One Refugee’s Journey Through ICE Detention

20:16Withholding's really hard to win. Like, you should definitely feel proud of yourself, but your client's not getting out.

20:27Jonathan Blitzer:That's Andrea Nunes, an immigration lawyer in New York. Our story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stay with us.

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24:47Jonathan Blitzer:This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Jonathan Blitzer. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker, and I'm sitting in today for David Remnick. On today's episode, we're taking a close look at the ways that the Trump administration has been overhauling the nation's immigration system. We'll continue with the story of a man from Guinea who was detained after an immigration hearing. That's an unprecedented step that ICE began taking in 2025. The man's name is Al-Saini. were only using his first name for his safety. At his asylum hearing, a judge denied Alsani's asylum status, but she granted what's called withholding of removal.

25:23Jonathan Blitzer:That meant that Alsani couldn't be deported back to Guinea. Before Trump's second term, most people who had won withholding of removal would be released from government custody. But that's not what happened to Alsani. He spent the rest of the fall in Moshannon. By December, he'd been locked up for six months, even though the government wasn't appealing the judge's ruling in his case. And meanwhile, the Trump administration was in the midst of a highly public battle about withholding of removal. Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Remember Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador? That's the Maryland man who, in the beginning of the Trump administration, was picked up and deported to El Salvador, mistakenly put in a prison there, and then had to come back to the U.S.

26:09There's an ongoing fight to deport him to Liberia. Abrego's attorneys say he should be sent to Costa Rica instead.

26:16Jonathan Blitzer:In the first year of Trump's second term, the government deported some 15 ,000 people to third countries. One group wound up in South Sudan, another in Eswatini. Afghans and Iranians were sent to Panama, a Colombian woman to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It wasn't just that these people were deported to an unfamiliar country. That country was often just a short stop on the road back to the place they'd fled. This has now happened to two of Andrea's Guinean clients. Both had one withholding of removal in immigration court, and both were deported to Ghana. But the government of Ghana doesn't care about the ruling of a U.S.

26:54Jonathan Blitzer:immigration judge. And so Ghana has since sent both men back to Guinea. Both of them are currently in hiding. So even with the withholding of removal decision in his case, Alcini, like Abrego Garcia, was in a new kind of jeopardy. If they send him to a third country, they just put him into a worse and worse situation. There was a bond hearing to determine if Alsani could be released now that he had won withholding of removal. But it was full of mishaps. The translator kept getting the facts wrong, garbling Alsani's answers. Instead of a rash from his illness, the interpreter said Alsani had pimples on his skin.

27:28Jonathan Blitzer:Sometimes the interpreter used French words, which Alsani couldn't understand. They lost the bond hearing. Andrea filed a motion to challenge the decision. In the meantime, though, Alsani and Andrea knew that he could be sent out of the country at any moment. They came up with plans for what to do if that seemed to be happening. We would practice. I would pretend to be ICE, and he would be Alsani, and I would be like, Oh, Alsani, we're going to send you to Ghana. And then Alsani would, like, do his practice, and he'd be like, I cannot be removed to Ghana because I have an appeal pending with the BIA, and I have an automatic stay.

28:02But like we would do this.

28:04Jonathan Blitzer:You had to come up with a script essentially. We would practice it all the time just because, you know, thankfully, again, Alcini did speak, he speaks really, I'm really impressed by his English. Again, it's not good enough for court, but, you know. Well, he essentially learned it in immigration detention. Yeah, it's so wild. But he can advocate for himself. The new American dream. Yeah. It's like such an incredible dystopian version of cultural assimilation. But I thought to myself, okay, like, maybe if they accidentally try to send him somewhere, he can advocate for himself and they'll understand.

28:33Jonathan Blitzer:ICE tends to move people with little to no warning. Often, the only way that someone finds out that they are about to be moved is that their commissary account is frozen. They can't buy food or make calls. One day, late in December, Alcini's account stops working. He tries to make a phone call, but can't. He and Andrea have a plan for this, too. They've put money on a friend's account. He calls on Andrea and puts Alsani on the line. You know, my commentary has been shut off. He was really worried. He was like, I'm scared. And those are, I feel like, the worst words to hear from someone, especially in his situation.

29:11Jonathan Blitzer:Within hours, Alsani's on a bus heading who knows where. Once we got off the bus and then they took us into an airplane, And then I said to myself, oh, wow, so they're finally actually going to be depoting me. So I was really, really worried at that point. When the plane finally lands, the ICE agents say, Some of you are staying here, but then others are going to be continuing. They read through a list of names. A few people get off. Alcini does not. The plane takes off again. Another landing. Another list of names. Alcini stays shackled on the plane. They land for a third time. And finally, they called my name and said they pointed to a separate vehicle.

29:54They said that's where I was going to go in.

29:56Jonathan Blitzer:A short drive later, the van pulls into a prison complex. Alcini and the others are still in the United States. They're in Indiana at the Miami Correctional Center. Yeah, when I first get there, one other guy was getting released. And we asked him how the place looked like. And he says, the place no good. Immigration detention centers like Moshannon are not supposed to be like prisons. Most of the detainees are not criminals. But the Miami Correctional Facility is a prison. ICE rents space there. Now, Alseni was put in a small cell with one cellmate. He couldn't go outside for recreation. We'll be locked up for 20 hours a day.

30:38The only time you will come out is to either eat or go take a shower.

30:42Jonathan Blitzer:So you spent 20 hours of every day in essentially a cell? Yes. There were two of us in a cell. The bathroom was also within that cell. Everything was there. What was the food like?

31:02The food was in... There was no food, really. It was only a sandwich that they gave you, like a peanut butter sandwich or bologna sandwich. That's what you will get.

31:15Jonathan Blitzer:Alcini doesn't eat pork, so he'd have to trade the bologna sandwiches for something he could eat. For me to get a peanut butter sandwich, I needed two bologna sandwiches to get one peanut butter sandwich. That was the rate. That was the going rate. Many of the people working in the ICE detention center were inmates from the prison, cleaning, doing other menial jobs. Alcini said the prisoners had more opportunities to be out of their cells than the immigrants did, which reminded me of something another person being detained by ICE told me recently. We're less than prisoners. Their staff, I think, was really violent.

31:52Alcini got pepper sprayed by staff there at least one time.

31:56Jonathan Blitzer:Weeks go by. Alcini says officers would come by to ask who was willing to be deported. They would also look for people who were willing to be sent to third countries. ICE will come every day and tell you so-and-so country is willing to take you, and so you just sign and get deported to that country. Did you know anyone who got sent to a third country, to a country that wasn't their home country? Yeah, I knew the Senegalese guy who got sent back to Ghana, but I knew a lot of people who got sent to a third country, countries that they were not from. So I better be detained than get out and do something good for my life than being sent back and getting killed.

32:42Because if you're taking me home, they will kill me. So if you're sending me home, I'll tell you to kill me right now.

32:50Jonathan Blitzer:Alcini and I talked about this a lot. He really means it when he says that he'd rather die in the U.S. than go back to Guinea. He and Andrea are increasingly desperate to get him out of detention. She files a petition known as a writ of habeas corpus. Habeas is one of the bedrock legal rights in a democracy. You cannot be held indefinitely without any actual charges. Andrea wants a judge to evaluate whether ICE could go on holding Alsani. At the Miami Correctional Facility, things are getting worse by the day. These are men from all over the world, locked up in abysmal conditions, with no idea when they might be released.

33:27You have to understand the state of mind of people in that kind of situation, because people are hopeless. And so they feel like they have nothing to lose. And so they are always frustrated. And it can take that frustration up onto you.

33:44Jonathan Blitzer:Fights sometimes broke out. Guards reacted harshly. They pepper sprayed men and threw them into solitary confinement, regardless of whether they were instigators or victims. One morning, Alsani is on the breakfast line when he notices another detainee having some sort of emotional breakdown. He was screaming and crying and saying if they don't take him out of there, He's going to hurt someone. The guard said, if you want to kill yourself, kill yourself. You want to kill someone, kill someone. I don't care. Remember, Alsani is short and thin. In moments like this, he's an easy target. Before Alsani realizes what's even happening, the man is attacking him.

34:22This guy comes from behind me while we were waiting for food. He comes from behind me and ripped my dread and then almost took out my eye.

34:32Jonathan Blitzer:When the guards finally get the man off him, Alcani's lost a chunk of hair. His scalp is bleeding. But worse, he's really worried about his eye. He can't open it. It's bleeding badly. When he asks for medical attention... They said they don't care about it. They told me to get out of their face and leave. If I didn't leave, they were going to pepper spray me or stuff like that. Back in the cell later in the morning, when someone comes around to count the detainees, Alcani asks again for medical assistance. The woman doing the count says she'll ask, but she doesn't come back. A few hours later, someone else does, though, with major news.

35:08Jonathan Blitzer:News about a legal development. A judge has finally decided on Alsani's habeas petition. And after nine months of being held in detention, the judge orders that he has to be released immediately. It's February 12, 2026. I was sleeping, and then the lady came and called my name. She said, you're going home. I said, going home where? Hey, she said, you're going back to New York. You should stop packing your stuff. We can't keep you here even for 20 minutes. Andrea's overjoyed. She arranges for a volunteer to pick him up from the detention center, buy him a bus ticket. And by the next day, he's back in New York.

35:46Jonathan Blitzer:And that's where he is now. Kind of back where he started. Learning his way around the city, looking for work, trying to make a life for himself. Alcany isn't the kind of person to talk much about his trauma. But clearly, everything he's been through, first in Guinea, now in the U.S., had added a layer of difficulty and chaos to his life. It's surely having an impact on how he thinks about his future. At the time of his release, there were nearly 70 ,000 people being held in immigration detention. More people than ever. And that number doesn't begin to capture the millions of lives that have been turned upside down by the president's mass deportation campaign.

36:24Jonathan Blitzer:In the meantime, the legal landscape was shifting. The administration's courthouse arrests began to face legal setbacks in court. A federal judge in California is banning federal officials from making arrests at immigration courts nationwide in a setback for the Trump administration's crackdown. In New York, a judge ordered the government to stop detaining people at 26 Federal Plaza, where all of this started for Alsani. In the ruling, the court wrote that while, quote, there is a strong governmental interest in enforcing immigration laws, there is also a serious interest in allowing migrants to pursue asylum claims without fear of arrest.

37:02Jonathan Blitzer:But the morning after the judge's ruling, masked ICE agents were back outside the courthouse, ready to make more arrests. An activist named Peter Melt-Kittel was there at the time. He tried to show them copies of the decision. The image, it reminds me of Alsani leaving the courthouse a year ago. holding a printout from the judge listing the date and time of his next appointment. You'd think the documentation might actually mean something. As Cattell described it later to a local paper, he showed them the decision, and the agents waved him away and said simply, we don't care.

37:43Jonathan Blitzer:I'm Jonathan Blitzer. Our program continues on the next episode, when I'll speak with a Democrat and a Republican in Congress on the politics of immigration and how this is all playing out with voters. Thanks for listening.

38:00The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. We had special assistance on this episode from Sarah Nix. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.

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