuffed detainees to the border under cover of night. Masked men await on the Mexican side.

  “People started screaming, this is a kidnapping… Cubans can’t go to Mexico.” (53:00)

  • Detainees “disappeared” with no legal standing, exposed, and abandoned to cartel violence and homelessness.

• Bitter irony: Many mistreated Cubans are themselves Trump voters; the Republican Party faces “a real tangle” reconciling its hardline policies with its base in Florida.

E. Corrupt, Inept Contracting and Profiteering

(58:30–64:53)

• “Who’s running these camps?”
  • A shadowy company, Acquisition Logistics, won the $1B contract despite no relevant experience; their headquarters is a suburban home, unclear workforce (“5 to 50 people”).
  • Contracts went out with Dear Leader-style rhetoric. Experts call their proposal “boilerplate nonsense.”
  • Even government accountability offices document horrendous inefficiency and waste.
  • Miller: “The least important part of the story is how much of our money is being pissed away here. But it is hard to even wrap your head around.” (64:11)

F. Foreign Policy, Hypocrisy, and Systemic Destabilization

(65:01–69:43)

• U.S. policy in Venezuela and Cuba now directly linked—immigrants fleeing regimes the U.S. says are “evil” get treated as “alien enemies” and exiled, sometimes to third countries, suffering on all sides.
• U.S. hypocrisy echoes Central America in the '80s: simultaenous foreign meddling and domestic scapegoating.
• Temporary protected status (TPS) for Venezuelans undermined, Cubans dumped in Mexico with no legal recourse.

G. Legal Pushback and Hope

(69:46–71:04)

• The legal community rallies: lawyers in Texas and across the U.S. file habeas petitions, sometimes out of their normal areas of practice, to insist on basic due process.
• “When ordinary people are exposed to these horrors, you see them respond in extraordinary ways. And that does give me hope, honestly.” – Jonathan Blitzer (70:15)

---

Memorable Quotes and Moments

• Miller on outrages becoming normalized:

  “I'm not fucking numb. And this is the thing to not be fucking numb about.” (04:03)

• On Camp East Montana’s conditions:

  “Since we're not given anything to mop up the dirty water, we had to use our own underwear.” (41:06)

• Blitzer on forced disappearances:

  “These people had, in some form or another, been disappeared by the state…their family could not locate them.” (39:10-40:51)

• On sick policies:

  “The cruelty is the point situation. Like, they're torturing people because they want them to say no mas.” – Tim Miller (43:51)

• On the guards’ callousness:

  “He overheard guards betting $500 about which detainee would kill themselves next.” (45:24)

• On the American way of life:

  “That is the American way of life…to protect our liberty, protect our family, protect our homes without the government using their power to take it away from us.” (19:44–20:13)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00–08:09: Setting the principle—state power, due process, and how it is routinely violated.
• 24:31–32:47: Jonathan Blitzer recaps ICE abuse in Maine and the calculated policy logic.
• 33:15–38:28: The ISAP “bait and switch”—how people following the rules were entrapped and detained.
• 38:28–54:54: Camp East Montana and the machinery of systematic cruelty; conditions, trickery, and disappearances.
• 45:31–52:48: Deaths at Camp, mishandling and cover-up, the “isolation wing,” and guards’ malice.
• 53:26–57:32: Cuban detainees, forced abductions, and the political hypocrisy at play.
• 58:30–64:53: Shadowy government contracting and profiteering surrounding the camps.
• 65:01–69:43: Foreign policy entanglements, U.S. hypocrisy, and the new Central America parallel.
• 69:46–71:04: The legal fight and flickers of hope.

---

Tone & Style

• Unapologetically urgent, emotional, and bracing.
  Tim Miller is angry, urgent, and uses forceful language. Blitzer is measured, deeply informed, but similarly passionate and often shocked.
• Direct language, raw quotes, and explicit condemnation of current U.S. policies.
• Deeply empathetic to the victims, scathing toward officials, and fiercely grounded in journalistic detail.

---

Takeaway

This episode exposes the dark transformation of America’s immigration enforcement apparatus into a nationwide internment system—where due process, constitutional rights, and basic decency are sacrificed to a politics of cruelty, fear, and open corruption. Through policy analysis, firsthand reporting, and moral commentary, Miller and Blitzer urge listeners to reject numbness, fight against normalization, and demand a return to democratic values where the state no longer holds unchecked power over the vulnerable.

---

For listeners seeking a deep, anger-fueled but meticulously reported warning about America’s slide toward state-sponsored lawlessness and human rights abuses, as well as a cry to defend the core tenets of liberal democracy, this episode is essential.

---

Transcript

[Tim Miller]

Hey, everybody. We got Jonathan Blitzer today talking about

[Charlie Sykes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

I was ruminating on the various news

[Charlie Sykes]

and the podcasts we've been doing this week on the planes, trains and automobiles. It 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.

[Tim Miller]

And I think that there's an element

[Charlie Sykes]

that connects the three main stories we've been covering. The ice murder in Maine, my interviews with Ro Khanna and Pete Buttigieg.

[Tim Miller]

And I wanted to talk about that

[Charlie Sykes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

I'm not a superhero guy, okay? I actually didn't even know.

[Charlie Sykes]

I was like, who said with great power comes great responsibility? This was banging around my head on the airplane.

[Tim Miller]

And I guess Spider man said it.

[Charlie Sykes]

I was hoping it was going to be like, Churchill or Locke or something, but it was Spider Man.

[Tim Miller]

So, anyway, it's right, though. Spider man got something right. With great power does come great responsibility. And there really isn't anything, any greater responsibility than the ability to inflict state violence onto somebody. The state's control of your body, of

[Charlie Sykes]

your person, that is the maximum amount of power.

[Tim Miller]

The founders recognized that the state could

[Charlie Sykes]

wield this kind of power and that there would be people that would wield it corruptly, wrongly, viciously.

[Tim Miller]

And so they put it right there

[Charlie Sykes]

in the 14th Amendment.

[Tim Miller]

Nor shall any state deprive any person

[Charlie Sykes]

of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

[Tim Miller]

The state could not use its violence

[Charlie Sykes]

and its power against you without giving you a chance to defend yourself, stare

[Tim Miller]

in the writ of habeas that the president of the United States and the vice president were 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, when the conservatives talk about the west and protecting democracies and, you know, defending ourselves from, you know, the, you know, the enemies of the west, the enemies of freedom. Like, one of the things we're supposed to be protecting is this. This notion that people cannot be deprived

[Charlie Sykes]

of life or of property without being

[Tim Miller]

able to defend themselves. You can add that to the list

[Charlie Sykes]

of American ideals that these so called MAGA patriots don't celebrate.

[Tim Miller]

They're more into caudillo style governance. They love what's happening in El Salvador. They practice what the Peruvian dictator once called to my friends.

[Charlie Sykes]

Everything for my enemies.

[Tim Miller]

The law, that's what they like.

[Charlie Sykes]

That's the system that they want.

[Tim Miller]

This morning, Donald Trump pulled back on the.

[Charlie Sykes]

I guess for 20 hours.

[Tim Miller]

The administration said that they're going to

[Charlie Sykes]

put some guardrails around the Kavanaugh stops that have led to two murders this week, two deprivations of life. The president said this.

[Tim Miller]

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

[Charlie Sykes]

into the criminal's hands.

[Tim Miller]

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.

[Charlie Sykes]

In Maine.

[Tim Miller]

Johan Guerrero was in the country legally on a work permit in Houston.

[Charlie Sykes]

Lorenzo araujo 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.

[Tim Miller]

So on Friday, when Stuart Stevens was

[Charlie Sykes]

on the podcast talking about death squads,

[Tim Miller]

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, they 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 were looking for, but he wasn't even the person they were looking for.

[Charlie Sykes]

It's fucking clowns.

[Tim Miller]

And some of you resonated, it seemed like, with a comment I made last night on the Next Level. 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 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 Johan Guerrero. He did not have due process of law.

[Charlie Sykes]

Neither obviously did Alex Preddy.

[Tim Miller]

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

[Charlie Sykes]

comes with that power. They're not considering the rights of the man.

[Tim Miller]

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 and 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,

[Charlie Sykes]

it's going to be enemies. The state, to my friends, everything from

[Tim Miller]

my enemies, 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,

[Charlie Sykes]

well, we got to. We're keeping things safe. You know, we're keeping things safe for

[Tim Miller]

the criminals, so we have to do this. But that's also a lie.

[Charlie Sykes]

They have no consideration for the safety of their community.

[Tim Miller]

And the whole point of having the state violence is supposed to be 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 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 were putting in these fucking disgusting internment camps, a lot of them had no criminal record.

[Charlie Sykes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

But when you act like this, right? When person, because of their skin color, because of their tattoo or because of the way that they're protesting, that their life can be eliminated, that their rights can be eliminated without due process, what you are doing is you're acting like Bukele X. That's how he's 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.

[Charlie Sykes]

But tough titties.

[Tim Miller]

That's the kind of government that the

[Charlie Sykes]

MAGA Patriots want for this country, and

[Tim Miller]

that's how Israel's governing the West Bank. The same abuse of power we're seeing in ice. Obviously, the result is not as extreme.

[Charlie Sykes]

Nobody died.

[Tim Miller]

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.

[Charlie Sykes]

Israel is not a pluralistic, secular democracy like ours.

[Tim Miller]

Obviously, different rules, different types of constitution, religious background. But what was undergirding the outrage was this irresponsible use of state power. They've got these roving bands of quasi state militias.

[Charlie Sykes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

They're 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

[Charlie Sykes]

then obviously people on social media attacking Roe and Cam are talking about how

[Tim Miller]

they wanted this or this was a stunt. And a lot of times when I

[Charlie Sykes]

have politicians on the show, politicians are

[Tim Miller]

going to spin 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 want to give them better for the doubt, but you also want to challenge.

[Charlie Sykes]

So I understand people that would be skeptical of Ro's travel to the west

[Tim Miller]

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 comments too much, but, like, he was scared shitless, as he should be. His 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. He wasn't texting me, like, wow, this is going to be great. Roe's going to get some great press out of this when we get back. And it was like, dude, I'm scared.

[Charlie Sykes]

This is scary. 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

[Tim Miller]

get out of this. So, okay, I don't know. Call the stunt, if you want. A stunt is just a word you use when people do politics or do

[Charlie Sykes]

diplomacy or do anything publicly.

[Tim Miller]

And you don't like it.

[Charlie Sykes]

You know, it's like, it's like when

[Tim Miller]

you know, the people calling it a stunt or people who are more sympathetic to Israel, etc. And it's like, okay, and that's fine. And like politicians go to Israel and go to the Western Wall and, and, and you know, meet with hostage families. I don't call that a stunt. That's not a stunt. There are perspectives you're trying to learn. You're a politician and, 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 tell them they couldn't drive in an area that was, by the way, not restricted, despite the

[Charlie Sykes]

fact that many people are saying that it was.

[Tim Miller]

It was like the Jerusalem Post said, it was not restricted.

[Charlie Sykes]

Like when it was restricted in the past, it was restricted because Jewish settlers firebombed an EU school.

[Tim Miller]

The whole thing is a fucking outrage. And it just gets gobbled up into this political 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, in places where you have 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. Obviously there are people, 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 stunt, like, even if you take the critics at face value and it's like, oh, they really wanted this.

[Charlie Sykes]

Like Rowan Cam really were excited about being menaced and tormented by fucking kids with guns.

[Tim Miller]

Where else in the world could you do this where it's our ally? Like, I live in Louisiana. 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 gonna pull up on me. It's possible. We got a lot of guns in 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 opposes the government, that, like, there's going to be a gang, prevent me

[Charlie Sykes]

from being able to go wherever I want to go.

[Tim Miller]

So, you know, it's not really like

[Charlie Sykes]

a great defense either for folks who are trying to criticize bro that, like, oh, well, you wanted this.

[Tim Miller]

It's like, why'd you make it so fucking easy on him? And it also is, again, if, like, everything is 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 think that, that if you were living in a rule of law situation, you think that that would be the

[Charlie Sykes]

person that would be detained.

[Tim Miller]

The last thing on this is there's

[Charlie Sykes]

some, like, commentary about, like, oh, they don't have. They didn't have any reason to be scared. They're overdoing this.

[Tim Miller]

Whatever. It's like, really like you're sitting on a keyboard in America being like, kid who's been a school shooting shouldn't be

[Charlie Sykes]

scared when he's sitting in a car

[Tim Miller]

being held up by somebody with an M4. Don't know what he's going to do.

[Charlie Sykes]

Don't know. When you get out there for 70

[Tim Miller]

minutes, I get it. It's easy to minimize, you know, to be like, well, it's just, just an hour. It's that big of a deal. It's kind of like, yeah, it is that big of a deal. We live in a rural country. The government doesn't just get to keep

[Charlie Sykes]

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 dudes and fatigues will show up and hold them for an hour. So, yeah, it is. Is it as big of a deal

[Tim Miller]

as getting murdered in the street?

[Charlie Sykes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

In Pete's case, it's even a little different.

[Charlie Sykes]

It's a little worse.

[Tim Miller]

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.

[Charlie Sykes]

I think they're less deserving of rights or protection because their sexuality and that

[Tim Miller]

was kind of like the promise of Trumpism. Trump people love this. Now, this was big thing around the don't say gay bill. If you are a random parent, parents 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 and their loved one.

[Charlie Sykes]

There are a lot of different examples of this.

[Tim Miller]

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

[Charlie Sykes]

don't like you, because you're the enemy,

[Tim Miller]

the domestic enemy, the enemy of the people, if you will. In Pete's case, maybe it wasn't state

[Charlie Sykes]

violence that was the threat. Right. I don't, you know, he wasn't afraid that somebody was going to get attacked or die. They didn't have guns. I don't, I don't think, I guess I didn't even ask.

[Tim Miller]

But it was state power and state

[Charlie Sykes]

coercion was his property going back to the 14th Amendment.

[Tim Miller]

And there were representatives of the state

[Charlie Sykes]

in his home doing a baseless search of his home, traumatizing his children based on nothing.

[Tim Miller]

By total coincidence, this week, maybe part

[Charlie Sykes]

of the reason my blood pressure is also so I've been watching this Polish gay show on Max Recommend it called Proud.

[Tim Miller]

I started watching it not because I

[Charlie Sykes]

really wanted to get riled up, but because I just watch any foreign gay prestige drama. And so I just flipped it on. Didn't know what the premise was.

[Tim Miller]

I kind of was under the pressure

[Charlie Sykes]

base of the preview. I was just sort of a Polish party boy doing ecstasy. So that's what I thought I was going to get.

[Tim Miller]

Instead, the premise of the show was

[Charlie Sykes]

the Polish state wanted to take away a gay guy's adopted kid because he was gay.

[Tim Miller]

And the whole narrative drama of the

[Charlie Sykes]

show is based on the fear that gay men have.

[Tim Miller]

In particular that I talked to Pete about, that people will 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

[Charlie Sykes]

you from your family, that they'll be able to determine that you're unfit, that the people in power don't think that that lifestyle is appropriate, that the State knows better that they'll get to take your kid.

[Tim Miller]

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 Chester were only separated with their kids for a

[Charlie Sykes]

night, and that is obviously not the same level of attack on our rights as Johan Guerrero was separated from his child for life forever because he was gunned down.

[Tim Miller]

Both stories strike at the heart of what our rights are as people who are in America. The fascists think that they can use

[Charlie Sykes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

Like we, the real patriots, we believe

[Charlie Sykes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

That's the fundamental difference. And when we talk here about what the purpose is of the bulwark and we talk about these broader principles, defending liberal democracy, this is the essential part of liberal democracy. This is bigger than our political fights. Underneath the umbrella of liberal democracy, we

[Charlie Sykes]

will disagree on what regulations are appropriate or, you know, what level of immigration is appropriate or what tax rate is appropriate.

[Tim Miller]

Like, what this is though, is our

[Charlie Sykes]

way of life is protecting our system, is protecting our fundamental rights.

[Tim Miller]

The fucking heritage Americans, they love that

[Charlie Sykes]

phrase way of life. 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 MAGA Americans want. That's their way of life.

[Tim Miller]

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

[Charlie Sykes]

guns are going to shoot you, are

[Tim Miller]

going to detain you, are going to separate your children. That is the American way of life. We've not been perfect at that. Obviously. Historically we denied black people that for whatever hundred 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

[Charlie Sykes]

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 l 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.

[Tim Miller]

So you guys got to fucking fight for it for two weeks while I take a little breather. Okay.

[Charlie Sykes]

We got two more podcasts between now and then.

[Tim Miller]

But you know, I need to at least acknowledge that that's part of our life as well.

[Charlie Sykes]

That's part of our liberty as well.

[Tim Miller]

Okay. I get to take a little breather,

[Charlie Sykes]

but you guys, you guys have to con in the meantime.

[Tim Miller]

Okay. Up next, Jonathan Blitzer.

[Charlie Sykes]

He's so good.

[Tim Miller]

One thing I love about summer is how easy everything feels. The day is a little more relaxed and I find myself reaching the same comfortable go anywhere pieces again and again. That's why I keep coming back to my friends at you know it Quince. They focus on well made essentials that naturally become those everyday staples that you live in all season long. They got these 100% European linen pants and shirts that are breathable, easy to throw on. And it's the summer upgrade your rotation needs starting at just 34 bucks. I'm loving that linen shirt. Their tees are soft enough to live in all day. I just threw on Quince tee the other day and I was reminded how soft it was. I was like, oh, this is nice. Everything at quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for exceptional quality, not brand markup. I mentioned the linen shirts I've been liking. I also I'm thinking we're in pool season and here's something I've been eyeing for the summer. I've got some Italian swim trunks and I like a European trunk. The American trunks are a little too hetero for my taste, so I'm going to be eyeing the Italian swim trunks. Maybe something for you as well. It's not just clothing. Quints 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 TheBullwalk for free shipping on your order and 365 day return is now available in Canada too. That's Q U-I-N-E.com the Bulwark for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the Bulwark. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show staff writer at the New Yorker where he covers immigration, politics and foreign affairs. His image he's the author of Everyone

[Charlie Sykes]

who Is Gone Is the United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis. Great book. We've talked about a bunch here. It's Jonathan Blitzer. What's up, Jonathan?

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Hey, how you doing? Thanks for having me.

[Tim Miller]

Good to see you.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Likewise.

[Tim Miller]

You appear like you might be coming at us from Guantanamo Bay, which given

[Charlie Sykes]

your research, I think is important that you.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a full immersion experience. Yeah. This is a recent move, kind of austere settings, but we're all right. Our connection is good.

[Tim Miller]

Your article in the New Yorker about

[Charlie Sykes]

what's happening at Fort Bliss Camp East Montana made me want to chain myself to the fence of an ice facility. Kind of like the environmentalists did in the 60s. They chained themselves to the big trees to prevent them from getting cut down. That's kind of where I was. I almost stroked out. So I want to spend the whole pod 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.

[Tim Miller]

But the big announcement yesterday was DHS

[Charlie Sykes]

says that they're 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 center, had said she'd called Mark Wade 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.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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 border czar, already said, oh, this is just a temporary measure. This isn't really going to change much.

[Tim Miller]

Obviously it's interesting that the border czar

[Charlie Sykes]

has kind of purview over Biddeford, Maine.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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 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 border czar, 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 Vance kind of making his usual comments. Homan 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.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

And so it's like, here we are again. And this was supposed to be part of a. A kind of a rebranded effort inside DHS under Mark Way Mullen as 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 are 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.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Actually, when we last talked, this is

[Charlie Sykes]

a little bit ominous for me to say this, but it was the day before they killed Renee Goode. So the stuff in Minnesota was starting to happen and it really escalated after there. So hopefully that's not a bad omen.

[Tim Miller]

I guess my question for you, since you've been spend so much time at

[Charlie Sykes]

the border covering the type of enforcement they do at the border.

[Tim Miller]

On the one hand, I think the

[Charlie Sykes]

latest reporting for the Atlantic is the person that killed Rohan 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 from the border and they're using these 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 etc 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 your thoughts are on that, given the time you spent covering this.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

I saw that Atlantic piece as well, and in many ways, that documents something we would have expected. I mean, it's really valuable reporting that, you know, as part of the general recruitment push, they've. ICE has hired, what, 8,000 new agents in a very short span. And they've, you know, rushed them through training. They've cut training time in half. And so this demonstrates, at the very least, a lack of preparation, the fact that 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 Bevino, the infamous Greg Bevino 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

[Tim Miller]

describing not a lot of consideration for habeas. Yeah.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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 are 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 Goode, 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, you know, it's interesting.

[Charlie Sykes]

Deployed to Biddeford, Maine.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Right, Exactly.

[Tim Miller]

The heart of.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Yeah, the crisis. You know, it's interesting. At the start of last year, I was spending a lot of time reporting on Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas. His. 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, 2024, 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 rein 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? 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.

[Charlie Sykes]

You see it in the situation in Biddeford with Carrero. It's like, and thank God nobody else got. They fire six shots. It's like, why are you firing six shots? You can watch the car, it's going three miles an hour. Three year old is on the scene. You can just see that it's like this downtown, little quaint main town. The whole thing is totally.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Everything about it is macabre. It's really unblue.

[Tim Miller]

You mentioned El Paso and what was

[Charlie Sykes]

happening there, and you're reporting there. So that takes us to your latest in the New Yorker.

[Tim Miller]

It's focused on Fort Bliss and this

[Charlie Sykes]

East Camp Montana, this camp city that they've created for detentions. But it starts actually talking about the case of Ray, who is part of this intensive supervision appearance program, isap. I wasn't that familiar with it, and I think that it was an important

[Tim Miller]

way to start the story because it

[Charlie Sykes]

shows kind of the bait and switch that we were performing on these people who've been in the country for a long time now.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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 rafts to the United States. He was one of them. Got intercepted by the coast guard, spent 11 months at Guantanamo Bay at the time, interned 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, you know, waywardness and gets in trouble with the law. He's in his early 20s at the time, gets arrested in Florida for his involvement in a 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, 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.

[Charlie Sykes]

People.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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, 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 as 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 2025, 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 that 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 cause 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 Ray's 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 appointments, 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, 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 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 them.

[Charlie Sykes]

I might have a heart attack over

[Tim Miller]

the course of this podcast, so we're

[Charlie Sykes]

going to do my best.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tim Miller]

And then I just.

[Charlie Sykes]

And obviously, as you mentioned, this is happening to so many people, but it's just pretty stark in the article where Ray, it's like, okay, it's his wife's birthday, he's going to go have lunch with her, and then he gets detained and he gets put on a bus to this ICE City. And he tells you he's on this bus 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.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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 Rhea 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. It's really. It's nightmarish stuff.

[Tim Miller]

Okay. So they get to Fort Bliss, which

[Charlie Sykes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

Alcatraz, basically.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

That's right. That's right. Yep. And the two, their. Their fates are intertwined because the first group of detainees to arrive at Camp East Montana at a time, by the way, when it was a literal active Construction site. I mean, the tents are being erected in August when people get there. And. And there's testimony from people. I mean, I've interviewed 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, people. 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 leave the tents. The tablets that people are supposed to use to make calls to lawyers or to 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 Beast, Montana, came from the South Florida Detention 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. 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 Beast, Montana. And a source, an administration source, told me that that was actually by design, that someone actually went into the system. I don't know, like, the it of it. Someone went into the system. And basically, for. 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 typed someone's name in was, contact the local ICE office for more information. And so these people are really being held incommunicado without any obvious evidence of where they are or what's happening to them.

[Charlie Sykes]

I wrote down a couple of the other anecdotes you had from these early days. Fetid 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.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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. 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.

[Tim Miller]

He'd been in a couple prisons. So he knows.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Yeah, he knows. And actually, his perspective was meaningful for me because it kind of put it. It allowed me to put some of this stuff in. In context. I mean, he'd been interned at Guantanamo Bay for 11 months in the. The mid-1990s and 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.

[Tim Miller]

You know, seems like he never got his medication.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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 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 you just take. That's being denied to you. And this is also an important dimension of Ray's story. This is someone who lives in El Paso. A large number of people who were held and are held at Campus 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, you know, 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.

[Tim Miller]

And even still.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Exactly, exactly. You know, what he. 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. This is. This is true all across the country at ICE detention centers. Basically, the idea they're. 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.

[Tim Miller]

This is the cruelty, is the point situation. Like, they're torturing people because they want

[Charlie Sykes]

them to say no mas.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

That's right.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

That's. That's exactly it. And. And, you know, 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 gonna, like, call an ambulance for me? No. I'm gonna 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 fight this out for a couple weeks. I'm tough. But he had really no choice but to just get out of there.

[Tim Miller]

This is why I kept reading the

[Charlie Sykes]

article, and I was like, it's been a while. Maybe this is a good vacation read. I need to go back and reread some Japanese internment stuff here, because that's what. It was striking to me. I mean, 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 Campus Montana, and there's one, a Dutch green card holder that told the AP. AP, yeah, 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.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

I don't think it's a stretch at all to reach for the comparison to Japanese internment. And I have to say I, you know, this is like a kind of emotional and intellectual struggle for me. Reporting this stuff is, you know, you're, you're trying to find the nearest parallel, and there certainly isn't one in my, 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 Campus 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 are, 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 what I think changed that was between December 2025 and mid January 2026, in a 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 Lunas Campos, 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, needed 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's 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. Lunas 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 asphyxiating me. 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 Beast Montana. 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 seems to have committed suicide. But again, 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 like referenced.

[Charlie Sykes]

I mean they were joking about people killing themselves. They wanted people to self deport. They kind of wanted people to kill themselves, it seems like at least, or they weren't doing anything to help prevent it.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, talk a little bit about

[Charlie Sykes]

these isolation part of the case camp. It feels like something out of a 80s movie. Like, you know, we're gonna, we're putting you in the hole.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Totally.

[Charlie Sykes]

It's crazy.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

There was a little tent on the south side of the facility with a string of isolation cells held as far as I could 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 there blocking members of Congress from conducting oversight. What we know is this Kind of patchwork of information gleaned from direct testimony of people who've 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 documents, et cetera. But we have.

[Charlie Sykes]

You're not giving New Yorker reporters a tour.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

I mean, I asked.

[Charlie Sykes]

I was shocked.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

I was surprised that they declined, because I hear.

[Charlie Sykes]

It's interesting.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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 Geraldo de Noscompos. 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 me my medication. Simple as that. And they said, please listen to us this time. 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 in 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. Campo 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, and actually, there's testimony, there's. There's a series of declarations that a bunch of Cuban detainees gave to the ACLU that I. That I mentioned in the piece. And that, like, really just scared the shit out of me, to be honest.

[Tim Miller]

Let's talk about that, because I. I

[Charlie Sykes]

want you to tell the story about what happened to these Cuban detainees. But also there's, like, this political subtext that this is happening to Cuba, 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 is a kidnapping. I mean, Cubans can't go to Mexico. So, you know, I mean, this is like, what's happening.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Well, to your point, just about this humanitarian emergency set against the backdrop of what's happening in Cuba and what the US 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 Mexicans is Cubans. The Trump administration has 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, a foreign immigrant with no resources and no protection in a country like Mexico, and

[Charlie Sykes]

what's more, and no legal standing.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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.

[Charlie Sykes]

And.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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, that the Cuban population, specifically, it gives. Not. 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 democracy, if this is about humanity, I mean, look what it's doing to Cubans in

[Tim Miller]

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 know what's happening to your people? I mean, this is insane. 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.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

It's a good question. I don't know, in his capacity as 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 the Secretary of

[Charlie Sykes]

State would have purview over deporting people

[Tim Miller]

to a third country.

[Charlie Sykes]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, that would be under his.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Prior to his, you know, tenure serving in this administration, he was always very explicit.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

During Trump 1 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 unto 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, like, 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 wave 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 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.

[Charlie Sykes]

Maria Salazar.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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 symbolic breaks with the Trump administration when it comes to immigration enforcement. She says this is, this is going to hurt our midterm results. We have constituents who are supportive of the Republican Party who are 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.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I guess it's really striking just

[Charlie Sykes]

that we're taking these Cubans to an internment camp in Texas and then apparently exposing them to breaking bad style drug cartel terror in order to try to convince them to self deport to a country where they have no status.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

I mean, it's, it's insane. Insane. I mean that, that the, the testimony of those guys who are basically like spirited away in the 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 the stuff you can't believe that it's true. And then you read in declaration after declaration these testimonies and they're, they're all consistent in the key details. I mean it's, there's something to it, it's shocking.

[Charlie Sykes]

Now I'm back to that one to have a stroke.

[Tim Miller]

I'm one. I want, I'm wanting to go back to Little Havana. I spent a little time in Little

[Charlie Sykes]

Havana working for Jeb. I want to go revisit with some of the, some of the Jeb supporters I met, see where they're at on this.

[Tim Miller]

Let's talk a little bit about the contracting side of this because, you know,

[Charlie Sykes]

you reported on that as well.

[Tim Miller]

Like who, who's in charge of the tent camps?

[Charlie Sykes]

How much money are they making?

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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, 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 1, doing these kinds of, they're known in like government circles as soft sided facilities. It's one of the great Orwellian descriptions of this.

[Tim Miller]

These tent camps, they're soft. Literally the material is soft.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Exactly. And soft enough for Dust to get in and for rain to leak through. And so the typical contractors who would have put in bids for this were initially 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, between members of the board of this contractor and someone tied to Doug Emoff, Kamala Harris's husband. The government 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 is all about, you know, contractors being on a kind of no 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 who 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 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 different, of building out different aspects of this facility in, you know, 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 subcontractors, some of the companies involved with subcontracting different services at 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. I mean, this stuff, there's some like,

[Tim Miller]

dear leader rhetoric in there.

[Charlie Sykes]

Exactly. We want this because Mr. Trump is so great.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Exactly. Like ICE is doing such great work. You know, we want to make sure we do the great work. You know, it's like I should. You know, you look at these proposals and it's like a different language. I had to share it with experts who worked in government to parse some of the language and all into a person say to me, okay, Acquisition Logistics proposal is this boilerplate nonsense. There's nothing distinguishing about it. And so some of these other companies actually file a complaint with the government. And typically, what's supposed to happen is when another contractor 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. You know, 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, ICE has 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 contract 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, no one's surprised when there are all these complaints right out of the gate that there are these problems and irregularities of the facility.

[Tim Miller]

The least important part of the story

[Charlie Sykes]

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 of which don't need to be detained. The RAY system was working fine, the ISAP system was working fine.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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 deemphasize in the story because like on a moral level, as you say, it sort of feels like the least of all the problems is that like all this money's being paid, 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 has been documented by the gao, but it's like a whole other chapter of it.

[Charlie Sykes]

We'll get the vice president on it. He's the fraud czar, he'll look at it.

[Tim Miller]

I'm just curious, before I lose you, I wanted to just have you kind

[Charlie Sykes]

of put your everyone who has gone as here hat on and the interplay between what's happening and here and what we're doing in Venezuela and Cuba. Obviously that book was about our adventures in Central America in the 80s and the reverberations decades later. And I'm just wondering, I don't know if there are any lessons that brought to mind or anything that you're noticing as you see what the Trump administration is trying to do in Cuba and Venezuela.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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, oil muscles, oil theft, et cetera. 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 you've done, I'm so grateful to how much attention you've brought to this. The Venezuelans who were sent to sicot, 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, I mean, the completely half baked, ridiculous premise of that was that Maduro as leader of Venezuela at the time, was somehow running a prison gang in Venezuela called Treindragua, which not only is just simply untrue, but which US Intelligence actually refuted. But never mind that 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, 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 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 US And Central America too, the US 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 US 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.

[Tim Miller]

Do you have a sense for how much things have changed in Venezuela?

[Charlie Sykes]

I feel like that's kind of hard to get a grapple around.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

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, 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. Sure. 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 Delson Rodriguez. And so the US now is basically running the country. What's happening in Cuba is the same sort of dynamic. I mean, it's just basically immediately commiserating 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, 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, and that's how you end up with, you know, 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, as 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 that's been a fact in the region now for decades.

[Charlie Sykes]

Woof.

[Tim Miller]

Okay, well, so people don't do self harm.

[Charlie Sykes]

I'm going to end on one positive ish thing.

[Tim Miller]

You do have some stories of the legal pushback and the success of that

[Charlie Sykes]

with kind of the frame being Fort Bliss. You mentioned one guy, Brendan McBride, who had a legal practice in San Antonio where he sued insurance companies, but because he was passed 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,

[Jonathan Blitzer]

for all the horrors of this, I have to say, it's like obviously reporting this, it's just, it's. 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. 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. It's maybe not as much as we'd like to cling to, but it's real. But it's real.

[Tim Miller]

All right, what do you got next, Blitzer?

[Charlie Sykes]

What are you working on?

[Jonathan Blitzer]

I don't know, man. I don't know. I'm trying to take it one day at a time here, because 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 then it kind of all really hits me, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of immigration enforcement stuff, I mean, detention, I don't think we can do enough to cover what's happening inside detention centers. There are over 60,000 people being held by ICE right now across the country. So, like, that's one line of reporting that has to continue. I think more of what we're seeing, not just from ice, but from Citizenship and Immigration Services 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. That probably that particular fray.

[Tim Miller]

All right, good luck, man.

[Charlie Sykes]

Have a couple gummies in the meantime.

[Tim Miller]

Sure thing. Sure thing.

[Jonathan Blitzer]

Thanks for. Thanks for having me. It's always good to talk.

[Tim Miller]

We'll see you next time, man. Everybody else will be back tomorrow. Will it be more uplifting tomorrow?

[Charlie Sykes]

I don't know.

[Tim Miller]

Probably not, but, man, it can't be less. Right. So we'll see you all then.

[Charlie Sykes]

Peace.

[Tim Miller]

The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.