If you’re not already familiar with Philip Agnew, I very much encourage you to watch this short 2004 clip, which is not about presidential politics.
“We are in a Kitty Genovese moment.”
Agnew grew up in Chicago and is a co-founder of Dream Defenders, a Miami-based justice advocacy organization which recently endorsed Sanders. Here’s his bio.
While Agnew is an enthusiastic surrogate for the Sanders campaign, he readily acknowledges that his own views on reforming the criminal justice system go further than Sanders’s: Agnew describes his own position on our policing and penal systems as “abolitionist.” (Read about “Freedom from Prisons and Police” in the Freedom Papers on the Dream Defenders website.) Nonetheless, Agnew passionately argues that when it comes to criminal justice reform and all the other issues Agnew cares about, Sanders is his top choice.
Recently, Agnew, who is a proud HBCU graduate (he served as student body president at Florida A&M University) has been doing yeoman’s work on the campaign trail boosting Sanders’s college education policy proposals.
Sanders’ 2020 National Co-Chair Nina Turner, National Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray, HBCU Outreach Coordinator, and surrogates Phillip Agnew and Ja’Mal Green met with students at Tennessee State University, Alabama State University and Tuskegee University, before the tour culminated at Morehouse. —Essence
Here’s a video of a group of young people discussing issues important to them with Agnew and Sanders.
Another intriguing young activist on the Sanders team is Latino Press Secretary Belén Sisa. Sisa is a DACA recipient, born in Buenos Aires and raised in Arizona. In 2017, she was among a group of young activists who put themselves at risk of deportation by engaging in civil disobedience — purposely getting arrested protesting for progressive immigration reform.
Here are some snippets from an article she wrote called “I’m Undocumented & I Work For Bernie Sanders. Here’s How We’re Fighting to Keep More Migrant Kids From Dying”:
In December 2017, I sat alone in a dark cell on a metal bunk bed without a mattress or heat, over 2,000 miles away from my hometown of Gilbert, AZ.
Seven other
DACA recipients and I spent
six days in a D.C. jail for taking part in sit-ins inside Congressional offices as part of a fight for a
Clean Dream Act. Standing up and demanding that undocumented youth like us be given the chance to live in this country without fear of deportation, we put everything on the line in hopes of pushing politicians to have the courage we had and pass a Dream Act.
…
We cannot normalize the detainment and death of children and their family members. The outrage must be clear in the same way it was a year ago when we were confronted with audio recordings of immigrant children crying for their mothers. The Trump administration must be held accountable — by us, the American people. …
While taxpayer dollars are being wastefully thrown at walls and increased funding for ICE and CBP, children are dying and the root causes of this human rights crisis are not being addressed. As Americans, we should be helping countries in Central America rebuild to address the reason people are fleeing to the U.S. As a nation of immigrants, we should fix our broken immigration system to welcome immigrants in a humane and civil process.
Here’s a short video about Sisa: