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

Incarcerated migrants at the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Texas in May displaying a banner saying “Help we want to be deported. We are not terrorists, S.O.S.” U.S. District Judge Wesley Hendrix readily offered the facility to the Trump administration under the Alien Enemies Act.( Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

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.