Former immigration judge Carmen María Rey joins Juan Manuel Benítez to discuss her August 2025 termination by the Trump administration, what she witnessed in New York's immigration courts during the first months of Trump's second term, and why she still has hope for America despite having decided to leave the country.

Rey, who spent her career as an immigration lawyer and now teaches at Pace University, was one of hundreds of immigration judges terminated without explanation. She had previously been targeted by 30 Republican Congress members, including Rep. Elise Stefanik, for tweets criticizing ICE during Trump's first term.

In this conversation, Rey describes scenes of "cruelty that will remain with me until the day that I die"—ICE agents detaining people in courthouse hallways, children screaming as fathers were taken away, families too afraid to use the bathroom. She reflects on the bitter irony of being fired from the very building where she once stood as an undocumented child, waiting in line with her mother for an employment authorization stamp.

Rey discusses the erosion of judicial independence, the "unitary executive theory" being used to justify mass federal employee firings, and why she sees parallels between this moment and the Civil War era.

Host: Juan Manuel Benítez

Guest: Carmen María Rey

Books mentioned in this episode:

• Empire of Borders by Todd Miller -
• Works by historian Heather Cox Richardson (Boston College)

Topics discussed:

• Immigration court proceedings and ICE enforcement tactics
• The firing of immigration judges and challenges to judicial independence
• The "unitary executive theory" and federal employment protections
• Asylum law and grant rates across different courts
• Historical parallels between current era and the Civil War period
• The experience of being undocumented in 1980s and 1990s America

Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know is produced at Columbia Journalism School. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read more at Substack.

• Grace Rauh - Executive Director, Citizens Union; Former NY1 Political Reporter

• Zack Fink - Director of External Affairs, Davidoff Hutcher & Citron; Host, Lobbying Insider Podcast; Former NY1 Political Reporter

• Mayor Zohran Mamdani's first weeks in office and his childcare policy win

• The Mamdani-Hochul partnership vs. the de Blasio-Cuomo era

• Governor Hochul's 2025 re-election prospects

• Trump's impact on democratic institutions and immigration enforcement

• The state of journalism and media consolidation

• Life after reporting: advocacy, lobbying, and what they miss (or don't)

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro

• Citizens Union

• Five Borough Institute 

• Davidoff Hutcher & Citron

• The Lobbying Insider - Zack Fink's current podcast

• NY1 Podcasts - Including the current Off Topic/On Politics

• Museum of the City of New York

• Mayor Zohran Mamdani
• Governor Kathy Hochul

• Lt. Governor Antonio Delgado

• Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch

• First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan

• Emmy List - Director, Mayor's Office of Childcare

Episode description

It’s the book many of my podcast guests recommended –and that I’m also now reading: The Gods of New York. In it, New York Times journalist Jonathan Mahler argues the last years of the 1980’s shaped the city we know today. Previously, in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, Mahler had gone back to 1977, when New York was literally and figuratively on fire. Now, he zooms in on just four years — 1986 to 1990 — and the larger-than-life characters that dominate them.

To close the first season of the Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know podcast, I speak with Mahler about the “gods” of that era — Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Larry Kramer, Benjamin Ward, Linda Fairstein and others — and how tabloids, Wall Street, crack, AIDS, and a wave of racial flashpoints pushed the city from a working-class metropolis to a global capital of finance and inequality. We get into Joyce “Billie Boggs” Brown and homelessness, Bed-Stuy’s transformation and Black political power, and what Mahler thinks Zohran Mamdani and this new political moment need to learn from that history. 

Mahler also talks about how he reported the book — more than 200 interviews and deep archival digging — why he still believes in “inefficient” research in the age of AI, and what he’d tell young journalists coming into the profession right now. And, because life is not all New York doom, he leaves us with a big, sprawling novel recommendation: Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. 

In January, we’ll be back with season two of Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know, with more conversations about New York and the people shaping its future.

Books and essays we mention

• Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986–1990 
• Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City 
• Jonathan Mahler, The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power 
• Jonathan Mahler, Mamdani’s Rise Marks the End of a Chapter in American History, New York Times guest essay (Aug. 11, 2025) 
• Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Assemblymember Alex Bores is one of the only lawmakers in America who can read both a bill and a codebase — and he's now running for Congress in New York’s competitive 12th District. In this episode, we dig into his push for AI regulation, the super PAC trying to knock him off the ballot, why Big Tech is watching this race, and how a coder’s mindset changes politics. We also talk childcare, democracy, growing up in Manhattan, and the small privacy settings on your phone that matter more than you think.

Guest: Assemblymember Alex Bores, candidate for Congress in NY-12
Host: Juan Manuel Benítez
Location: Columbia Journalism School, NYC

Topics we cover:

• Why AI is improving far faster than people realize
• What the RAISE Act actually does — and why major AI labs oppose it
• Industry secrecy, privacy law failures, and how your data is being used
• China’s AI strategy and why Big Tech’s talking points don’t hold
• The six-figure Silicon Valley super PAC targeting him
• Affordability, childcare, democracy, and the future of NYC families
• Growing up in Manhattan, labor organizing, Central Park memories
• The whiskey he swears anyone can learn to love
• His go-to iPhone privacy settings — including one Uber/Lyft toggle everyone should shut off

📺 Alex Bores’ Campaign Launch Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwWJAX0Q0wA

📚 Book Recommendation — Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka
(New York Public Library link)
https://www.nypl.org/research/collections/shared-collection-catalog/bib/b23691530

🌳Parks

• Central Park https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/central-park
• Carl Schurz Park — the Upper East Side park along the East River https://www.carlschurzparknyc.org/

🛠 Organizations & Bills Mentioned

• RAISE Act (AI safety legislation Bores sponsored)

  https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?Text=Y&bn=A06453&default_fld&leg_video&term&utm_s

• Anthropic (developer of Claude AI)
  https://www.anthropic.com
• NVIDIA
  https://www.nvidia.com
• Park Avenue Synagogue (community cleanup he mentions)
  https://pasyn.org
• New York Common Pantry (his suggested year-end charity)
  https://nycommonpantry.org

Show Notes

Special Book Edition: 25,000 Streams Celebration
Recorded in New York City on Thanksgiving Day

A milestone episode. After just a dozen conversations, Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know has crossed 25,000 streams. Instead of another interview, we’re doing something revealing, personal, and surprisingly political: we’re revisiting book recommendations from our guests.

These are the titles that shape how leaders think about New York, democracy, wealth, poverty, power, inequality, science, climate, and their own decisions. From collapsing empires to the Koch era, from hedge funds to poverty in Brooklyn, from spiritual discipline to climate-fiction superheroes, this episode shows how reading choices become political choices.

🗽 New York City history and power

• The Gods of New York — Jonathan Mahler (recommended by Brad Lander, Kathryn Wylde, Grace Rauh, Juan Manuel Benítez is currently reading, and the author is coming on the show)
• The City We Became — N.K. Jemisin (Brad Lander)

🌍 Climate imagination & speculative politics

• A Half-Built Garden — Ruth Emrys (Brad Lander)

💡 Ideas reshaping public policy

• Abundance — Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson (Mark Levine)

🧠 Psychology, mindset & self-determination

• The Science of Mind — Ernest Holmes (Eric Adams)

⚔️ Labor history, unions & fear of socialism

• The Jungle — Upton Sinclair (Curtis Sliwa)

💸 Wealth, exploitation & the cost of growing up poor

• Black Edge — Sheelah Kolhatkar (Jessica Ramos)
• Invisible Child — Andrea Elliott (Jessica Ramos)

⚾ Escapism with substance

• The Bee Sting — Paul Murray (Brian Lehrer)

🔎 Race, economics, and shared struggle

• White Poverty — Rev. William Barber (Antonio Delgado)

🏛️ A crumbling empire as metaphor

• The Emergency — George Packer (Ben Smith)

Brad Lander • Kathryn Wylde • Mark Levine • Eric Adams • Curtis Sliwa • Jessica Ramos • Brian Lehrer • Grace Rauh • Christina Greer • Josh Greenman • Nicole Gelinas • Antonio Delgado • Ben Smith

The most mentioned book: The Gods of New York, by Jonathan Mahler. Stay tuned — the author joins the podcast in a couple of weeks.

If you’ve been listening, reviewing, or sharing episodes, you helped grow a show focused on understanding power in New York City. Keep going:

👍 Subscribe
⭐ Leave a review
📚 Send Juan your current book recommendation
Because the ideas we read today shape the choices we make tomorrow.

🦃 Happy Thanksgiving from Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know.

Ben Smith has been at the vanguard of digital journalism for two decades. In a candid conversation, Semafor's co-founder and editor-in-chief discusses his mission to fix the chaos of information overload, how Semafor's unique format tackles trust and transparency, and the surprisingly "boring" ways AI is already changing newsrooms. Plus, he weighs in on the political spectacle of Donald Trump, the rise of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, and whether New York is on the path to becoming a "gilded museum" of the 20th century.

• Ben Smith, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Semafor.

  Member of The New York Editorial Board

• Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. (Ben Smith and Max Tani pull back the curtain on the media industry.)
  • Find the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Semafor's website.

• The Emergency: A Novel by George Packer
  • (Smith describes it as a novel about the collapse of an empire and grappling with the challenges facing the United States today.)

• Ben Smith highlighted a thriving "ecosystem" of New York City-focused podcasts, including:
  • FAQ NYC (Mentioned in the search results as a great interview-heavy political podcast.)
  • Max Politics with Ben Max (Features in-depth interviews on NYC and State politics.)
  • The Bigger Apple Podcast, with Liena Zagare and Nicole Gelinas

  Also mentioned:

• The Interview, from the New York Times

Antonio Delgado isn’t just New York’s lieutenant governor — he’s now Kathy Hochul’s biggest political headache. In this episode, Delgado tells Juan Manuel Benítez why he’s taking on his own boss in next year’s Democratic primary, why he thinks New York’s leadership is “broken,” and how he plans to fix it. He talks power, loyalty, and political retribution — and then drops the politics to open up about hip-hop, fatherhood, and why Kendrick Lamar and D’Angelo fill his current music playlist.

Show Notes:

• Host: Juan Manuel Benítez
• Guest: Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado
• Topics covered:
  • Why Delgado is running against Governor Kathy Hochul
  • The state’s affordability crisis and his plan to “tax the rich”
  • Political retribution and independence inside the Hochul administration
  • Lessons from his time in Congress representing the Hudson Valley
  • What Trump’s 2024 win means for Democrats in New York
  • Music, fatherhood, and finding balance beyond politics

Delgado's picks:

Book

White Poverty, by William J. Barber

Music

Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers

D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar and Black Messiah

New York place to visit

Hudson Valley

Follow:

🎧 Subscribe to Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Substack.

On the eve of Election Day in New York City, Juan Manuel Benítez convenes three sharp minds from the New York Editorial Board—Christina Greer (FAQ NYC), Josh Greenman (Vital City), and Nicole Gelinas (Manhattan Institute)—to dissect what’s driving this race: Zohran Mamdani’s momentum, Andrew Cuomo’s bet on negativity, Curtis Sliwa’s recalibration, and whether the city is voting for policy or for an idea. We get honest about polling blind spots, youth and Muslim/ South Asian mobilization, public safety as the make-or-break metric, and how a disciplined campaign meets the hard math of governing. Plus: fast takes on Ballot Proposal 6 and three book picks to keep your New York brain fed.

Guests

• Christina Greer — Political scientist; co-host, FAQ NYC
• Josh Greenman — Managing Editor, Vital City
• Nicole Gelinas — Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute

Book Recommendations

• Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City (Greer)
• Nicole Gelinas, Movement (Greenman’s pick)
• Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York and Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning (Gelinas)

Links

• New York Editorial Board breakfast interviews: nyeditorialboard.substack.com
• Columbia Journalism School's election coverage: cjspolitics.substack.com

Credits
Host: Juan Manuel Benítez • Recorded at Columbia University in New York City

Before you step into the booth, hear from someone who’s seen NYC power from both sides. Grace Rauh —former NY1 City Hall reporter and now executive director at Citizens Union and the 5BORO Institute— joins Juan Manuel Benítez to break down what’s actually on your ballot and why turnout keeps sinking. They get into the even-year election fight, the housing/zoning package, digital mapping, and the Adirondacks measure; Zohran Mamdani’s rise (and the de Blasio echoes), Andrew Cuomo’s comeback attempt, and how local journalism looks from the outside. Plus: a personal lightning round —books, landmarks, and what still gives her hope about New York. Then go vote.

Grace’s picks:

Book

• Gods of New York, by Jonathan Mahler

Podcasts

• FAQ NYC
• The Daily
• Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know

New NYC Landmark

• Katz’s Deli

Resources

• Vote info & sample ballot: vote.nyc

Citizens Union & 5BORO Institute (voter guides, reform agenda)

In late January, I participated in a breakfast interview with New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, hosted by the New York Editorial Board, of which I'm a member.

Back then, Mamdani was a progressive underdog in the race - a state assemblymember with ambitious ideas but long odds. A lot has changed since that breakfast. Mamdani won the Democratic nomination and today, he's become something of a national political superstar. As we head toward the November general election, he's leading in the polls with a healthy margin.

For this episode, I've stripped away all the questions and edited Mamdani's responses to flow as a standalone narrative. What you're about to hear is "Zohran Mamdani's Vision in the Candidate's Own Words" - his policy proposals, his governing philosophy, and his vision for New York City, presented in the same order as our conversation but allowing his answers to speak for themselves.

You can listen to the unedited version in the New York Editorial Board substack page.

Follow me and the podcast on social media

Instagram: JMBenitezNYC

TikTok: JMBenitezNYC

Facebook: JMBenitezNYC

Twitter: JuanMaBenitez

Bluesky: JuanMaBenitez

and subscribe to my Substack.