Melting the Ice/Derritiendo el Hielo

A look into WKCR’s archives and towards 89.9 FM’s anti-carceral potential. 

By Cecilia Zuniga

Illustration by Em Bennett

Tip-toed on a jail cell toilet, Jose Hernandez Velasquez stood feet above the ground in search of 89.9 FM’s signal. His hands, grasping a battery-powered radio, reached towards the window. Two minutes before 9 p.m., he struck the perfect angle, and WKCR’s broadcast began to play. Velasquez didn’t dare to move. For an hour, he remained outstretched in the same position as a rare sense of hope washed over him. Corrido melodies filled the concrete-lined cell. 

It was 2019, and Velasquez was detained at Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark, New Jersey. Born in El Salvador and raised in New Jersey since he was one, Velasquez was facing an order of deportation. The 20-year-old was taken into custody by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement after a series of low-level offenses, and endured brutal staff abuse while detained in Newark. 

On Sept. 25, 2019, over 100 people—including community and family members, migrant justice organizers, and advocacy groups—gathered to rally in support of Velasquez and others detained by ICE. From the parking lot, Los Jornaleros del Norte, the LA-based “day laborer band,” performed a serenade of rancheras, cumbias, and corridos for everyone detained inside the Essex County jail. 

Velasquez didn’t hear the music live as it played, but instead heard it over WKCR’s airwaves three weeks later. From his cell in solitary confinement, Velasquez later described the moment he tuned in and heard first the music, and then his mother’s voice speaking to him over the broadcast. “I told myself I’m not alone in this anymore. There’s people out there, for me, with me … and then I heard my mom. Oh my god, my mom at the end.”

“My heart melted,” Velasquez said. 

That hour-long recording was “Episode 3: A Song Cannot Be Caged//Una Canción No Puede Ser Enjaulada,” of Melting the Ice/Derritiendo el Hielo, a bilingual radio show that aired monthly on WKCR 89.9FM from fall of 2019 through spring of 2021. The show’s co-producers, Sylvia Ryerson and Luis Luna, heard about the rally from a coalition of immigrant rights organizers. On Sept. 25, they drove to Newark, sound equipment piled into the trunk, and recorded the event in its entirety, alongside interviews with immigration advocates, band members, and Velasquez’s attending family members. Through lawyers, the pair was able to get into contact with Velasquez, ensuring that he could obtain a radio and that he knew exactly when to tune in. 

It was Trump’s first term, and amidst surging xenophobia and blatant racism against migrants, Ryerson and Luna sought to create media that would build power, not paranoia. Since-lost to Columbia’s archives, Melting the Ice/Derritiendo el Hielo shared testimonies of how ICE impacts families across the U.S. by centering voices of people directly affected and uplifting strategies of communities fighting back. At WKCR, episodes were released every third Thursday of the month from 9-10 p.m. during a weekly program called “Abolitionist Hour.” And beyond the university station, episodes were also aired monthly at WPKN 89.5FM Community Radio in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

In eight episodes, Melting the Ice/Derritiendo El Hielo unpacked complex legal frameworks and federal immigration policies through intimate narratives, grounding their effect on a personal and local level. Episode 1 is a conversation with Tony Chen, a restaurant owner and father of three from New York City, about Clinton-era immigration policies that brought him to endure seven months of detention in Bergen County Correctional Facility. Episode 2 features Amy Gottlieb and Janice Hoseine, long-time friends and immigrant rights organizers who have struggled through the detention of their partners. Episode 4 delves into the deadly conditions of detainment during the COVID-19 pandemic in an interview with Yimy Aldair Benitez Lopez, a trans woman and cultural worker who spent five months in an all-male ICE facility in Hudson County. None of the stories are reduced to people’s time spent inside the facilities, however. “To understand the catastrophe of detention in someone’s life, you can’t begin with the point of their detention,” Ryerson said in the show’s bonus episode, “but we have to understand an arc of the personal and communal crises that this is creating for people.”

With each narrative, the show collaborates with those closest to the issue to critically analyze the social, political, and economic structures upholding such an oppressive system. Thus, relationships and community-based networks—between detained people and their loved ones, immigrant rights organizers and lawyers, college students and DJs—formed the foundation of their project. 

…

At the time of its conception in 2019, Ryerson was a second-year American Studies PhD student at Yale University, and Luna was a community organizer and a long-time DJ at WPKN. Neither were new to the radical potential of radio. 

Luna was born in Ecuador and came to the U.S. with his mother and sister at age 13. He described his mother’s decision as a particularly difficult one, one that “happens often with a lot of families who go through family separation, which is to pick two out of her four children to come to the U.S.” Spending his teenage years in Connecticut and Philadelphia for college, Luna’s world changed drastically upon encountering community radio, and resultingly, activism. In 2007, Luna began tuning into WKPN 89.5’ s Latin American alternative music show. It was from the radio that he heard the call and attended his first march—a May Day mobilization for immigrant rights in New Haven. He later connected with the show’s programmers, their local organizing, and got involved in the movement himself.

Luna remembers being invited into the WKPN studio for the first time, and choosing his first CD to broadcast: an album by RoCola Bacalo, an alternative band from Quito. “I put on the CD that was giving me life, that was also giving me feelings of sadness, nostalgia, of leaving Ecuador, leaving my siblings behind.” To 23-year-old Luna, it was a full circle moment of 10 years in the U.S., situating his own childhood within a larger political landscape. He began to question the role that the government has in crafting policies that tear families apart while creating financial opportunities for private, for-profit detention centers. “We’re talking about billions and billions of dollars of these companies and corporations that are profiting, as we speak, from detention.” 

A jail doesn’t have to be private, however, for corporations to profit from incarceration. Prior to moving to New Haven for graduate school, Ryerson became well-acquainted with the lucrative industry of prison calls while working as a journalist and programmer at WMMT-FM, a community radio station in rural Whitesburg, Kentucky. In the late 1990s, prison growth boomed in Central Appalachia, and the cost of prison calls steadily climbed: “It was like $8 for a 20 minute phone call,” Ryerson recalled. With eight prisons in the radius of the WMMT-FM’s airwaves, the Calls from Home radio show emerged out of defiance, using radio to circumvent the exorbitant price of prison calls. 

Calls from Home was a weekly R&B, Hip Hop, and Blues radio show that broadcast messages for incarcerated people from their loved ones, free-of-charge. Friends and family could call into the station, leaving shout-outs and song requests to be aired Monday nights at 7 p.m. Their incarcerated loved ones would do the same, buying radios from the prison commissary, sometimes sharing the broadcast through the vents between their cells. As Co-Director of the long-standing Calls from Home show, Ryerson oversaw what she called an “inside-outside collaboration over the airwaves every week.” Not only an effective means of communication, radio became a tool of forging solidarity in the face of carceral boundaries that seek to divide, partition, and isolate. 

Ryerson’s doctoral research on colliding processes of prison expansion, environmental disaster, and economic abandonment brought her to Yale, where she immediately looked towards the community radio landscape around New Haven. There, she was introduced to Luna, and the two connected instantly over their similar background in anti-carceral organizing and  shared “love of the airwaves.” The pair sat down to collaborate and brainstorm ways to use radio to connect with those behind the walls—bringing Luna’s Connecticut-rooted migrant justice work into conversation with Ryerson’s organizing against state and federal prisons in rural Kentucky. At that time, Ryerson learned that there are no ICE detention centers in Connecticut. So, when ICE makes arrests in Connecticut, detained people are taken out-of-state and often brought to facilities in New Jersey. 

In the spring of 2019, Ryerson and Luna began to envision a new radio program that would center the stories of people directly impacted by ICE policies, while also spreading information, hope, and solidarity to those inside detention facilities. The endeavor began with mapping out airwaves across New England and figuring out which frequencies could reach the facilities. One spring afternoon, Ryerson hopped in her car and drove around North Jersey until she found herself parked outside of the Essex County Correctional Facility. Thumbing through the entire radio dial, Ryerson paused at the sound of jazz and the voice of a WKCR student programmer. “I was like, oh my god, this is incredible,” Ryerson remarked, “I knew about WKCR. I knew it was an independent college station, and I knew it’s exactly the kind of station that is open and willing to do something like this.” Soon after, Ryerson and Luna learned that WKCR’s airwaves reach the four largest ICE detention centers in New Jersey. The pair connected with students and WKCR’s Public Affairs Program Director, and they started preproducing hour-long broadcasts to be aired monthly. 

A fully bilingual radio program, Melting the Ice/Derritiendo el Hielo’s creators took the time to carefully translate, transcribe, and edit each episode into both English and Spanish. “Access to language is really important,” Luna explained, “In that the language that you feel most comfortable with, that's where you feel the strongest and with the most power.” Everything about the audience’s listening experience was composed with intentionality and care, from fully translated interviews to the messaging of the show's soundtrack. Scholar-activist and hip-hop artist Olemeca, created the theme music, all of which is firmly rooted in a pro-immigrant political consciousness. 

With that, Melting the Ice/Derritiendo el Hielo demanded the help of a wide coalition. Attorneys from Make the Road New York and the Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU Law School promoted the show to their detained clients. New Sanctuary Coalition, a faith-based and immigrant-led organization that supports people facing deportation, did the same. NSC’s Executive Director and well-known immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir explained that the radio show empowered people to guide their attorneys and advocate for themselves while detained. (Ragbir is also Amy Gottleib’s husband, who shared their story in Episode 2 of Melting the Ice/Derritiendo el Hielo.) 

While facing immigration detention himself in 2018, Ragbir made it a point to inform people inside about “how to navigate the system and what they should not give up. This is what you’re entitled to. You are entitled to an immigration hearing. This is how you get your support. This is what you’re fighting for.” For many people in ICE custody, pieces of information, knowledge, and any connection to the outside become hope. “You don't know when there’s an end to it, so like a whirlpool, you’re always trying to breathe,” said Ragbir. Just a minute-long phone call, Ragbir continued, can be “the line between sanity and insanity” while incarcerated. 

Ryerson reiterated the unique intimacy of radio as a medium, specifically “when people are in a system where their humanity is being so disrespected and degraded.” Where mainstream media often captures the voices of politicians and those farther removed from the impact of policy, the radio opens the airwaves to forge community. Audiences listening on the outside might envision the experience of listening behind bars, while those detained are addressed directly, lovingly, and brought into the conversation. On Christmas Eve of 2020, Melting the Ice/Derritiendo el Hielo aired a two-hour long special of holiday greetings, messages, and prayers, from family members separated from their detained loved ones. “Shakuri, this is for you, from your mother,” one voice started. 

“This is from the bottom of my heart. I miss you so, so, so much. During this holiday season, there will not be a holiday for me without you. I’m hoping for you to come home, for you to be my arm like my little baby, my little boy, the baby that I love so much.” 

She paused and let out a breath, her lips brushing against the mic. 

“Every bit of my heart is for you, Shakur.” For two hours, dozens of similar messages resounded. 

…

Between 2019 and 2025, the conditions of ICE detainment and immigration policy have drastically changed. Under the first Trump administration, Ragbear explained, “there were people who believed in process.” Today, anti-immigrant rhetoric and targeted ICE raids remain violent, yet the judicial process of deportation has been almost entirely eroded. “[Trump] and his cabinet don’t care about the rules, don’t care about the regulation, don’t care about the laws,” said Ragbear. Heeding to Trump’s call to ramp up mass deportations this May, ICE has pivoted towards unseen and unusually aggressive tactics. Courthouse arrests have become eerily common, as the strategic increase in case dismissals creates a deportation trap for migrants exiting their hearings—plainclothes agents waiting in the hallway to arrest them. 

Such illogic does not point to a flaw within the immigration system, but rather exposes the fullest extent of its raw and inhibited potential. “We also have to take advantage of the moment to demonstrate how the system has no legitimacy,” Ryerson stated, reflecting on the current moment. “One of the things I've heard from longtime abolitionist organizers is that our work is to decrease the scale, the scope and the legitimacy of the carceral state.” Radio, she explained, is a mode of undermining such legitimacy. A broadcast refuses the carceral logic of separation. A broadcast creates a borderless community that transcends concrete. 

“A song cannot be caged. A song cannot be jailed,” said Pablo Alvarado, the bass player of Los Jornaleros Del Norte and Co-Director of the National Day Labor Organizing Network. Quoted in an interview outside Essex County Correctional Facility on Sept. 25, 2019, his words remain timeless. “A song is free, just like our desires to be free. And that’s why a corrido, a ballad, a cumbia, is the antithesis of white supremacy.” 

While the students who participated in the original iteration of Melting the Ice/Derritiendo el Hielo have since graduated, today we are left with a radio archive of what is possible, and nearly 60 miles of broadcast coverage to imagine what comes next.