EP 9: The Problem with Punishment and Immigration
We recorded and edited this episode in spring and summer 2025, during a horrifying effort to punish immigrants. There are ICE raids in Home Depot parking lots. Masked ICE agents are grabbing people who are attending their immigration hearings. Anti-immigrant rhetoric, which has been growing over decades, is reaching a brutal new turning point. We find ourselves asking, what more can we do to keep our communities and neighbors safe? And why are we still trying to punish our way there?
In this episode, we speak with Donald Anthonyson, a New Yorker who has spent decades advocating for immigrant rights. We also speak with Yasmine Farhang of the Immigrant Defense Project, Joshua Epstein at Queens Defenders and Rosa Cohen-Cruz from Bronx Defenders. They share insight into the particulars of immigration law right here in New York. How does it impacts each of us? And what we can all do in this moment to protect each other?
Useful Links
Our guests for this episode include Yasmine Farhang, the Director of Advocacy at Immigrant Defense Project (IDP); Joshua Epstein, Supervising Immigration Attorney at Queens Defenders; Rosa Cohen-Cruz, Director of Immigration Policy at Bronx Defenders and part of the Immigrant Rights Working Group at Congregation Kolot Chayeinu; and Donald Anythonyson, a long-time organizer and advocate. Hear more from Donald in NYU’s Review of Law & Social Change.
We get some of our numbers about immigration in NYC from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs 2023 Annual Report. We also talked a little about the threat of ICE on Rikers Island. Here’s a New York Times article about the judge’s injunction to block Mayor Adams’ proposal to bring ICE back, and a statement from IDP on the danger of Mayor Adams’ attempt.
Here's more info about immigration detention in the US from Vera Institute.
Here’s some more information on the New York for All Act and how to take action to support it. Here’s some more information on the Dignity Not Detention Act and ways to take action. Learn more about what is happening nationally, how to protect your rights, and how to get involved from the ACLU.
Want to get more involved in NYC? Follow @abolishice_nynjon Instagram!
Transcript:
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): This is the Problem with Punishment Podcast. Spoiler alert: The problem with punishment is it doesn't work. But the bigger problem is that we turn to punishment in every aspect of our lives, from our families to our neighborhoods, our boroughs, our city. We keep expecting punishment to make things better when, for the most part, it makes whatever problem we're addressing worse. Every time punishment fails, it hurts. Some people have taken the pain of that failure and turned it into purpose. I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño, and I'll be talking with a range of New Yorkers who have experienced firsthand the failure of punishment and who found or created something better to do instead. From gun violence to child abuse to drug addiction, New York can lead the way in actually solving some of our most pressing problems. But first, we have to talk about the problem with punishment.
Welcome to our episode, The Problem with Punishment and Immigration. If you're a listener to this podcast, you've figured out that there is a pattern in a lot of these episodes. There's a particular problem, a lot of times it's serious, and people are trying to solve it, and they're turning to punishment, and then coming up short. And that's because so often systems of punishment are really about social control first and then, second, about solving a problem. And if you want an example of punishment and social control, you would be hard-pressed to find a better one than punishment in immigration. Punishment has come to dominate our thinking about how we're going to solve problems related to immigration.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): Now, New York City, in particular, has a long history of being an entry point for immigration to the US. A long history of strong immigrant communities. I did some research, and in the 2020 census kind of confirmed what I know from growing up here. The estimate was that roughly 40% of New York City's residents were immigrants. Then you throw in children of immigrants as well, and you have most people who live in the city live in immigrant families. You know, from Arabic to Yoruba, there are 200 languages spoken in New York. Imagine our hospitals, our schools, our hospitality industry, our construction industry without immigrants. I mean, can you even imagine it? And our conversations about immigration in this city are not about a failed immigration system. And how that failed system is keeping us from welcoming people, from tapping into the ingenuity and resilience of immigrant communities. Our conversations instead have devolved into good immigrants, bad immigrants, and looking for folks to punish.
So in this episode, we're going to talk about the problems of punishment and immigration, specifically in New York City, from a couple of different angles. We're going to start off in Queens, talking to Queens Defenders. They serve thousands of New Yorkers a year, and their immigration clients come from well over a hundred different countries. I got to talk to Joshua Epstein, the immigration attorney supervisor there. He's based in Kew Gardens, one of the places I grew up in in Queens. So, of course, we talked about how great Queens is. And we'll start with that part of the conversation.
Joshua Epstein: Queens is just a beautiful place, and there are so many people and organizations and movements within Queens that are here to uplift our communities, whether their communities are based on where someone's coming from or the language they speak, or the people they love, or the type of work that they do for workers rights, it really encourages a lot of growth and a lot of love and support. Unfortunately, at the same time, we're not on an island, right? We're part of New York City, we're part of New York State. We're part of the United States. So we are bombarded by tons of unfair treatment, and New York City has not been kind to its non-citizen residents, and neither has New York State in a lot of ways. In Queens and in New York City, with immigration enforcement, ever since the inauguration in January, enforcement has increased dramatically. We see this with home and community raids, and this can happen when, let's say someone has overstayed a visa and then immigration finds their home address, or maybe someone is fingerprinted by the police for a variety of reasons and whether that case was dismissed or not, dismissed or decided to not be prosecuted or is still going on, and their cases, they're trying to go to the courts to resolve their case. Immigration may swoop in and do these home raids because they can get the biographic information from their fingerprints. We see more of these immigration holds and detainers dropping on people who are incarcerated in the New York City corrections system. And all of this creates a climate of fear, right? It creates a climate where people don't want to leave their homes. If ICE can grab someone without a warrant, claim that they're part of a gang or an organization, and then whisk them away to a detention center, in another state, in another country and disappear them. They can do that to anyone. They then become a secret police. There aren't certain people because of who you are, who you voted for, that are raptured up from negative consequences.
Donald Anthonyson: You can't have a more crueler crime than exile. And that's punishment for being what? You know, being where you are, who you are.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): That was the voice of Donald Anthonyson. For each of the episodes, we're including stories or perspectives from people who have been directly affected by the issues we're talking about. So for this one, I wanted to talk to an immigrant New Yorker, and especially one who's been organizing for decades. And that's how I got the wonderful privilege and pleasure of talking to Donald about these issues.
Donald Anthonyson: I am a non-US citizen, and I've been involved in multiple issues, more so, more prominently in immigration, fighting, detention, deportation. I've done police brutality work. I also do environmental justice work, migration. I came here in ‘79 and been living in New York. I lived other places. I've lived in Montreal for a moment, but, you know, going back and forth, we got caught up in the immigration situation. This is in the 70s, coming off of the 60s revolution in particular, coming from the Global South. There was a place we could come to that, for the Caribbean people, you could come to America. One people coming to for a better life, so they say, but also the opportunities, economics, and stuff like that. For the Europeans who are running from whatever it was over on that side, the famine—you're coming here and you're being welcomed by some folks. But to me personally, it has never been that genuinely welcome, okay? It has just been okay. You can come in, but X, Y, and Z, because I was here first, and the word is autotune. And every time I hear it, I'm just saying yes because people are saying “I was here first. So if I was here first, you have to follow my rules. My rules say because you got kinky hair or your eyes look kind of different, you can't come over here. You can stay over there.” The Lower East Side was a place when I came—it was kind of fading. But where you had that real melting pot, you had people speaking Yiddish. When I got here, you had Italians, you had Spanish, you had Afro-Americans, you had Caribbean people, and the place was burning, the Lower East Side. But those people got together—Cooper Square, the Community Land Trust—these were people, they were Jewish ladies, they were Puerto Rican men, they were Afro-American men and women getting together to hold that community because they were all in the same boat. They were sufferers.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): And even though New York City has a long history of immigrant communities, New York City also does have a long history of immigrant communities and immigrants. Kind of badly. I asked Donald about his experience with some of that.
Donald Anthonyson: I did organize it on the streets, and some of the responses we would get when I came here and I was, I was told, “go back on a banana boat.” I had to tell the person, “Bananas don't come in the boats anymore. We don't come here in banana boats, okay?” Immigration is also a political a social control tool.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): And I'm going to turn back to my conversation with Joshua Epstein, because this topic of social control and immigration just kept coming up in all of the conversations I had for this episode. Let's go back to Josh for a second.
Joshua Epstein: The detention and removal system really is baked with all of the problems of class and race that law enforcement is. And you can make a direct line to slavery. Right. And if you go all the way back there, then people weren't just illegal. They weren't considered people. Right. So that might be another framework of sort of understanding why this country calls people illegal. The immigration law is fundamentally cruel and unfair, and rife with codes and regulations and loopholes to allow the government to eviscerate human rights. So that's one point. But the other point is that most of the immigration laws that create status for people, that allow folks to apply to come here or stay here temporarily or permanently, have not been updated in decades. Whereas the laws to detain people, to exclude them, to deport them, to remove them are continually updated. And this is where the fundamental human rights violations lay, and where the law only hurts people and continually hurts people, rather than trying to help. And by helping people, we're talking about the specific people and their communities, but we're talking about the whole country.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): But there are some drives to update laws. Again, as Josh mentioned, a lot of times to make them a little more cruel, and one of the policies and sets of laws that are under public debate right now is the concept of sanctuary laws. And what a sanctuary city might mean or might do. I watch enough Fox News to know that there's a lot of misinformation out there about what a sanctuary policy looks like, and why a city would employ it. So for this part of the conversation, we're going to welcome in the Immigrant Defense Project and Yasmine Farhang to explain a sanctuary policy and give a little bit of background and history on it, how New York City came to have a sanctuary policy. And even though New Yorkers are wonderful, we're wonderful people and can be very generous, it's actually a really quite a self-serving thing, but I'll let Yasmine give context to it.
Yasmine Farhang: We're hearing the term sanctuary a lot right now. And really actually have been in particular in New York for the last couple of years. And so I think where we try to start is that sanctuary can mean many different things, right? And it's not a hard and fast term that has one definition that's universally understood. Right. When we talk about sanctuary, we're often talking about a policy or we're talking about laws, but we're also really talking about a value around how we as a city treat immigrant communities, how we support and respect immigrant communities, and how immigrants just are an inseparable part of the fabric of New York City. As cheesy as that sounds, it's true. And then very specifically, you know, when we're talking about sanctuary—in the context in which it's coming up the most today at the local level—we're really talking about a set of laws that regulate how our local resources and our local agencies, our city agencies, are used or are prohibited from being used to support a mass deportation agenda.
We're talking about sanctuary, we are talking about being able to rely and trust that local agencies are not sharing one's information for purposes of mass detention and deportation, right? And the reason that that's so critical is because it fosters trust between immigrant communities and local agencies. And if we don't have that basic trust, that immigrants who are going to speak to school officials or going to shelters or speaking with local law enforcement or whatever it might be, if they don't have that basic trust that the communication and the information they're sharing and the places they're accessing are not going to put them at risk, right, of ICE detention and deportation. If we don't have that trust, then there's a lot of vulnerabilities, not just for immigrant New Yorkers, but for all New Yorkers. So if survivors of violence are not going to seek support from city agencies, that has real implications for them. It has implications for their children. It has implications for their families. If workers don't trust that they can report wage theft or labor exploitation or unsafe working conditions, that has implications for all workers, regardless of whether they're U.S. citizens or not.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): The list of the number of scenarios where you want people to be able to interact with local government is actually quite long.
Yasmine Farhang: It has real implications if renters feel like they can't report dangerous conditions in their buildings; it puts all New Yorkers at risk. It also is more likely to create the conditions that allow for racial profiling, and the conditions that allow for abuses of power with people who work in local agencies. And there have been many, many studies that have shown that cities with large immigrant populations that have these sanctuary laws and policies in place are actually safer for all residents of that city, right? When people are viewing their community, whatever that community is, with some just minimal, just minimal degree of trust, we know that that has a positive impact for everyone, right? And so this executive order from Mayor Koch in 1989 recognized that in order for New York City to function and be vibrant, and have people interact with each other and with their local agencies. They needed to have some basic trust that the people they were interacting with were not going to share their information. And this executive order has been in place under multiple mayors.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): So we've had these policies of separating out immigration enforcement from local law, from local policy, not as some like utopian experiment, but actually as a practical way of keeping our systems running that maintain our quality of daily life here. But all of that has come under attack now because of rhetoric, blaming immigrants, basically being like, well, there's good immigrants and bad immigrants. And this good, bad immigrant, this deserving, not deserving immigrant narrative that takes up so much of the space in the public sphere is really making it difficult for us to have reasonable conversations about immigration and how to handle some of the challenges of immigration. And for that, I'm going to turn back to Joshua Epstein from Queens Defenders.
Joshua Epstein: The messaging and the narratives around immigration for immigration reform have completely failed. And they failed from something I mentioned earlier, which was the inability of the immigration law to be advanced in ways to help people. In ways for there to be status for people to come or people to stay. That just allows an anti-immigrant, xenophobic part of the country to gobble you up. You said that you didn't want criminals or you didn't want these type of people, and we agree with you, and that becomes the only messaging, and you can't get anything to move. And when you can't get anything to move, this means that so many people need to live within the shadows when they have a right to be here in many ways, and they're contributing to our entire fabric of our community in every way possible. It turns into a story old as human time, right? Where you have a bunch of rich people that tell everyone to blame the other people because they either look different or they don't have, or there's a resource allocation issue, and they're going to take all of your things, and then you have sort of the masses fighting with one another, while this very small group steals everything. That doesn't even allow people to stay here when they are terrified of being persecuted, tortured, or killed back home. And one of the reasons is creating this narrative that there are good immigrants, and then there are bad immigrants.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): And this good immigrant, bad immigrant narrative is just a pretense on which to dehumanize immigrants. And then the circle you're drawing around who are the immigrants that can be dehumanized, just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and including more people.
Joshua Epstein: The immigration enforcement system is frequently very lazy and just uses the local law enforcement system, which, as we know, has been baked in racism and classism. So everything just helps the other system with its cruelty. Basically, yeah, you get leaner, meaner. And the other thing is what we were talking about. I mean, there's clear evidence that this doesn't work. Like, we haven't been able to get a Dream Act. We haven't been able to get any sort of another Amnesty Bill, but we can't even get new visa statuses or more green cards being offered, right? For people that want to come and maybe work here temporarily, or want to come and work and live here permanently. And we also have a persecution-based relief system that is abysmal.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): If we're going to talk about persecution and we're talking about things that are horrible in New York City, then it's time to talk about Rikers Island. Mayor Adams threatened a big change in April of 2025, when he issued an executive order to allow ICE to return to Rikers Island and operate again, where they have not been for many years. Now, this was stopped earlier this summer, thanks to a great deal of organizing and pressure and litigation, and the City Council took it on as an issue. But ICE used to be on Rikers for years, and there are many other examples of ways that ICE is collaborating with police and corrections in the past. And there's lots of reasons it didn't work well. So we're going to go back to the Immigrant Defense Project in Yasmine to give us a background on this, so that as New Yorkers, we have the full picture.
Yasmine Farhang: Over the past dozen years, we have seen different local laws. So there's been several local laws, right? It's not just one that have built on these values and built on that executive order to ensure that we have now legislated and codified moving forward, regardless of who was in office, regardless of executive order, that this is now law in New York City. Those laws were later expanded in 2014 to increase protections for anybody interacting with the New York Police Department and the Department of Corrections. Those 2014 laws are really critical, not only because they were sort of groundbreaking in New York City, but also because that was the those were the same laws in 2014 that evicted ICE from operating on Rikers Island, which is what's coming back up now a decade later.
Joshua Epstein: Residents and citizens in Queens are subject to some harsh treatment by the New York City government, and one of which is trying to reopen the ICE office on Rikers Island. And this was closed ten years ago because of all of the harsh and illegal treatment that ICE officers, along with the collaboration with the Department of Corrections, were doing to hurt Queens residents and residents in other boroughs, and this desire to collaborate with ICE comes back to this narrative and messaging of, well, they're at Rikers they must be the bad immigrant.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): And here we come back to the problem of Rikers, which is that, you know, it's our island gulag here in the city. And people being held in a jail are actually innocent until proven guilty. It really is possible that a person who has done nothing wrong has not actually broken any particular rule, could wind up in Rikers. And having ICE physically present on Rikers Island is just going to compound the problems that we already face with Rikers. Not really address it, but again, this narrative of, oh, who's the good immigrant? Who's the bad immigrant keeps coming back to limit our ability to deal with these real problems. We all want to be safe. We all want to live in safe communities. The notion that incarcerating tens of thousands of people. You know, because someone has committed a crime is just so irrational and is not going to get us safer communities.
If you've listened to any of the other episodes of this podcast, I hope you've noticed how often we try to keep this, like, grounded in the real world. Like what is actually happening in New York? And also talk about what are things people can do that work better than turning to systems of punishment. And for someone who can speak to both of those fronts, I'm going to turn to our next guest.
Rosa Cohen-Cruz: My name is Rosa Cohen-Cruz. I'm a member of the congregation Kolot Chayeinu and part of the Immigrant Rights Working Group. In my professional capacity, I'm also the director of immigration policy at the Bronx Defenders and have been an immigration attorney for over a decade.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): So Rosa is a twofer for us. She can both speak to the legal system implications and some of the system responses that we're seeing and some of the system problems we're seeing, with the focus on punishment and can also talk to us about things people can do in community. Because she and I are both members of the synagogue that she mentioned, this is where I will mention that my synagogue is very cool because I am not Jewish, but I am a member. And let's start off with Rosa with her legal hat on, talking about yet another scenario in which you are glad you live in a city with the sanctuary policy.
Rosa Cohen-Cruz: I think that even for people that might have questions or different political alignments than I do when it comes to immigration, sometimes it just takes the reminder that on a very individualistic or selfish level, if my house is on fire, I want any neighbor who sees it to immediately call 911 and not have to take a pause and think about their immigration status, and if helping me will put them in harm's way. You know, like, I think even someone that might not be community-minded, it is in all of our own self-interest that any person on the street would feel safe acting in an emergency. If I'm, you know, if I have a sudden medical emergency, I want to know that someone will call emergency services and not even pause for one second to consider if that will cause them to be funneled into ICE custody. We need to make sure that people feel safe engaging in our institutions, but we also need to have a commitment that we are not going to allow New York State to profit off of, creating more opportunity to disappear our neighbors and friends.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): Wait, New York profiting, actually making money off of ICE detention? I asked Rosa to explain more.
Rosa Cohen-Cruz: I think there has been a lot of important emphasis on ending collusion between, you know, institutions like law enforcement and, you know, public officials and and ICE, but I think that there is less of a spotlight on the fact that New York is, with one hand, helping funnel people into ICE detention and then, on the other hand, profiting off of the detention that they are creating. And so, you know, we have a system where we allow our county jails to rent extra bed space to ICE. And there are quite a few county jails that do it. One of the largest contracts is with the Orange County Jail, just an hour north of the city. A couple years ago, their day rate was $133 per person. And that's really what these detention contracts are. Every bed is a new bed for ICE to fill. And, you know, I'll just say on both sanctuary laws and detention, New York State is behind that. Other jurisdictions, other states have actually passed laws that say, we are not going to let our local jails rent their beds to ICE detention because we know that that is wrong. And so the two bills that are kind of the critical bills that would end those partnerships are the New York for All Act. And then the Dignity Not Detention Act is the bill that says we're not going to let our local jails rent beds to increase ICE detention capacity.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): A quick clarifying point here. So the Dignity Not Detention Act would end ICE contracts with jails. Then there's the New York for All Act, which would stop collusion between agency employees for New York City and ICE. And it would end all the 287 G Agreements in New York. So both bills, but each in a different way, are essential to keeping immigrants and all New Yorkers safe and keep our state functioning. Now, back to Rosa.
Rosa Cohen-Cruz: One of the things that is so disturbing about these ICE contracts is that they're often controlled and maintained by the sheriff's department themselves. And so these sheriff's departments have an incentive to go after immigrants. I mean, it's a it's clear textbook, racial profiling in many ways. And that's particularly true in counties like Nassau that have 287g Agreements, where they're deputized ICE officers, and also detention contracts, where they profit off of having an immigration detention center in their jail. So we're creating this mechanism where basically ICE is usurping a state institution and a local institution for their own purposes. And, you know, it's causing racial profiling, targeting of our neighbors and communities, and overall destruction to the strength and integrity of our communities.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): So some of this, you knew it was bad. It's even worse than you thought. Let's turn to the other part of the puzzle that Rosa brings us, which is things we can do. And we'll actually start with talking about the state coalition, and then talk about things that ordinary members of a synagogue can do.
Rosa Cohen-Cruz: It is very clear how harmful ICE detention is, both to the folks inside and to their families and community members. But the working but the coalition, the Dignity not Detention Coalition, also has an inside-outside working group where we directly communicate with and support folks who are surviving detention. And one of the most concrete ways I've seen people support folks inside is by donating to commissary funds, giving donating to bond funds, so when someone does get bonds, they can be released. And for people who don't have financial resources, writing letters to folks inside with words of encouragement and saying, hang in there, keep fighting, your fight matters, what you're doing matters, like we're with you. Those words really mean a lot to somebody who's inside, and just trying to make it to their next day, to their next court date. And so, you know, wherever you sit, whether you're someone that if you're someone that doesn't want to go into the fray or doesn't have financial resources to contribute, there's still a role for anyone to play in supporting folks who are being targeted by this anti-immigrant moment that we're in.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): Yeah, because ordinary people can come together. Ordinary New Yorkers do come together all the time to organize themselves into communities that respond to harm, that respond to punishment, that create things that are better. So what are the things that our synagogue is doing?
Rosa Cohen-Cruz: There's a number of different kind of projects going on under the umbrella of the Immigrant Refugee Working Group at Kolot. There's a group that thinks about legislative policy. And, you know, how can we use our voices to let lawmakers know what our community thinks about what New York should be doing to help make this the city and state a truly welcoming place for everyone, regardless of where they were born. There's a group that is more dedicated to providing material support to people who need help, who maybe are recent arrivals. And I know there was a group that was helping find housing for some people. So there's there are sort of different offshoots, and there's a group that's doing theatre workshops, helping people process—It's actually my mother who is part of that group—helping people process their own stories and what they've gone through to be in this moment, to be here using theatre and using theatre techniques to kind of help build community and work through some of those things. There's always good food, good conversation, just being in community with each other, supporting each other through some really hard times, and thinking together about how to, you know, continue the commitment to making New York a welcoming place for everybody. Being in a legal organization professionally, it has been extremely powerful and grounding to work in community with people really seeing how everybody, everyday people are responding to the moment and meeting the moment in a way that the law is really not equipped to do.
One of the biggest needs in this moment that I'm seeing is supporting folks as they're going to their court, their immigration court dates, particularly if they're unrepresented, just giving them moral support through accompaniment. And I also understand that that is really scary for a lot of people and maybe isn't what everybody wants to do, but there's a lot of ways to kind of continue to show up, support. The community support of individuals wherever they are in their journey to find stability is extremely important. And so you don't have to be a policy buff or a lawyer to make a meaningful impact in this fight. You don't have to be someone who likes going to protests or wants to do accompaniment. You can literally write a letter to somebody. You can literally donate $5 to a commissary fund. You can talk to your friends about why what you're seeing is horrifying, and keep it on in the public mind, like there are so many ways to engage. And I think this is a moment that is really going to require everybody's engagement and stamina to continue the conversation, to keep this relevant. So we can, you know, really push back collectively.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): It might not seem to matter what individuals do, what one synagogue has figured out about doing, but all of these things have an effect. If enough of us just take the time and figure out things we can do and we need to, because the scale of the problem of punishing immigrants is really pretty big.
Joshua Epstein: We're talking about millions and millions of people that are baked into the communities that are making this country run. I don't just mean economically, but I mean on a spiritual and human level. Detention and deportation don't work. They hurt people. They bruise our society. They create people who live in the shadows, and they sentence people to death abroad. And we've been deporting people for a very long time. And at least in the last 30 years, we've been deporting people en masse. And people keep on coming right? We're really lost in this cycle of punishment. And we think that this is normal. And it really became quite perverted.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): In our rush to punish our way out of our immigration problems. We're looking for someone to blame. But our immigration system has been broken for decades. The problems with this immigration system are much older than many of the people who are caught up in it. Immigrants are not responsible for our broken immigration system. Citizens, especially if you're like me, a birthright citizen, we have more responsibility for fixing these problems than people who are migrating. And I say that because I was raised to believe that being a US citizen was a tremendous privilege, and I believe that to be true. So with that privilege comes responsibility. And I've had plenty of conversations with people talking to me about, oh, but are these immigrants following the rules? That would be a fair question if we citizens had done our job, if we had a reasonably functional system. But that's not what we have. The system is broken. It allows money to move across borders freely, but not people. And it especially does not allow the freedom of movement for poor people or people from the global South.
Punishing the people who are caught up in it is illogical. And let's face it, kind of mean. Especially when you consider how many New Yorkers are descended from immigrants. You know, reasonable people, especially those who don't want to insult their ancestors who are migrants, can agree that there's a right to migrate. And let's come back to one thing about the roots of migration as well. It's a line from a poem by Warsan Shire, but I saw it on a sign at an immigration rights protest here in New York City. It's from like ten years ago. Shira wrote, "No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark." There are real problems that are pushing international migration, and as New Yorkers, we're both smart enough, and ultimately, I think we are kind enough to figure that out. So we have to talk about the roots of migration, the roots of why we have such a broken immigration system. And I'm going to give Donald the last word on this.
Donald Anthonyson: How did you get here? I don't think you're running from a country with 365 beaches to come in cold ass New York. How did you get here? Show some humanity to your fellow beings. Then it becomes more easy to welcome and harder to punish.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): This podcast was produced in Brooklyn, New York. The unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape and Canarsie People. We thank all the ancestors for caring for this land over the generations, and we're committed to the work of creating a shared future that includes the native communities that are still here, and all the people who call this land home. When we recorded this podcast in spring and summer of 25, there's so much energy being spent on targeting immigrants for punishment. I look forward to the time when people listen to this episode and think, what were we thinking? How did we let this happen? But you know who's not allowing it to happen? Who's getting in the way? Our guests on this episode. At an incredibly stressful time, they made time to sit down with us, and I really want to thank them for that. Thanks so much to Yasmine Farhang and the folks at Immigrant Defense Project, who also helped us with the overall approach to this issue. Thank you, Joshua Epstein from Queens Defenders. Thank you, Donald Anthonyson, I could have talked for hours. Thanks to Rosa Cohen-Cruz, a member of Kolot Chayeinu, and also, this episode marks the second visit we've had from Bronx Defenders to share the work that they're doing.
Our podcast team is Doctor Candacé King, Reverend Doctor Sharon White-Harrigan, and Tess Weiner. Thank you to our production partner, JuleCave Studios, led by our creative producer, Julius Shepard-Morgan. Remember, you can send comments and questions to us via email justiceBeyondPunishment@gmail.com. I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño. This podcast is a project of the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, with support from Trinity Wall Street. You can learn more about the collaborative and all our creative projects at BeyondPunishment.org. Thanks for listening.
