Is America Abandoning Immigrants? Mass Deportation and Resistance
Fintan O’Toole in conversation with Francisco Cantú, Caroline Moorehead, and Julia Preston.
The New York Review of Books’s Advising Editor, Fintan O’Toole, hosts Francisco Cantú, Caroline Moorehead, and Julia Preston for a wide-ranging conversation on political violence in America.
This conversation was recorded on September 25, 2025.
Francisco Cantú is a writer and translator and the author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and his writing and translations have also appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, VQR, and The Best American Essays series, as well as featured on This American Life. He teaches at the University of Arizona, where he is one of the coordinators of the Field Studies in Writing Program and DETAINED, a community archive that collects oral histories of people who have been incarcerated in for-profit immigrant detention centers.
Caroline Moorehead is a historian and biographer, most recently of a quartet of books on the resistance in France and Italy before and during World War II and a life of Mussolini’s daughter Edda. She is a human rights journalist and the author of Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees.
Julia Preston is a journalist focusing on immigration. She is the coauthor, along with Samuel Dillon, of Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy, an account of Mexico’s transformation from an authoritarian state into a struggling democracy. She was previously a contributing writer at the Marshall Project, a nonprofit organization that publishes reporting on criminal justice and immigration. Before the Marshall Project, she worked at The New York Times, first as a foreign correspondent in Mexico and then as the paper’s national correspondent covering immigration.
About this series
The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues emerging from the second Trump administration. In each conversation the Review’s Advising Editor, Fintan O’Toole, will talk with a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including immigration, political violence, the rule of law, and the state of the left.