On a Tuesday morning in February, with snow still on the ground from the day before, New York City school doors opened to 63 percent of students. The other 37 percent were home, their parents scrambling for coverage or quietly losing a day of work they couldn’t afford to lose. Mayor Zohran Mamdani had already used his one weather waiver. He couldn’t close schools again without jeopardizing the 180 days of instruction the state requires for maximum funding. So the buildings opened. Most of the city stayed home anyway.

New York Magazine recently called this a crisis—and named the culprit: “religious and cultural holidays,” specifically the five added to the calendar in the last decade. Eid, Diwali, and Lunar New Year among them.

I’ve covered immigrant communities for fifteen years. I know this story and I've watched it get told, in variations, for years—the story where the arrival of new communities is framed as a disruption to a system that was, before they got here, working fine.

The double standard

For as long as there have been immigrant families in New York City, those families have navigated a school calendar built entirely around traditions that were not theirs. They arranged childcare for Christmas break. They stretched thin budgets across spring recess. They took unpaid days for Easter and winter recess and the professional development days that arrive without warning, because that is what you do when the system was not designed with you in mind.

The New York Magazine piece quotes one Asian American mother—a parent in Queens named Jean, who is Korean American, celebrates Lunar New Year, and would, she says, prefer her daughter be in school. Jean’s perspective is real and worth hearing. It is also the perspective of one parent, in a city of millions, from communities that fought for twenty years to see their children’s holidays recognized. The organizers of the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays are not quoted. The parents who kept their children home in protest, year after year, waiting for Diwali to be recognized—they are not in the piece.

Choosing one parent whose views confirm the article’s argument, from the communities the argument is about, is not balance. It is a familiar move, and journalists who cover these communities recognize it.

A calendar built by some, for some

The school calendar was never secular. That is the fact that tends to get lost in these conversations, and it is the place where this one has to start.

In the 19th century, American public schools ran on Protestantism. The King James Bible was standard classroom material. When Irish Catholic immigrants arrived in waves, Archbishop John Hughes of New York pushed back so fiercely against the forced religious assimilation that Catholics eventually built their own parallel school system rather than submit their children to it.

Jewish holidays weren’t added to the New York City school calendar until 1960 and not because the Board of Education grew a sudden conscience. By then, Jewish teachers and students made up such a significant portion of the city’s school system that absenteeism on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur had made the buildings functionally inoperable. The calendar changed because the demographic reality left no other choice.

What happened next followed the same logic, just slower.

Decades of fighting for a seat at the table

The push for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha began in earnest in 2006, when the state of New York scheduled a mandatory statewide exam on the holiest day of the Muslim calendar. The Coalition for Muslim School Holidays organized for nearly a decade before Mayor Bill de Blasio added Eid to the calendar in 2015 — for a city where, by then, an estimated one in eleven New Yorkers was Muslim.

Lunar New Year came the same year, after years of advocacy by Asian American community leaders including U.S. Rep. Grace Meng and City Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who had spent years documenting the absurdity of a system that handed out unexcused absences to children for celebrating with their families. Asian American students now make up more than 15 percent of New York City’s public school enrollment.

Diwali took the longest. Two decades of organizing, including parents pulling their children from school en masse as deliberate acts of protest, before Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar—the first Hindu American elected to New York State office—helped push it into law in 2023. More than 200,000 Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist students are affected.

The New York Magazine piece acknowledges some of this history but what it doesn’t give any weight to is the years of of grinding, multi-decade campaigns by communities that had spent years watching their children penalized for practicing their faith, then finally demanding the same recognition that had long been extended to others.

The real scapegoat

Consider what the article’s own reporting reveals. A mother on the Upper West Side spends more than $4,100 a year on holiday camp for her two children. That number is cited as evidence of the calendar’s cost—but it reflects the full calendar: Christmas break, winter recess, spring break, professional development days, snow days. Eid and Diwali are recent additions to a list of closures that predates them significantly.

The piece notes that only 41 percent of large private U.S. companies observe Juneteenth as a paid holiday — and far fewer offer Lunar New Year, Eid, or Diwali. The article treats this as background detail. It isn’t. It’s the whole point. Working parents are struggling because their employers were never required to accommodate anything outside a traditionally Christian calendar. That’s not a school problem. That’s a corporate culture problem—and blaming the school calendar lets it off the hook entirely.

The absence of national paid leave policy surfaces briefly when Rachel Kessous, a public-high-school teacher in Brooklyn is quoted saying, ‘”our country is clearly not set up to support working families, but the issue is not with the DOE calendar; it’s with our inability to take off work when needed to support and spend time with our families.” The return-to-office mandates that have stripped away the flexibility that once made school closures manageable get a sentence. These are noted and moved past.

The piece compared New York unfavorably to Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington D.C.—cities that close for fewer holidays—and documented the financial strain on working parents in detail. What the piece spent less time on is the city’s school day—at 6.3 hours compared to the national average of 6.9—is among the shortest in the country, a fact mentioned once, in passing, without examining how much of the 130-hour instructional gap it explains.

The constraints are real and the calendar is genuinely tight. None of that changes the fact that when major outlets frame inclusive holidays as the primary source of a working-parent crisis, they provide cover for exactly these kinds of reversals—and ask the communities who fought hardest for recognition to be the first ones to give it back.

Hi all!

I was on a reporting trip last week and was insane to think I could send this newsletter out on time so if you end up wondering why you’ll hear from me twice this week, that is why. This is a solo operation and sometimes a girl misses. But at least I’m authentic and not an AI agent right?

Moving on.

Last week, as the Supreme Court prepared to hear the most consequential immigration case in over a century, a woman named Cecillia Wang walked into that room and stood at the lectern. She is the national legal director of the ACLU, and a daughter of immigrants who was born in Oregon to Taiwanese grad students.

Under the executive order she was there to argue against, she would not be eligible to become an American citizen. She would not have been allowed to become the lawyer standing in that room, before those nine justices, with the president of the United States watching from the front row.

I don’t know how she felt walking in, but I know how I felt hearing her speak and reading about her life.

One of the first things President Trump did on his his first day back in office last year was President Trump sign an executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants, and also for children of immigrants here legally but temporarily on student visas, work visas, or any non-permanent status.

An estimated 150,000 such children are born in the United States each year. Every federal court that has considered the order has struck it down and yet it still arrived at the highest court of the land—the Supreme Court.

The case turns on five words in the 14th Amendment: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The government argues those words require a parent’s permanent allegiance and legal “domicile” in the United States, not just physical presence. The challengers argue that those words have meant one thing for 128 years: if you are born here, you are American.

The amendment says so. The Supreme Court affirmed it in 1898. Congress codified it in 1952.

What the Trump administration is asking the court to do, in the plainest terms, is treat one hundred of fifty years of constitutional law as a clerical error.

A First in American History

Trump is the first sitting president that has ever attended Supreme Court oral arguments. He sat in the courtroom for about 90 minutes while his Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, made the government’s case. He left less than 15 minutes after Cecillia Wang stood up to argue the other side.

On his way out, he posted on Truth Social, “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”

Like many things, Trump is wrong. There are nearly 33 countries (primarily in North and South America) that have birthright citizenship, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.

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What the Justices Said

The conventional read coming out of Wednesday is that the government lost the room. Not just with the liberal justices but with the conservatives too, including three of the four justices Trump himself appointed.

Chief Justice Roberts was the first signal. When Sauer argued that mass global migration represented a “new world” that the framers couldn’t have anticipated, Roberts didn’t pause, "It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.” He also called the government’s list of historical exceptions to birthright citizenship—children of foreign diplomats, children of enemy combatants— “very quirky,” and questioned how the government could leap from that “tiny and idiosyncratic group” to an entire class of immigrants.

Justice Gorsuch said it was “striking” how rarely the concepts of allegiance and domicile—the centerpiece of the administration’s argument—came up in the actual congressional debates when the 14th Amendment was being written and ratified. He later told Sauer, plainly, “I’m not sure how much you want to rely on Wong Kim Ark.” The 1898 case that first attempted to disprove a child of immigrants as a birthright citizen that the government was leaning on kept undermining them.

Justice Barrett pressed Sauer on the text itself, “You say the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to put all newly freed slaves on equal footing, but that’s not textual. So how do you get there?” She also asked why, if the framers had wanted to limit birthright citizenship based on parental status, they simply didn’t say so. When Sauer tried to pivot to foundlings—children of unknown parentage — Barrett cut him off mid-sentence, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about the Constitution?”

Justice Kavanaugh noted that the administration wasn’t just asking the court to reinterpret the 14th Amendment, it was asking them to overrule Congress, which had written birthright citizenship into federal immigration law in 1952. He rejected the government’s comparisons to other countries’ citizenship rules:, “We try to interpret American law with American precedent based on American history.” And on what would happen if the court simply followed the traditional reading of Wong Kim Ark, “This is a short opinion.” The room laughed.

On the other side of the bench, the liberal justices were equally unsparing. Justice Sotomayor cut through the government’s careful framing: “You’re asking us to overrule Wong Kim Ark. You’re asking us to overrule that case.” Justice Jackson returned repeatedly to a question the government never adequately answered, “Why is there nothing in the 14th Amendment about the parents?’ On enforcement, she was blunt, “Are we bringing pregnant women in for depositions?”

The only two justices expected to side with the administration are Thomas and Alito who directed most of their pointed questioning not at the government, but at Wang.

What Comes Next

Birthright citizenship is still the law. The executive order has never gone into effect and every court that has considered it has blocked it. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on it by early summer.

Most legal observers now expect the court to strike the order down. The question is the margin — whether it is 7–2, 6–3, or a narrower 5–4 that leaves more room for future challenges. The margin matters because a narrow ruling is a door left slightly open.

But a ruling in our favor doesn’t erase what happened Wednesday. The argument that some of us born here carry a lesser claim to this country, that our parents’ visa status is our inheritance, that American-ness can be means-tested at birth—that argument was made out loud, in the highest court in the land, with the president of the United States in the front row nodding along.

Birthright citizenship wasn’t written into the Constitution until 1868, to overrule the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which had declared that Black people—enslaved or free—could never be citizens. It took a constitutional amendment to undo that. It took a civil rights movement to make the promise even close to real.

The question of who belongs in America is very old. The answer has always had to be fought for.

OUTRAGE: The César Chávez Revelations

The co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union sexually abused young girls and women — including fellow civil rights leader Dolores Huerta. The revelations have sent shockwaves through Latino communities and movement spaces, forcing a reckoning with how we hold complicated legacies, how survivors get silenced inside the very movements built to protect the vulnerable, and what we owe Dolores Huerta—who gave decades to a cause alongside someone who was harming her.

The Takeaway: There are no easy answers here. But looking away isn’t one of them.

Read The New York Times investigation (gift link).

LIVING IT: The Family That Left

Rachel is a public school teacher with 17 years in NYC. Irvi worked double shifts, bought a Bronx townhouse, and coached his daughters through panic attacks about ICE. They did everything “right.” And then, two days before Christmas 2024, they decided to leave—together, before the choice was made for them. Caitlin Dickerson at The Atlantic spent a year with the Cruz family as they dismantled their life and relocated to rural Oaxaca, Mexico.

The Takeaway: What makes this essential reading isn’t the politics—it’s the specific, accumulated weight of what a family loses when a country decides it doesn’t want them.

Read it at The Atlantic.

WATCH OUT FOR: Birthright Citizenship

The legal fight over birthright citizenship is moving through the courts and is landing in the Supreme Court for oral arguments on April 1st. From Wong Kim Ark in 1895 to Japanese American internment, the through-line is the same: citizenship, even when constitutionally guaranteed, has always been fragile.

The Takeaway: Before the ruling comes down, catch up with my piece on the backstory of who this country decides “belongs.” I’ll send a full explainer on the ruling next week.

Read “Born in the U.S.A., But Who Belongs Here?”

STILL HERE: A Boy, a Spelling Bee, and Ms. Rachel

Nine-year-old Deiver Henao Jimenez was being held in an immigration detention center when he got on a video call with children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel, begging to be released to compete in his state spelling bee. This week, he and his family were finally freed.

The Takeaway: This isn’t a “happy ending”—a child being released from detention shouldn’t require rejoicing. But Deiver got to go. And in this world, that matters.

Read about it in NBC News.

This weekend, across every corner of the globe, the Muslim diaspora is dressed in our finest. We are filling our homes with the scent of cardamom and rosewater, eating the most decadent foods, and—for those of us raising children—carefully passing down the traditions that make us who we are. We are giving our kids the “big” Eids we always dreamed of having when we were growing up here.

This weekend, as we celebrate Eid, we’re also closing out our series, Ramadan Is American.

It’s easy to feel like we’ve “arrived” when you look at the landscape of 2026. There are over four million Muslims in the United States. Target has a dedicated Ramadan aisle. West Elm sells crescent moon décor. Hallmark makes Eid cards. We are seen in a way that felt impossible a generation ago.

But as I watched the henna dry on my daughter’s hands, I couldn’t shake the thought that this visibility is a fragile thing.

A landma…

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In 1805, The United States was barely thirty years old when the White House hosted its first iftar. Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, a diplomat from Tunis, arrived in Washington D.C. to negotiate with a young republic that had been at war with his sovereign’s neighbors.

President Thomas Jefferson invited him to a state dinner at 3:30 PM, but Mellimelli sent word back that he could not eat until sunset because he was fasting for Ramadan. In a moment of quiet, pragmatic pluralism, Jefferson—who owned a well-worn 1765 translation of the Qur’an—simply moved the clock. He updated the invitations to read “precisely at sunset.” It was the first time the fast was broken at the President’s table, but it wasn’t the first time it was broken on American soil. While Mellimelli dined with the elite, thousands of enslaved Muslims across the South broke their fasts in the shadows of slave quarters, practicing a faith the law refused to recognize even as it profited from thei…

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In Part 1, we traced the first Ramadans observed on American soil—enslaved African Muslims who carried their faith across the Atlantic were forced to fast in secret. Hundreds of years later, their descendants inherited freedom but not the institutions that sustained their faith.

But the story didn’t end there.

A Mysterious Figure in Detroit

In 1930, a man named Wallace Fard Muhammad appeared in the Black neighborhoods of Detroit. No one really knew where he came from and there are no reliable government records of him. Some believed he was from the Middle East; others thought he was South Asian.

But Fard arrived at a moment of profound upheaval in the United States. Thousands of Black Americans had migrated north during the Great Migration to work in auto factories, only to encounter segregation, racial violence, and economic exploitation all over again.

Fard began teaching a version of Islam that blended Islamic vocabulary with messages of self-reliance, discipline, and racial uplift, s…

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In 2009, archaeologists excavating Fort Shirley—a British colonial trading post on the Pennsylvania frontier — uncovered a small copper alloy medallion in a refuse pit. Stamped into its surface in Arabic: La ilaha illa Allah. There is no god but God.

The charm likely belonged to an enslaved African held by the Irish trader George Croghan. Fort Shirley was a place of trade, militarization, Indigenous displacement, and human captivity.

It was not a mosque yet Islam was there — long before minarets rose in American cities, before Eid became a line item on corporate calendars. Islam had already crossed the Atlantic. It did not arrive with immigration. It arrived in chains and according to some historians even before that through African explorers.

Fasting Under Brutal Conditions

By the time British ships began transporting large numbers of enslaved Africans to North America through the transatlantic slave trade, Islam had been rooted in West Africa for hundreds of ye…

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I’ve been thinking about how Ramadan, Lent, and Chinese New Year all landed in the same week this year. A spiritual and cosmic shift—because we needed something. Two and a half years of watching the Palestinian genocide on our screens, and now watching American families being ripped apart by ICE, again, on our screens. The PTSD of simply being a witness is already taking a toll on all of us. And I think that kind of exhaustion—the kind that doesn’t go away after sleep—is often what pushes people back toward faith.

Ramadan has always been the time I sit most honestly in my Muslimness, which is complicated. The version of Islam I grew up with and the version I’m finding my way toward now do this little dance—not just during Ramadan, but every single day. I’m not sure the dance ever fully resolves. I’m not sure it’s supposed to.

So this year, in true Port of Entry fashion, I’m exploring the historical …

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I’m sitting in a new café that just opened in my neighborhood — Pyo Chai — started by two brothers, the sons of Nepali and Pakistani immigrants. Young South Asians are hanging out, working on their laptops. Bollywood music blares through the speakers.

It’s the kind of utopia I imagined growing up — and now it’s here, at home.

But I’m too busy on my phone, scrolling journalist Lidia Térraza’s page, looking for updates about two-month-old baby Juan Nicolas. He’s been sick for weeks and developed bronchitis. He was taken to the hospital, but ICE wouldn’t let him stay. He was sent back to the Dilley detention center.

He and his mother have since been deported to Mexico.

A few months ago, my two-year-old almost stopped breathing after developing asthma from a bad cold. We were in the hospital for three nights. Unironically, it was the night Zohran Mamdani was elected.

My daughter is the grandchild of people who also crossed the border and dared to have a …

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In 1910, Muhammad Judah sailed from Algeria to New York, carrying whatever hopes bring a person that far from home. At Ellis Island, he faced the question that ended his journey: “Do you practice polygamy?” Under the Immigration Act of 1891, polygamists were barred from entry. He never set foot in the U.S.

I came across his story at the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Niyū Yūrk exhibition, open through March 8, which traces 140 years of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) lives in New York.

“When I joined NYPL three years ago, I realized that we had long been collecting materials produced by these communities as well as materials gathered to serve them dating back to the late 19th century,” explained Hiba Abid, the very first curator of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at NYP…

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Pop culture has a way of showing up in the damndest moments. When the most marginalized are rendered invisible by mainstream narratives, art arrives uninvited, unfiltered, and impossible to ignore.

After winning Album of the Year at the Grammys, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny, is preparing to take the Super Bowl halftime stage this Sunday—against the backdrop of U.S. federal agents conducting coordinated raids across Latino communities nationwide. ICE routinely stops people of color on the street, asking where they’re from and scrutinizing accents that don’t sound “American.” Speaking Spanish on the subway, at work, or in schools—even in cities where it has been spoken for generations—is treated as evidence of foreignness.

Bad Bunny does not sidestep that reality. He starts his acceptance speech at the Grammy…

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At a press conference in Texas today, members of Congress, advocates, and community leaders stood shoulder to shoulder with a single demand: Bring Liam home.

There’s a particular cruelty in being taken from your life and told nothing about what comes next and that’s the thread running through the story of Liam Conejo Ramos, a five‑year‑old boy now held in federal immigration custody at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley.

The press conference, led by Reps. Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett who visited the Dilley detention center, alongside community advocates, came amid renewed concerns about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) practices—particularly the targeting of families through courts, schools, and homes.

“This is not an isolated case,” Castro said. “Liam is not the first, and he won’t be the last.”

Liam’s detention has ign…

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In the days after federal immigration agents flooded Minneapolis, Somali families brought thermoses of tea and trays of sambusas to ICE protestors standing in the cold. They handed out food while staying largely indoors themselves—afraid to drive, walk or draw attention.

Minnesota is home to roughly 84,000 people of Somali descent, the largest Somali population outside Somalia itself. Most arrived in the 1990s and early 2000s, fleeing a country that collapsed after the fall of its military government in 1991. Civil war, famine, and clan-based violence killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Many spent years in refugee camps in Kenya before being resettled in the United …

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On the very first morning of this year, I hurried past the Freedom Tower, the former World Trade Center site, toward a moment that felt impossible just half a generation ago: the inauguration of New York City’s first Muslim mayor. Like every Muslim New Yorker, I feel a sharp dread whenever 9/11 is mentioned in the same breath as Muslims—it is an ache that has shaped decades of our lives, our policies, our fears. But there I was, on January 1st, walking past that horrific memory and into something new.

Thousands of New Yorkers stood in line for the inauguration block party. I was lucky enough to be invited to the ceremony. As I entered, an iconic 90s Bollywood track, Chaiya Chaiya, blasted through the speakers, and I cheesed hard. Our first South Asian mayor greeting us in the language of our joy, of our diaspora, felt like a fever dream. And then Sean …

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Dear friends,

If you’re reading this, you’re already part of the Port of Entry community—a space created to tell diaspora and immigrant stories with care, depth, and historical grounding. Thank you for your support <3

As many of you might know, my journalism career started in fashion, where I was always an outsider—a brown child of working-class immigrants. All I wanted to do was bring stories of outsiders like me into the pages of those illustrious magazines. And I did. At Elle, Marie Claire magazine, Refinery29.com and more. It gave me the courage to tell our stories everywhere. For NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.

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The Bondi Beach attack was a nightmare made real. Fifteen people were murdered during a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney. An act of antisemitic that ripped through a community in their moment of joy and left the world reeling with grief. We should have come together in that grief. We should have stood with our Jewish neighbors without hesitation. Instead, within hours, something else took hold: Islamophobia.

I need you to understand what happened next, because it matters deeply to all of us who believe communities can hold space for both truth and compassion.

In the United States, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville declared on social media that “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult” and called for the deportation of Muslims.

In New York City— where more than a million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Muslims share neighborhoods, schools, and subway cars—a Republican city councilmember demanded the “expulsion of Muslims from western nations.” The post was delet…

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The last place a child should disappear is inside a federal building. On the morning of November 26, six-year-old Yuanxin and his father, Fei, entered 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan for a routine check-in with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Fei was then transferred to Orange County Jail, more than an hour away, and Yuanxin was gone.

Volunteers who accompany families to ICE appointments say this is not an isolated incident. “They just don’t come out,” one said. “Entire families have gone in and not come out.” Days later, Representative Nydia Velázquez’s office confirmed that Yuanxin had been transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), though officials would not disclose the exact location. A six-year-old boy, newly enrolled in first grade at P.S. 166Q in Astoria, Queens, was now separated from his father.

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As we enter this season of gratitude, I want to extend my deepest thanks to you—the readers who sustain Port of Entry not just financially, but spiritually. Your support makes it possible for me to investigate, document, and honor the stories that so often go unrecorded.

Thanksgiving sits at a complicated intersection of celebration and historical truth. Its origins stretch back to Indigenous harvest traditions that long predate the Pilgrims, but the national holiday we know today grew out of narratives that erased Native resistance, loss, and survival. For many Indigenous communities, this day is not one of feasting, but of mourning and remembrance.

As the child of immigrants, I grew up absorbing the simplified version—the one in textbooks and elementary school plays. It took years of unlearning to understand what had been left out, and that journey mirrors why the Port of Entry exists: to illuminate the histories and migrations that shape us, especially those buried beneath …

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For decades, Muslim American stories have followed a familiar script: explain, defend, humanize, repeat. In the long shadow of 9/11, Muslim writers have been expected to soothe Islamophobia rather than tell the truth of their lives. Aymann Ismail, a journalist and son of Egyptian immigrants, tears up that script in his debut memoir, Becoming Baba.

His coming-of-age story moves from gender-segregated Islamic school classrooms in New Jersey to getting high and praying with his wife after their second child is born—embracing the contradictions many Muslim writers have been afraid to voice publicly.

In our conversation, Ismail was as candid as his prose, bracing for the criticism he knows is coming both from within his own community and the usual suspects outside of it.

I read your book in a day and a half, which, as a parent, is saying something. What I loved most was how messy it is, how …

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