Kafka’s Merry-Go-Round of Hell: A Podcast with Laura St. John

Dive into the delusions of detention and deportation under the Trump administration. The Florence Project’s legal director offers a new way to understand and challenge them.

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Immigration
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November 25, 2025

The legal director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project provides an on-the-ground analysis of and reckoning with year 1 of the Trump administration’s detention and deportation regime.

What happens after an arrest? How many people have been detained? And what happens to asylum seekers?

And what exactly is Kafka’s merry-go-round of hell?

Laura St. John answers these questions and more.

But, perhaps most importantly, St. John provides practical answers for what concerned people might do about it. She offers an antidote to the “sense of hopeless inevitability” that the Trump administration is purposefully creating for undocumented people.

For 15 years, St. John has been working for the Florence Project—an organization that provides legal assistance and advocacy for undocumented people in detention.

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Author
Todd Miller

Todd Miller is Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of The Border Chronicle. He is the author of four books that examine border militarization and its externalization, surveillance technology and industry, climate change, and the search for alternatives. His books include Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders (City Lights, 2021) Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World (Verso, 2019),  Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights, 2017), and Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (City Lights, 2014).

Todd’s forthcoming book is a deep examination of water as a border issue in an age of climate-induced heat waves and drought. It will be published by Seven Stories Press in 2027.

Besides The Border Chronicle, articles by Todd have appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Guernica, TomDispatch, and Al Jazeera English, among other places. He has also authored and co-authored reports on border surveillance, the border industrial complex, and climate change for the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, where he is a fellow.

Todd’s book Storming the Wall received the Izzy Award in 2018 for “path-breaking and in-depth reporting.” He also received first place in “Community immigration reporting” by the Arizona Press Club in 2013. Todd has a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies and Journalism from Prescott College, where he is also an adjunct professor.

In his spare time, Todd likes to travel, read, philosophize, and hang out with his two kids—whether it be going to a dance recital or being a basketball coach.

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