Angelina Garcia
Soc 122 M, W, 3:30-4:45 PM
May 4th, 2014
Word Count: 434
Democracy Now! Summaries (#9)
The first story I watched/read was titled "Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas on 'Documented: A Film by an Undocumented American'" and I chose this particular story because I enjoy documentaries. It is about a film by journalist Jose Antonio Vargas and his disclosure of his illegal status in an essay in The New York Times Magazine. The story also features many people who come forward as having illegal statuses. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez first talk about an immigrant's rights protest called May Day; Dominique Hernandez of the New York State Youth Leadership Council spoke at a rally in Manhattan saying, "My father worked a lot and really, really hard for me to actually be able to pay an education. Undocumented youth are not eligible to get any financial aid." The story then goes on to show a trailer for his film. In the trailer the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist talks about his film; he reveals his own immigration story saying, "My grandparents legally immigrated from the Philippines in the mid-1980s. My grandfather decided that he was going to get his grandson to come to America. One morning, my suitcase was packed. I was 12. It's been 18 years since I've seen my mother." He also goes on to say that in 2010 almost $11.2 billion was paid in state and federal taxes by undocumented people.
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/2/pulitzer_winning_journalist_jose_antonio_vargas
The next story that I watched/read was titled "'You Might Get Hit by a Car': On Secret Tape, FBI Threatens American Muslim Refusing to be Informant." It talks about the FBI's attempt to make government informants out of Muslim Americans who live outside of the U.S. The two guests that joins the program include senior editor at Mother Jones by the name of Nick Baumann and Naji Mansour. Mansour joins the program and talks about traveling for work and his run ins with the FBI. They play a couple of clips of phone calls between Mansour and an FBI agent. He is not the only account of this sort of recruitment. He states, "I have come across other people who have been pressured. During my experience with an organization in Kenya called the Muslim Human Rights Forum, we came across several people who were pressured in different ways with regards to, you know, becoming informants." Nick Baumann talks about the FBI's concern with homegrown terrorism and proxy detention where "American citizens are actually picked up by foreign governments and either questioned in a similar way to what the FBI is interested in or actually questioned by the FBI itself while in foreign detention."
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