Growing up in the former Soviet Union, Pedro Spivakovsky-Gonzalez's father and grandparents would listen to Voice of America with their ears pressed to the radio, trying to catch words through the government's radio jamming.
The U.S.-funded news service was instrumental in helping them understand what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, before they moved to the United States in the 1970s.
"It was a window into another world," Spivakovsky-Gonzalez said. "They looked to it as a sort of a beacon of freedom. They were able to imagine a different world from the one they were living in."
When Spivakovsky-Gonzalez and his family heard of President Donald Trump's attempts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media - the agency that oversees VOA , Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia -- he said it was a "gut punch."
The first months of the second Trump administration have delivered blow after blow to American efforts to promote democracy abroad and pierce the information wall of authoritarian governments through programs that had been sustained over decades by presidents of both political parties.