This is a strange week to be turning 250.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court told this country something it already knew: if you’re born here, you’re American. Two hundred and fifty years in, and we are still litigating the most basic question this country was ever built to answer: who gets to belong here, and who decides?

I was in Minneapolis last week, on Dakota land, and I kept thinking that this whole argument over citizenship—soil versus blood, who’s born here versus who arrived here—is a conversation that already assumes the soil was ours to claim in the first place. It wasn’t. Before there was a 14th Amendment, before there was a colony, this was Dakota land, and Ojibwe land, and hundreds of other nations’ land, none of whom were asked. Every version of “who belongs here” that this country has ever argued — 1790, 1965, 2026 — is a conversation happening on top of an answer nobody with power ever wanted to hear. I think it’s dishonest to talk about birthright and belonging in America without naming the fact that the whole framework, soil or blood, was built on a taking.

With that in mind, here’s how the door has actually moved over 250 years — open, shut, cracked, thrown wide, and slammed again.

Open Door (1776–1874)
For nearly a century, the United States barely bothered to lock the door. States decided who got in, not the federal government. But “open” never meant “equal.” The 1790 Naturalization Act made citizenship the property of “free white persons” only. And while roughly 20 million people walked through that open door—mostly from Britain, Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia — hundreds of thousands of Africans were dragged through it in chains, stripped from the immigration count entirely even as their labor built the country receiving everyone else.

The Restriction Era (1875–1964)
Between 1875 and 1964, America engineered a slow, targeted shutdown based entirely on race and nationality. Chinese laborers literally built the country’s railroads, yet they were the first group explicitly banned by name through the Chinese Exclusions Act of 1882. Fast forward to the 1920s, and new quotas deliberately slashed the number of Southern and Eastern Europeans allowed in. By World War II, the U.S. was locking Japanese Americans in internment camps. Add the Great Depression to the mix, and immigration plummeted: the 1930s saw just 528,000 arrivals, the thinnest decade the nation has ever recorded.

The Reform Era (1965–2016)
1965 changed who got to call themselves American. The Hart-Celler Act tore out the racial quota system and, for the first time, let Asia, Latin America, and Africa in on equal footing. The demographic floor of the country shifted under everyone’s feet—the foreign-born population quadrupled between 1970 and 2007. By 2022, 46.1 million immigrants called the U.S. home.

The Crisis Era (2017–2026)

The influx of immigrants and diversifying of America led to today’s backlash, is my humble opinion. Two Trump administrations frame this era. The current Trump administration has run the most aggressive immigration enforcement campaign in over half a century—interior deportations and street arrests increased in unprecedented numbers, refugee admissions slashed down. In 2025, more people left the United States than arrived.

As America turns 250, the only constant in our history is that the question of who belongs here has never been permanently answered. The people who built the railroads were denied citizenship. The door that almost completely shut in the 1930s was thrown wide open again by 1965. Immigration policy isn’t a fixed line; it’s a pendulum pushed by people who refuse to accept the status quo.

Here at Port of Entry, I track that pendulum in real time. If this breakdown brought some clarity to your week, pass it on to someone else who values the history behind the headlines. That’s how this community grows.

Juneteenth is, without argument, the true Independence Day of the United States of America. For 89 years after July 4th, Black Americans were still enslaved. Black communities have celebrated June 19th since 1866—for generations before the rest of America acknowledged it existed. Many immigrant communities still don’t know what it is—even though the Black freedom movement it represents is the reason most of us were ever allowed into this country at all.

On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas with around 2,000 Union troops and delivered General Order No. 3, announcing to more than 250,000 enslaved Black people that they were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two and a half years earlier. But without Union soldiers to enforce it, the law had been meaningless in Texas. Plantation owners had simply continued as before, capitalizing on free black labor.

This is the first thing immigrant communities need to understand about this country: America has a long precedent of curtailing the freedoms that people of color are owed. The allure of Western amenities, the promise of the American Dream, the relief of having made it here at all—these things lead immigrants, again and again, to turn a blind eye to that reality.

The Myth That Was Built to Divide Us

When we arrive in the United States, we are handed a racial hierarchy. Too often, we assimilate by internalizing the very anti-Blackness that oppresses the people who paved our way.

If your immigrant family arrived after 1965, you have a direct connection to black history. Before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, U.S. immigration policy was built on a quota system that heavily favored Northern Europeans. The Civil Rights Movement produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on national origin. Once that principle was established domestically, discriminatory immigration quotas couldn’t stand. Attorney General Robert Kennedy said at the time, “everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on national origins, yet this system is still the foundation of our immigration law.”

On January 9, 1966, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, UC Berkeley sociologist William Petersen published a piece in the New York Times Magazine titled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” The article argued that Japanese Americans had lifted themselves to success through hard work, family values, and respect for authority while explicitly labeling Black Americans “problem minorities.”

This story came out while Black Americans were in the streets demanding structural change in the civil rights era, and here was a major American publication offering a counter-narrative: look at these Asians, quietly succeeding. Why can’t everyone else do the same?

White politicians and media ran with it. The model minority myth became a tool used to flatten the real diversity of Asian immigrant experiences, erasing the poverty, the language barriers, the discrimination, the internment that Petersen himself had documented, in order to repackage Asian communities as evidence that the system worked. If Asian immigrants could make it, the argument went, then Black Americans demanding reparations, desegregation, and voting rights were simply making excuses.

The message handed to generations of immigrants since has been consistent: proximity to whiteness will reward you, but you have to position yourself against Blackness to earn it.

Complicity is Deadly

Immigrant entrepreneurs frequently open businesses in predominantly Black neighborhoods, where commercial rent is cheaper due to redlining and systemic disinvestment. Non-Black store owners profit in Black communities, while bringing their imported or learned anti-Black biases behind the counter with them.

And more often than not, this complicity becomes deadly.

Cyrus Carmack-Belton was 14 years old when Rick Chow, an Asian American convenience store owner in South Carolina, chased him down and shot him in the back in 2023. Chow had accused the unarmed teenager of stealing four bottles of water. A civil lawsuit filed by Carmack-Belton’s family alleges that Chow had a pattern of racially profiling and intimidating Black customers. On June 1st, 2026, the jury came back with a not-guilty verdict.

In 1991, Soon Ja Du, a Korean immigrant whose family owned the Empire Liquor Market in South Central Los Angeles, shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in the back of the head after accusing her of stealing a bottle of orange juice—even as security footage showed Harlins approaching the counter with money in her hand. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter but received no prison time—just probation, community service, and a $500 fine. The sentencing enraged Black Los Angeles and became a major flashpoint for the 1992 uprisings.

More than thirty years later, Cyrus Carmack-Belton is dead and Rick Chow is free, and we are still in the same cycle. Immigrant communities did not invent anti-Blackness in America. But we have participated in it, benefited from it, and too often said nothing about it.

The Holiday We Were Told Not to Know About

It took until 2021 for Juneteenth to become a federal holiday—156 years after those troops arrived in Galveston.

“Juneteenth is neither the beginning nor the end of something. The end of the Civil War and the ending of slavery didn’t happen overnight and was a lot more like a jagged edge than a clean cut,” explained Erin Stewart Mauldin, the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at USF St. Petersburg and an expert on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Immigrants walked through a door that Black Americans bled to open and we have to reckon with the full history of the country our communities have made their home.

The uncomfortable question Juneteenth asks immigrant communities is this: what will we do with the freedom that was won for us?

Last night was BROLIC, as we say here in NYC. The Knicks made an epic comeback in the NBA finals when they were behind by 30 points and if that isn’t symbolic of the city they play for, made up of immigrants, kept running by immigrants and led by an immigrant mayor, then I don’t know what is.

That kind of resilience—the refusal to fold when the math is against you is the exact energy I grew up watching my immigrant father channel from our living room in Queens from the 80s to the 2000s.

The Ewing Era: Grinding for Belonging

My father arrived in New York in 1983. He had two days off a week—the restaurant industry’s version of a weekend, Sundays and Mondays—and he spent them the way a lot of immigrant men in Queens spent their days off in the 1980s and 90s: learning America through television. My father’s commitment to this was not casual. He could tell you stats on any player in almost any American sport, immediately, without looking anything up.

The Knicks were always on. I grew up with the silence of squeaky sneakers, the thud of bodies, the roar of the Garden crowd coming through the speakers. Knicks legend Patrick Ewing who holds nearly every major Knicks franchise record (points, rebounds, blocks) but never won the championship was the relentless force in the period of my father’s youth.

An immigrant watching another immigrant on television–both figuring out their place in America.

Patrick Ewing moved from Jamaica to Cambridge, Massachusetts at twelve years old in 1985 and in his own words, still had an accent and never played basketball until he immigrated. Yet, by the time the Knicks drafted him first overall in 1985, he was already the most dominant big man in the college game. What he gave New York for the next fifteen years was something the city recognized in itself: a relentless, physical, never-quite-enough strife.

The Science of Fandom as Citizenship

Academics who study immigrant communities actually have a name for what my father was doing on game nights. Decades of research show that for newcomers, sports fandom is a vital tool for adaptation—a way to establish connections, build community, and feel at home in a new setting while still identifying across borders.

The franchise’s winning foundation was laid by Red Holzman, the son of Jewish immigrants who coached their only championships in the ‘70s. By the time Pat Riley took over in the ‘90s, the team was built on pure grit and a willingness to absorb punishment. You had guys like Rolando Blackman, a Panamanian immigrant who learned English on the fly in Brooklyn, grinding his way to that ‘94 Finals run. And Patrick Ewing was the center of it all—unmovable, relentless, the face of a franchise that never quite won but never stopped grinding.

Linsanity: The Impossible Dream

I write a lot in this space about what we inherit as the children of immigrants—how we carry both the bone-deep self-doubt and the wild, impossible tenacity of people who dared to invent new lives in a new country. The story of the immigrant legacy of the Knicks is incomplete without the Linsanity period. Jeremy Lin’s parents, Gie-Ming and Shirley, emigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. in the 1970s. Like my own father, Gie-Ming actually learned basketball by watching NBA broadcasts, before teaching his sons how to play at the local YMCA.

For a few magical weeks in February 2012, a phenomenon hijacked the Garden. Here was an Asian-American kid who had been passed over by every team in the league, crashing on his brother’s couch on the Lower East Side, completely invisible to a sports world that couldn’t see past its own rigid prototypes. In fact, he was just days away from being cut from the team entirely so they wouldn’t have to pay out his contract. But the Knicks were in a brutal losing slump, key players were all hurt, and the head coach, Mike D’Antoni, was on the verge of being fired. Completely out of options, the coach put Lin in the game as a desperate, absolute last resort.

Lin responded by scoring 25 points against the New Jersey Nets, single-handedly saving his coach’s job and his own career. It was a breakthrough so sudden and electrifying that fans on the internet immediately smashed his name together with the word “insanity” to coin “Linsanity”—a catchphrase that instantly took over the cultural zeitgeist and the covers of the New York tabloids. A week later, he put up a massive 38 points on national television against Kobe Bryant and then came Valentine’s Day in Toronto: a tied game, the final seconds ticking away, and Lin calmly stepping back to hit a perfect, cold-blooded game-winning shot.

For every kid of an immigrant who was taught the survival math of keeping your head down, staying quiet, and making yourself small, watching Lin command the Mecca of basketball was a cultural revolution.

A New Generation: The Immigrant Story as Main Text

Today, the Knicks are back in the Finals after twenty-seven years, and the immigrant story is no longer subtext. Karl-Anthony Towns grew up in New Jersey, the son of a Dominican immigrant mother named Jacqueline, who crossed into a new country and built a life and then died of COVID-19 in April 2020, at the height of the pandemic, while her son was in NBA quarantine and could not get to her. He has spoken about her death with a grief that is also a kind of testimony—to what immigrant mothers carry, to what they leave behind. The indisputable MVP who delivered the winning shot of last night’s game, OG Anunoby was born in London to Nigerian parents and came to America at four years old.

Showing Up When the Environment Turns Hostile

New York has always moved in cycles—arrival and backlash, a fist opening and closing. My father lived through it all. He was here after 9/11, when men who looked and prayed like him suddenly became suspects in the city they’d spent years building. He is still here now, watching a federal administration make attacking immigrants its entire cornerstone. Between the executive orders slamming doors shut and the relentless rhetoric villainizing the very people who feed, clean, and build this country, it’s a hostile environment explicitly designed to force immigrants into retreating.

But the ethics of this city—and the ethics of these Knicks—reject that. You can’t deport the hustle. You can’t rip out the engine of New York and expect it to run. You don’t run when the math is against you or the room turns hostile. You show up. You grind. You come back next season.

And once in a lifetime, you tip the ball in for the winning shot and watch an entire city spill out into the streets, radiating with hope.

Happy Immigrant Heritage Month!

This June, the government wants us to celebrate immigrants. But I know many of you are asking the same question I am: Is that really possible right now?

How do we celebrate at a time when our communities are afraid to leave their homes? When folks are being abducted in broad daylight, and children are getting sick in horrific conditions inside detention centers? When allies are losing their lives just for defending their immigrant neighbors?

The Origin Story

Immigrant Heritage Month has been observed every June since 2014. It grew out of an initiative during the Obama years, back when comprehensive immigration reform felt—however briefly—like it might actually happen.

The goal was to shift public sentiment. The hope was that if Americans could see themselves in the immigrant story (and most can, if they go back far enough), the politics would naturally follow.

Twelve years later, we are still making that case.

This year, cities across the country are trying to mark the month with intention:

• New York City themed its celebration “Immigrants Power New York,” using a power grid as a visual reminder that we are the connective infrastructure holding the city together.

• Colorado’s governor formally proclaimed June as Immigrant Heritage Month, highlighting that one in nine Coloradans is an immigrant, contributing an estimated $9.5 billion in state taxes annually.

• Boston’s City Council adopted a resolution officially recognizing June 2026 as Immigrant Heritage Month, honoring the essential role immigrants play in the city’s business ownership, workforce participation, and cultural diversity.

The symbolism is beautiful, and it isn’t subtle. But unfortunately, neither is what’s happening on the streets. The case for our belonging is more urgent—and the audience far more hostile—than the founders of this month ever imagined.

The Reality on the Ground

While America puts up the celebratory bunting, we have to look clearly at the policy landscape we are navigating right now.

• This is a neighborhood story: In fiscal year 2025, ICE recorded more deportations from within U.S. communities than Border Patrol apprehended at the Southwest border. The woman who got picked up at the bus stop while going home from work to her kids, the man behind the counter at the halal cart, and the grandmother who has lived in the same apartment for thirty years.

• A deadly year: 2025 was the deadliest year in ICE custody in two decades. At least 32 people died—matching the all-time highest record previously set in 2004.

• Birthright citizenship under fire: As tent camps operate across the country in brutal conditions, the administration is actively asking the Supreme Court to strike down the 157-year-old guarantee that if you are born on American soil, you are American.

• A slashed safety net: The refugee admissions cap for fiscal year 2026 currently sits at 17,500. Under President Biden, just a year ago, it was 125,000. That is an 86 percent reduction. More than 128,000 refugees who had completed full security vetting—who sold their belongings and gave up their housing—were left stranded when the administration suspended the program on its first day. The few slots that do exist this year are allocated primarily to white South Africans.

Heritage Isn’t Just History

The story of immigration to this country is genuinely, stubbornly beautiful. My parents came to this country in 1983, but America wasn’t their first attempt at finding a life in the Western world. They lived in Germany first—a country where, as Bangladeshi migrants, they had absolutely no pathway to citizenship. The U.S. was the place where they believed true belonging was actually on offer.

The communities Port of Entry is built to serve are the most resilient, creative, and tenacious people I know. That doesn’t stop being true just because the government is actively trying to dismantle the legal architecture that made our arrival possible.

So, here is my ask of you. Let’s celebrate our fierce, beautiful existence, and let’s absolutely refuse to let the celebration become a cover story. The case for immigrants—for the value, humanity, and belonging of people who came here, who are still coming, and who are being detained as you read this—is not a historical claim. It is an urgent, present-tense reality.

The archive is ours to build. Let’s keep building it together.

Every May, the United States celebrates Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month to honor more than 50 ethnicities, 60 nationalities, and 100 languages that fall under this umbrella. At Port of Entry, my mission is to highlight the stories of immigrant communities—many of them AAPI—all year round. It’s the foundation of my nearly two-decade career, so centering these voices is embedded in everything we do here. But I have always wondered: how and when did AAPI month actually start?

Like with so many milestones for communities of color in this country, it began with racism, of course.

Jeanie Jew’s great-grandfather came from China to help build the Transcontinental Railroad—and was later killed in an act of anti-Asian violence while advocating for his community. Decades later, his granddaughter carried that grief into the halls of Congress. In the 1970s, Jew looked at the bicentennial pageant America threw for itself, noticed her people were completely erased from the narrative, and decided to do something about it. She lobbied so relentlessly that 231 congressional members eventually co-sponsored her bill. Still, it took fifteen years—from 1977 to 1992—for the month to become a permanent annual observance.

So, what does the designation actually do?

In theory, it offers visibility, political leverage, and a mandated moment for schools and institutions to reckon with AAPI history. The month has also served as a designated on-ramp for vital civic organizing, driving voter registration, legislative advocacy, and community coalition-building.

What it hasn’t done, however, is make the community safe.

Anti-Asian hate crimes are still nearly three times higher than they were before the pandemic — and that’s just what gets reported to federal databases. Federal victimization surveys estimate that 42% of violent hate crimes go unreported, with many victims facing language barriers, fear of retaliation, or concerns about interacting with law enforcement because of immigration status. Anti-Sikh hate crimes surged 59% in 2025. Anti-Hindu hate crimes rose 12%. Anti-Buddhist hate crimes climbed 23%. The communities folded under the AAPI umbrella are not a monolith—but the violence tracking them doesn’t much care about that distinction.

Anyway. Here’s what I’ve been reading this month.

OUTRAGE: They Want Your Green Card. And They Want You to Leave to Get It.

Most people applying for green cards from inside the United States will now be required to leave the country and apply through consulates abroad, under sweeping changes announced by the Trump administration this week. USCIS framed the change as a return to the “ordinary immigrant visa process,” saying adjustment of status will be granted only when “extraordinary relief” is warranted. The process hundreds of thousands of people have relied on — filing from within the country where they already live, work, and pay taxes — is now “extraordinary.”

The Takeaway: They don’t have to deport you if they can make staying feel like the mistake.

Read TIME’s explainer.

FROM MY DESK: The Women Who Work While You Sleep

This one is mine, and I’m proud of it.

For over a decade, a coalition of mostly immigrant women—home care workers, many of them Chinese and Caribbean—have been fighting to end the 24-hour workday in New York. Under current state rules, live-in home care workers can be scheduled for 24-hour shifts and paid for only 13 of those hours — as long as they’re allotted three hours for meals and five uninterrupted hours of sleep without interruption. Workers say those breaks rarely come. Some report working up to 96 hours straight.

In April, workers launched an indefinite hunger strike outside City Hall, calling for passage of the No More 24 Act. After seven days, City Council Speaker Julie Menin promised a vote.

The Takeaway: The people keeping our most vulnerable neighbors alive are being robbed in plain sight. Spoiler alert: that vote still hasn’t come.

Read my piece in The Guardian.

GET IN DEEP: The Missing Bride of Anqoun by Rania Abouzeid

Anqoun is a town in southern Lebanon that Israeli ground troops invaded earlier this year, razing villages and displacing hundreds of thousands as they set up a buffer zone. Abouzeid goes into that wreckage and finds one woman’s story—a bride who disappeared—and follows it with the particular access that comes from being of the region and not just passing through it.

The Takeaway: Read it slowly. It’s the kind of journalism that makes you remember why the work matters.

Read it in The New Yorker.

CLOSE TO HOME: The Sacrifice Zone

For days, protesters have stood face to face against ICE agents outside Delaney Hall, a federal immigration detention center in Newark, NJ—the largest sustained immigration demonstrations since Minneapolis. People have shown up with homemade shields, old mattresses, and human chains to block the gates while batons came down on the crowd. They’ve been pepper sprayed, shoved, and arrested—and they keep coming back. Inside, detainees launched a hunger strike over alleged inhumane conditions while DHS denied it was happening. The governor was denied entry. State health inspectors were only allowed to see part of the facility. Slate senior writer Aymann Ismail lives nearby and went before the worst of the clashes — and what he wrote explains exactly why people aren’t leaving.

The Takeaway: The sacrifice zone has always been a

choice. Right now, people are putting their bodies on the line to say they reject it.

Read it in Slate.

I have spent most of this week immersed in the aftermath of the horrific mass shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, reporting a piece on the community for The Guardian.

On Monday morning, two teenagers walked up to the Islamic Center with guns and a manifesto. A security guard named Amin Abdullah stopped them before they could reach the 140 children inside. He died in the parking lot. So did two other men from the community—Mansour Kaziha, the mosque store manager, and Nader Awad, who heard the shots and ran toward them to protect the children and teachers.

I have been a journalist for two decades. I have reported from refugee camps and detention centers; I have followed ICE as they patrolled the streets. I cover Muslim and immigrant communities because I firmly believe that the stories of people at the margins of American life are, in fact, the story of America itself. I thought, by now, I would know how to hold this work. I was wrong.

The Guardian piece—a reported look at the Islamic Center, the imam who spent twenty years keeping its doors open, and the community that built it—touches on the anti-Muslim hate that led to this moment. I am grateful to my editors for letting me report on the full scope of this tragedy.

But there is something I needed to write that I couldn’t file to an editor. Something about what it means to do this work as a Muslim journalist and as a mother, in a country where the political and the personal have become impossible to separate. A country where the threat environment our children are growing up in is not merely a backdrop, but the story itself.

That’s what Port of Entry is for. It’s below.

“Seconds felt like hours,” Ms. Imani, a teacher’s assistant at the Islamic center’s elementary school, told me. She was describing the forty minutes she spent huddled under a desk in the dark, reciting her shahada, listening to shooters move through the hallway of the school where she works. I have conducted hundreds of interviews in twenty years of reporting. I have rarely had to stop and actively remind myself which role I was in—journalist or mother.

This is what it takes to keep Muslim children safe in America in 2026: men like Amin, Mansour, and Nader rushing toward gunfire.

When police finally evacuated the school, the staff ran to a nearby church that served as the safe zone. As the children came bursting through the doors—some in shock with wide eyes, some sobbing, some running straight into each other’s arms—the teachers did something Ms. Imani described quietly, almost as an aside: they wiped their own tears first. “It was so hard to keep on that brave face,” she told me. “But the children are the ones who gave us the strength.”

I keep coming back to the children. They knew exactly what to do because they had practiced. A school attached to a mosque, in a country that makes its children run active-shooter drills, has already told those children something very specific about what the world thinks of them. They learned to pray and they learned to hide. Both are survival skills now.

“The kids loved Amin Abdullah,” Tazheen Nizam, executive director of Council of American Islamic Relations San Diego, told me. He stood at that door every single day, greeting them with a smile. He was funny. He was jovial. And now he is gone, and they will walk past the empty space where he used to stand.

That he was there at all is worth examining. In recent years, mosques across the country have relied on the Department of Homeland Security’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program to fund physical security—cameras, barriers, trained personnel. Nizam told me that no mosque in San Diego County received a grant in the last funding cycle. The application process, she explained, has become entangled in conditions that make Muslim institutions wary. Requirements linked to immigration enforcement cooperation create an atmosphere of scrutiny that turns federal protection into a potential liability. So, communities make do. They find a brave man willing to stand at the door. They train their three-year-olds to crouch in corners and stay silent. They pray it is enough.

The defunding of mosque security does not exist in isolation. Hatem Bazian, director of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at UC Berkeley, has been tracking the political environment that produced Monday’s shooting for two decades. What he describes is not a spike, but a structural transformation. An anti-Sharia caucus in Congress has grown to more than 60 members. Republican-led campaigns have targeted Muslim institutions in Texas, Florida, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The war with Iran and Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza have intensified anti-Muslim sentiment and violently narrowed the political space for Muslim American voices. Every lever of civil society, Bazian told me, has been weaponized—and religious institutions are not exempt. “The rhetoric that was previously confined to the fringe,” he said, “is now spoken openly from the floor of Congress and amplified by figures with proximity to the executive branch.”

It is not a coincidence that this is happening as the country grows more diverse, more multiracial, more multireligious—and as the political response to that diversity grows increasingly hostile. The communities most targeted by hate violence are the exact same communities being quietly cut off from the resources that might protect them. Bazian calls this the integration bargain that was never a bargain at all. “American Muslims,” he told me, “are citizens on probation. They must demonstrate in small and large ways that they deserve citizenship.”

I was a teenager when the towers fell. Like every Muslim American of my generation, September 11 marked a before and an after. It reorganized how we moved through the world, how we explained ourselves, how we learned to make ourselves legible to a country that had suddenly decided we were a question it needed to answer. I became a journalist, in part, because of that rupture. I believed that stories were a form of repair. That if enough people understood what Muslim and immigrant families in America were actually living, something would shift.

I still believe that.

But I am also a mother now. When Ms. Imani described crawling under that desk and saying her shahada while listening for footsteps in the hallway, I wasn’t only a journalist processing a source’s account. I was a Muslim mother to a two-year-old and a five-year-old.

Nizam said something to me that I haven’t been able to shake. She was talking about what parents are living with—the sheer dread of a drill notification, the mental math that happens every single morning. “You never think: has the school done an active shooter drill? Are they up to date on security?“ she said. “You’re thinking: do they have their lunch? Do they have their sweater?“

Fellow children of immigrants, the more we add our language, our food, our grief, our joy, our faith to what America is—the more we are targeted for exactly that. We were promised that assimilation was the price of safety. We paid it. And we are still burying our people who died because of hate.

Our children should not have to be this brave. And neither should the men who died to protect them.

If this brought something up for you—share it. Forward this newsletter. Subscribe and support. Put it in a group chat. Give it to someone who doesn’t already know what Muslim families in this country are carrying.

That is what Port of Entry is here for.

— Jennifer

Happy Asian American Pacific Islander month!

The AAPI designation was coined in 1968 as a political coalition, but Native Hawaiians have long contested it. They are not immigrants like most other Asian American communities; they are the Indigenous people of a sovereign nation overthrown by a U.S.-backed coup in 1893. Today, widespread economic displacement means a majority of Native Hawaiians actually live outside of Hawaiʻi—a crisis recently compounded by the devastating 2023 Maui wildfires and the aggressive land speculation that followed.

Author and journalist Sara Kehaulani Goo explores this ongoing struggle in her memoir, Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawaii, which centers on her family’s fight to hold onto ancestral land on an island the rest of the world treats as paradise. I first met Goo at an Asian American Journalists Association conference and was struck by the reality of her experience.

Read our conversation below.

What is your port of entry?

My family’s story began in Hawaii—which was not part of the United States. It was its own independent nation. And so even our immigration story began in a kingdom that was overthrown and forcefully absorbed into the U.S., not by the Hawaiian people’s choice. That experience has never really been reflected in what we call the “American experience.” As a kid, it was strange to have people look at my face and immediately assume so much about where I came from. I needed to share a different story.

Within the AAPI umbrella, so many communities get flattened or lost. What has it been like navigating that, especially as someone with mixed ancestry?

Context is everything. I’m a fourth-generation Asian American, so even among other Asian Americans I don’t quite fit—the languages people expect me to speak, the immigration experiences they assume my family had. But the thing people of color often have in common is that others perceive us to be a certain way when we’re actually quite different. The shared experience isn’t a specific history. It’s being misread.

The book is called Kuleana. Walk us through that word.

Kuleana means responsibility but not responsibility in the American sense, which often suggests something you have to do that you maybe don’t want to. It means responsibility with pride, with honor. What I came to understand through this whole process is that kuleana is the thing you are called to do, not just obligated to do. The book is really asking: what do we owe those who came before us, and those who come after? That kuleana is being passed to my children now. It’s not about an asset. It’s about the honor of holding a piece of something that was once part of a kingdom—and keeping that connection to the ʻāina alive.

How did your concept of inheritance shift through this process?

I still think in my Western brain about inheritance as something tangible. But kuleana feels more like a blessing I’m charged with carrying. It made me take stock of my own life. When the generation before you starts to pass away and you realize you’re the adult in the room — you have to take the torch. And out here on the East Coast, raising my children, I started asking: what connection are they going to have to our family’s history? If you come from somewhere, if a culture matters to you, you have to be very intentional about passing it on.

You originally wanted to write a history book. What changed?

I wanted readers to care about Hawaii’s history the way I had come to. But then a crisis happened within our family — a real, concrete fight to save ancestral land and I realized the personal story was inseparable from the historical one. Our family’s situation was emblematic of what so many Hawaiian families are going through or have gone through. Since the book came out, I’ve heard from so many people who’ve said: this happened to my family. This is happening right now. Most Americans don’t realize how much land loss has already occurred. And it’s not a finished story.

Writing about your own family means making choices about how to portray real people. Were there difficult negotiations?

I was upfront from the very beginning. Everyone knew I was working on this, and I asked questions of anyone who would spend time with me. When I had to write about my great-uncle — why he decided to sell his portion of the land — I tried to honor the economics of his life. He didn’t have the same economic cushion we did. Not everyone has the luxury of continuing to pay taxes on land that isn’t generating income. That is just the truth of how many people’s lives work. I gave everyone a full draft before publication. No surprises. And my great-uncle ended up being among my biggest fans.

To most Americans, Hawaii exists as a dream destination, somehow outside of political reality. How do you write into that without losing people?

My goal was never to make people feel guilty for going to Hawaii or for loving it. Hawaii still needs tourism—responsible tourism. And it genuinely is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. What I wanted was for people to understand the context when they visit. Hawaii has a rich culture that is struggling to survive, and significant consequences of colonialism that are still being lived. Both things are true. I wanted to hold both.

Land as a theme resonates across so many diaspora communities. Did you feel that resonance while writing?

Deeply. There’s this idea in a lot of communities where a family spends money to hold onto land that may never give them anything back financially — and it doesn’t matter. Because it’s a piece of us. For Indigenous people especially, the connection to land is about something else entirely. It’s about who you are and where you came from. Once you lose that connection, it’s very hard to come back. We wanted to keep that thread alive even when we couldn’t physically be there. Just to hold the place.

The Hawaiian language revival is one of the most remarkable stories in the book.

Hawaiian was almost gone. In the 1970s, only around 2,000 people were still speaking it—including my great-grandmother, who was one of the last native speakers of her era. The language had been suppressed, used to make Hawaiian people feel ashamed of who they were. Children were punished for speaking it. And now there are 20,000 speakers. Children are learning it in immersion schools. Someone told me once that when a culture loses its language, it loses everything else very quickly after. The Hawaiians came so close to that edge. The fact that they’ve pulled back is extraordinary.

What does the Hawaiian language contain that English can’t hold?

Precision about the natural world that reflects how people actually lived in it. In Hawaiian, there are dozens of different words for rain—a light drizzle, a short burst, a thunderstorm. Same for wind, same for surf. Why? Because when you live your life on an ocean, the specific conditions of weather and sea determine whether you can fish, whether it’s safe to go out. Of course you need precise language for that, it’s a matter of survival. Whereas in English we just say: it’s raining. I started learning Hawaiian while writing the book, and it opened things up that research alone never could have.

You write about raising your children on the East Coast and the work of keeping culture alive across distance.

It requires intention. Left to its own devices, American culture fills every available space —and it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just the default. If you want your children to know who they also are, you have to actively create space for it. I wrote this book for my kids, for my nieces and nephews, for all my cousins and their children. Not as a lecture — as a record of who we are and where we came from. A story they can hold.

What do you hope diaspora and immigrant readers specifically take away?

This book is for anyone interested in generational connection. How do we find our way back to the thread between ourselves and our parents and grandparents, and how do we carry it forward? If you’ve ever felt the pull of a place your family came from, if you’ve found yourself not quite fitting any one category, if you’re a parent wondering how to give your children a sense of something beyond the immediate — I think it will speak to you. Knowing our own stories helps us navigate the world better. That’s what a port of entry really is: the particular place and history through which each of us arrived. It’s what makes us different. And it’s what we share.

I got married in 2020, during Mother’s Day weekend. It was a shotgun wedding in the middle of the pandemic. I was very early on in my pregnancy with my first daughter. That was the first shame I had to suppress and the first sacrifice my Muslim Bangladeshi immigrant mother had to negotiate about the future she envisioned for me.

Two years ago, I showed up at my parents’ doorstep with my three-year-old and three-month-old daughters. I left the home I had built with their father, the home I’d spent decades dreaming of—the promise of a family of my own, a partner to love and cherish me. We set up camp in my childhood bedroom, no questions asked. That was the second disappointment Ammu had to navigate about my future.

There is nothing quite like the ego battle between an immigrant mother and her first-generation American daughter. I was a defiant teenager. I did not follow her rules. I did not want her life with it’s restrictions and stifling stipulations. I had to leave her world, never to come back.

I did not expect my mother to be the person who taught me that I could come home, no matter what.

I recoiled at how my mother and the world around her would respond. I expected the silence that passes for acceptance in immigrant households, the love that arrives as labor—food made, space cleared, adjustments made without announcement. I did not expect grace. I did not expect her to swallow her feelings about my choices and about what manush ki bolbe—what will people say.

Last May, my divorce finalized. I officially became a single mother. I did not expect Ammu to help me carry my shame with dignity.

As a first-generation American, I grew up as my parents’ proof of concept. I am the reason they came, the return on every sacrifice, the person who was supposed to make it all worth it. I carried this storyline with resentment and defiance and the particular fury of a child who understands she is loved but cannot breathe inside the shape of it.

I don’t want my own daughters to be proof of anything. I want them immersed in who they are—their culture, their history, their grandmother’s language and their mother’s stubbornness and their own sprinkles of how they translate these inheritances. I want them to know, that they also can always come home.

If I do my job right, the things that matter will remain. That is their inheritance and my job as a child of immigrants raising the next generation.

A few days ago, my five-year-old daughter said to me, “I need some alone time with Nanu,” rushed over to my mother, and whispered something in her ear. My daughter cupped her Nanu’s ear and whispered. When she was done, she loudly warned her grandmother, “Don’t tell Amma!”, and went back to her seat in front of the TV.

My mother’s eyes twinkled. I looked at her and mouthed: she told you about my Mother’s Day drawing? She nodded, grinning.

I have spent most of my adult life trying to get out from under my mother’s gaze. And here I am, back inside it, grateful.

A reading list on immigrant mothers

These are the books I return to when I need to remember that the story of the immigrant mother who holds up her children is not mine alone. It is one of the oldest stories in the world.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko: Polly, an undocumented immigrant mother in New York, disappears from her son’s life—not abandonment exactly, but desperate self-reclamation. She was never given the conditions to be a full person and a mother simultaneously. She had to choose. Read it as an indictment of every structure that made that choice necessary—and as a reminder of what it means to have a door to come home to.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri: Ashima Ganguli crosses an ocean for a man she barely knows, builds a life that has almost nothing to do with herself, and holds her family together across two cultures for decades. Read it for what it costs her and for the grace she extends anyway, even when no one asks her to.

Brick Lane by Monica Ali: Nazneen arrives in London from Bangladesh as a young bride, delivered into a marriage and a life she did not choose. She becomes herself anyway— slowly, quietly, at great cost. Manush ki bolbe could not stop her either.

The global fast fashion market has grown to $150 billion in 2025, and fewer than 2% of the industry’s roughly 60 million workers earn a living wage. Platforms like Shein and Temu have pushed the race even further to the bottom and they’re disproportionately marketed to younger, lower-income consumers—including many descendants of immigrants for whom the price point feels like access.

It is access built on the backs of women who look like our families.

Last November, Amnesty International documented what may be the most comprehensive reckoning with the industry to date— a pervasive “climate of fear” across garment supply chains in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, where joining a union can mean harassment, firing, or physical attack. The report also shows how fast fashion brands are complicit in these human rights abuses despite denying this narrative for decades.

When I was a correspondent in Bangladesh, I followed garment workers to the hospital after a protest turned violent. The photo above is from that day —Bobita with her head bashed in, getting stitched up in a crowded ward. No one from her factory came to check on her, except her colleagues who were also attacked.

The story ran on Elle.com. Then the factory owner threatened to sue. As a freelancer, I had no protection so Elle took it down. The factory owner had more legal recourse than the woman whose head they’d cracked open and the reporter telling their story. You can still read the piece here.

I tried to follow up with Bobita many times after that. Eventually she left the slum where she was renting a room and no one knew where she went. Women like her who often make our clothes, who get hurt fighting for a living wage, who tell their stories to journalists vanish, while the industry keeps moving.

For South Asian Americans, these are our aunties and cousins. When a $12 Zara tunic gets coded as “boho chic,” someone’s relative made it for pennies and someone else’s culture got laundered into a trend. The aesthetic travels. The credit doesn’t. And neither does the money.

The piece below is the one I wrote last year, connecting the dots between the cultural appropriation, colonial economic history, and the fast fashion industry and not much has changed.

Port of Entry pieces go behind the paywall after two months — but I’ve unlocked this one for the 700+ readers who’ve joined since it first ran. If this is the kind of storytelling you want to exist in the world—reporting and deep analysis that treats descendants of immigrants as the complex, politically awake people we are—consider becoming a paid patron. There's no other place doing exactly this, for exactly us.

— Jennifer

The Santa Maria Inn on California’s central coast used to be a rest stop for Hollywood stars like Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe. Today, its glory has faded. The town it anchors—Santa Maria, with a population of about 110,000, wedged between wine country and the Pacific Ocean—is shaped now by the people who feed the nation. I stayed here last October while reporting a piece for The Guardian on the immigrant farmworkers being targeted by ICE.

At first glance, Santa Maria looks like every other small Central Coast city with wide open streets, low stucco buildings, a little greenery. But upon a closer look, you’ll see that luxury cars are rare—most vehicles are beat-up trucks and SUVs. On TikTok, local kids film themselves mocking the boredom and the lack of opportunity.

What you don’t see on the surface is that over 80% of the farmworkers here are undocumented. They are the essential, invisible engine of a billion-dollar agricultural industry—the people who pick the strawberries, the broccoli, and the lettuce that end up in your grocery store. The farming season runs nine months, from March through October. The other three months, workers are out of work and out of pay. And right now, both during and after the season, they are living in constant fear.

Hundreds of them have been taken by ICE.

The devastation is often swift and sweeping. On December 27th, just after Christmas, ICE swept through four towns in Santa Barbara County in a single day. One hundred and forty-four people were detained. A third of them were from Santa Maria alone—a massive blow to a town this size. Kids were home on winter break. Their parents left for work in the morning and never came home.

Historically speaking, this is not a new story. In 1954, during the government’s infamous “Operation Wetback,” 1.1 million people were deported to Mexico in a single year. Labor activists at the time charged that the raids were designed not for national security, but to manufacture a labor shortage—driving undocumented workers back across the border to replace them with cheaper, more controllable bracero contract workers.

The structure today looks startlingly similar. As UC Davis agricultural economist Philip Martin points out, the availability of a vulnerable labor force has always been used to hold down farmworker wages. Mexican academic Jorge Bustamante has long argued that a primary function of U.S. immigration enforcement has historically been—and still is—to regulate the price of Mexican labor in the United States.

The Teenage Watchman

I met Cesar Vasquez on a Sunday night in October, two months before his eighteenth birthday. He had deferred his college acceptance to stay in Santa Maria and work full time for 805 Undocufund, tracking ICE agents, coordinating rapid responses, patrolling the streets, and documenting everything.

We started patrolling at 6 a.m. on a Monday—Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which Cesar noted dryly might be why the streets were quiet. We passed the FBI office, a shuttered hospital that once housed farmworkers, and the tomato fields where his mother used to work and organize against pesticide exposure. Inside the car, his phone buzzed without stopping: local chats, county chats, national chats, ICE vehicle sightings, videos of people being taken from the street.

On his car visor, he keeps a list of ICE vehicle models: Ford Expeditions, Dodge Chargers, transport vans. He pulls it down often, cross-referencing it against the cars we pass. At a local mall parking lot, he pointed to an unremarkable spot on the asphalt.

“That’s where I saw my first kidnapping,” Cesar said.

He retells the story in a daze every time we loop past. Santa Maria is small enough that we go around it often. “ICE agents here are cocky,” Cesar told me. “They know we know who they are, and they don’t care.”

In the back of his car, he keeps the tools of his trade: gas masks, shields, printed lists of know-your-rights resources. Yet, despite the militant nature of his work, Cesar is articulate, passionate and completely unafraid of silence. Multiple people told me independently that he has an old soul. He quotes Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton regularly. To process what he witnesses, he sees a therapist. To stay grounded, he meditates, guided by his mentor, Aura.

Later, we went to Cesar’s house. In the bedroom he shares with his sister, awards and certificates line the walls, displayed right next to a book about Fred Hampton. I interviewed his mother, Angelica, who crossed the border alone as a child. As a young farmworker, she had organized against the pesticide exposure she knew was making her and her coworkers sick. Now, she watches her son lead the resistance, worrying about him the way mothers do—quietly and constantly.

You can see the realization of the American Dream in their family. His older sister Sam, 25, is a high school history teacher in Los Angeles. Another sister is in graduate school in the UK. They are exactly what this country says it wants to produce and what it promises children of immigrants. Yet, the very system that champions that dream actively tears at the fabric of their community.

“I Feel Guilty About the Families I Couldn’t Save”

The work takes a heavy toll.

“I feel guilty about the families I can’t save,” he confessed to me.

To combat this feeling, he pushes harder. He walks the streets during sweeps, knocking on doors. He broadcasts warnings on Instagram Live and has been chased mid-broadcast.

He told me about a high school senior who was reading The Diary of Anne Frank for class when she got into a car and learned her own family was on the run. He told me about flower vendors who disappeared from their street corners during the raids, only returning when Cesar’s warnings finally reached them. And there were the kids—dozens of them—whose parents simply never came home over Christmas break, leaving a void their teachers wouldn’t discover until school reopened.

The morning I packed up to leave, I asked Cesar something that had been nagging at me the entire trip.

“What is that smell in the air?”

He laughed, the way you do when a question catches you completely off guard because the answer is so obvious to you.

“It’s the strawberries.”

He can’t smell them anymore. They are just air to him now. The fields at dawn, the tractors rumbling down residential streets, the workers bent toward the earth—it’s all just the atmosphere of a life he has always known. It is a life he has chosen to stay inside of and fight for, even when he could have easily left it behind.

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.

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 landmark civil rights report by CAIR documented 8,683 civil rights complaints involving Muslims in 2025—the highest number in thirty years.

has been two decades since 9/11. It has been years of interfaith dinners, Muslim-American elected officials, and #EidMubarak trending on social media. And yet, the hostility is at an all-time high.

We are more visible than ever, and we are more targeted because of it.

The past few weeks have made that contradiction heartbreakingly plain. In Houston, a parent-led Ramadan display at Bunker Hill Elementary was forcibly removed after complaints—in the same state that mandates the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom. Multiple Republican lawmakers have felt emboldened to post Islamophobic statements that, only a decade ago, would have ended their careers.

None of this is new, even when it feels heavy.

We stand on the shoulders of those who kept the light burning in total darkness. Bilali Muhammad fasted in secret on a Georgia plantation, scratching his faith into scraps of paper in Arabic. Omar ibn Said, enslaved in the Carolinas, prayed toward Mecca when no one was watching. The Nation of Islam in the 1950s and ‘60s took a faith that had been beaten out of a people and turned it into something fierce, public, and proud.

That history is the ground beneath our feet. It is the foundation for every Chand Raat celebration, every Eid day off, and every cardamom latte. It’s a reminder that visibility has always been a battleground. The question was never just whether we could be seen—it was about who got to control the story of who we are.

And the story remains clear: Ramadan is, and has always been, American.

Join the Conversation

Thank you for walking this path with me over the last four weeks. This series has been a labor of love, but it only truly comes to life when it reaches you.

We are building a community here at Port of Entry, and your voice is the most important part of it. I’d love for us to close this chapter together:

• What stayed with you? Of all the stories we’ve shared, which one mirrored your own experience or changed the way you see our community?

• What should we explore next? This series is over, but our journey isn’t. If there’s a corner of the American Muslim experience—or any story of identity and belonging—that needs to be told, tell me about it.

Reply to this email and let’s talk. I read every single one of your messages, and I can’t wait to hear from you.

Wishing you and your loved ones a day full of light, safety, and joy.

Eid Mubarak,

Jennifer

Read the full series:

[Part 1] The Enslaved Who Fasted in Secret

| [Part 2] How Islam Was Rebuilt in Black America

| [Part 3] Iftar at The White House

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 their labor.

For nearly two centuries afterwards, Ramadan and Muslim life was absent from the halls of power. It existed quietly in the shadows of Southern plantations, preached on city street corners by the Nation of Islam and practiced in the first mosques of the Midwest but it remained invisible to the state. Islam and Ramadan simply wouldn’t have a formal place at the federal level again until the 1990s.

By the 1990s, the “triple-threat” of Muslim American diversity—African American Muslims, the post-1965 Immigration Act professional class, and a new wave of refugees—had grown to roughly 1% of the population. In 1996, the Clinton administration finally acknowledged this growth, hosting the first official White House Eid celebration.

In early 2001, President Bush turned the White House Iftar into an official yearly tradition. He filled the State Dining Room with Muslim leaders and diplomats to celebrate Ramadan, making it a staple of the American presidency. But the timing was surreal, just a few months after this big gesture of inclusion, the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, changing the meaning of that bridge-building forever.

Bush kept the gesture of solidarity. In the weeks after 9/11, he stood at a podium and said plainly,“Islam is peace.” He visited a mosque. He broke fast publicly with Muslim Americans while the country convulsed with grief and with rage directed at anyone who looked, prayed, or dressed like the enemy the nation had just named.

But the administration was simultaneously building a surveillance apparatus that treated every Muslim neighbor as a potential threat. The NYPD Demographics Unit became the face of this duality, mapping neighborhoods and infiltrating mosques between 2002 and 2014. This created a haunting paradox—the same government that invited you to eat dates at the White House might have had an undercover officer sitting in the back of your mosque for afternoon prayer earlier.

The Obama years were all about trying to make the Muslim community feel like a normal part of the American story. At the 2010 Iftar, he even famously stood up for the right to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero. But, even as he normalized the image of Muslims in the “American fabric,” his administration presided over the expansion of drone programs and the “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) initiatives that many community leaders felt continued to stigmatize their youth. The dinner invitations were more frequent, but the “security-first” lens remained firmly in place.

The tension finally snapped over the last decade. In 2017, Donald Trump broke tradition by canceling the Iftar following the “Muslim Ban. In 2018, he brought it back, but with a catch. He filled the seats with foreign diplomats instead of American Muslims. By leaving out local leaders and lawmakers, he turned a community tradition into a strictly diplomatic photo-op. And honestly? The community was fine with it. Most major groups said they would’ve declined the invite anyway.”

By Ramadan 2024, under President Joe Biden, the boycott became nearly total. Despite Biden’s initial efforts to restore a festive atmosphere, the community refused the invitation amidst the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, holding a “People’s Iftar” in the rain outside the White House gates instead.

Fast forward to Trump’s second term in 2026, and things have shifted back to a more formal, distant kind of diplomacy. The official ‘Presidential Messages on Ramadan’ still talk about spiritual growth, but the welcoming iftar and eid celebrations at the White House were a short lived affair between the late 90s and 2010’s.

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, speaking directly to a community that had been systematically denied dignity and autonomy. He gathered a significant following. And then, in 1934, he vanished.

A new leader stepped in: Elijah Muhammad, under whom the Nation of Islam was formally structured.

Discipline as Resistance

The Nation of Islam was controversial—both because it became the first major Muslim movement rooted in Black America, and because its theology differed significantly from mainstream Sunni Islam. It taught that Fard was a divine figure. It emphasized racial separation over integration.

But it did something else, too: it rebuilt Islamic practice where slavery had dismantled it. Ramadan observance, daily prayer, and moral discipline became central pillars. In a society designed to control Black bodies, that discipline was a form of dignity—a way to assert selfhood on one’s own terms.

According to scholar Edward E. Curtis IV in Islam in Black America, the Nation of Islam provided a religious framework that challenged internalized inferiority and reimagined spiritual and political possibilities for Black Americans.

Ramadan Behind Bars

By the 1950s and ‘60s, Islam was spreading rapidly among incarcerated Black men through the NOI’s prison outreach programs. Muslim prisoners began demanding the right to pray, to study the Qur’an, and to fast during Ramadan. In 1964, the Supreme Court case Cooper v. Pate affirmed that Muslim prisoners could sue for violations of their religious rights—a landmark expansion of constitutional protections for religious freedom. Ramadan, once hidden and illegal, was now part of America’s legal landscape.

Malcolm X and the Struggle for Global Human Rights

No figure changed the story more than Malcolm X.

Born Malcolm Little, he converted to the NOI while in prison and became, by the Civil Rights era, the most electrifying spokesperson for Black Muslim life in America. Then, in 1964, he undertook the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. There, he witnessed Muslims of every race praying and breaking fast together. The experience transformed him. He embraced Sunni Islam, left the Nation of Islam, and reframed the Black freedom struggle as part of a global human rights movement—one that connected Black Americans to Muslims around the world.

It was a theological shift, yes. But it was also something bigger: a new vision of what Islam in America could mean.

Parallel histories

Black Muslim life didn’t develop in a vacuum. While the NOI was rebuilding Islamic institutions in Detroit and Chicago, immigrant Muslim communities were already quietly forming across the country.

Albanian Muslims built a mosque in Maine as early as 1915. Syrian and Lebanese immigrants opened what became known as the Mother Mosque of America in Iowa in 1934. Yemeni laborers formed communities in Detroit and Buffalo in this era, too.

And in Harlem, something quieter had been unfolding for decades. Bengali Muslim sailors (from British colonial India, present day Bangladesh) settled in Harlem in the early 20th century (I was one of the first to interview the researcher for NYT years ago!), marrying into Black and Puerto Rican communities and building shared spiritual spaces. They opened silk and textile shops. They lived in Black neighborhoods, not apart from them. They were Muslim men fasting in Harlem apartments in the 1920s and 30s— decades before Islam was widely associated with immigration. By the 1960s, their children were already part of Black America.

This complicates the story we often tell about the clean separation between “Black Islam” and “immigrant Islam.” For some families, those identities were already intertwined.

But multiracial does not mean equal.

In the early 20th century, some Arab immigrants fought legal battles to be classified as “white” in U.S. courts. That designation provided access to citizenship and protection under segregation laws. Proximity to whiteness created distance from the Black struggle. Black Muslims bore the brunt of state surveillance and public suspicion. They were the visible face of Islam in a racially stratified society.

And yet, by the late 1960s, something new was happening.

Ramadan as Meeting Ground

Organizations like the Muslim Students Association, founded in 1963, began connecting immigrant Muslim students with Black Sunni communities. Urban mosques increasingly hosted multiracial iftars. For the first time at scale, Black American Muslims and immigrant Muslims were breaking fast together.

For decades, two Islamic histories unfolded in parallel — shaped by race in very different ways. And even as Muslims increasingly united through faith, anti-Blackness within many non-Black Muslim communities was real, and is present to this day

. Islam in America was rebuilding inside America’s racial hierarchy.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of Ramadan Is American.

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 years. Through trans-Saharan trade routes, scholarly networks, and Sufi brotherhoods, Islamic education flourished across Senegambia, Futa Toro, and Futa Jallon. Qur’anic schooling and Arabic literacy was common among the educated class.

Historians estimate that up to thirty percent of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslim and some scholars put the figure higher for certain regions and time periods. When they were captured and forced across the Atlantic, they carried more than memory. They carried rituals and discipline. To understand what that means, we have to imagine the conditions.

Workdays in the American South often began at sunrise and extended until dusk—the exact window during which fasting from food and water is required. They labored in rice swamps, indigo and cotton fields under a relentless sun and punishing heat. They would be punished through whipping and other physical brutality for slowing down or taking breaks in the fields and after an entire day in the sun, their evening meals were far from nourishing, often unhealthy scraps.

Under classical Islamic jurisprudence, a person who is coerced, ill, or placed in conditions that threaten survival is not required to fast. Enslaved Muslims who had studied law would have understood they were religiously exempt, which makes the possibility that some fasted anyway all the more striking.

To voluntarily abstain from food and water in a system already organized around deprivation would be a spiritual choice. It was a way of marking time according to a sacred rhythm rather than a plantation bell, a refusal to let the body’s hunger be defined solely by an enslaver’s ration schedule. A defiance that their body and time belonged to God before they belonged to a master.

Slavery was designed to erase history. Enslavers changed names, forbade African languages, imposed Christian instruction, and restricted gatherings of enslaved people. In South Carolina and many other colonies, more than five enslaved people could not gather together, so worshipping as a community would’ve been dangerous. Ramadan and the celebration at the end, Eid ul fitr, would’ve been quiet occasions.

Enslaved Muslim Scholars

Omar Ibn Said was captured in Futa Toro and sold into slavery in North Carolina in 1807. In 1831, he wrote an autobiography in Arabic that, rather than opening with Christian conversion as white patrons may have expected, began with verses from the Qur’an, including Surah al-Mulk. The manuscript — now at the Library of Congress — demonstrates advanced Islamic education sustained across decades of captivity.

Bilali Muhammad, enslaved on Sapelo Island, Georgia, authored a thirteen-page Arabic manuscript from memory outlining Islamic legal principles. The Bilali Document, preserved at the University of Georgia, discusses ritual purification, prayer obligations, and devotional structure. It reads like someone who had studied law, because he had.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, enslaved in Maryland in the 1730s, was the son of a prominent Muslim cleric in Senegambia. He wrote letters in Arabic that reached English officials; his literacy and status eventually helped secure his manumission. Contemporary accounts describe him refusing pork and maintaining ritual observance under enslavement.

These men give us rare documentary windows into Muslim life under slavery.

Muslim women were present in the regions from which many enslaved Africans were taken. Women from Muslim-majority communities participated in Qur’anic education and devotional life. Demographic records confirm they were captured and transported to North America, but their names rarely appear attached to Arabic manuscripts, obscured by the broader archival silencing of women’s experience under slavery. If men were praying in fields and writing legal treatises from memory, it is difficult to imagine that women laboring in kitchens and cabins and raising children under surveillance did not also carry fragments of Islam with them. American religious history is often narrated as though Islam arrived recently, layered onto an otherwise Judeo-Christian foundation.

Ramadan in America did not begin in suburban mosques or citywide iftars. It began in bodies that had every legal reason not to fast and, at least sometimes, chose to fast anyway.

If we are going to talk about Ramadan in America, we have to begin there.

Stay tuned for Part II of Ramadan is America on how Islam shaped early American diplomacy.

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 significance of Ramadan in the United States.

For most Americans, Ramadan feels like a recent arrival. Something that showed up in airports and suburban mosques and corporate diversity calendars. A tradition that gets accommodated. But that framing has always bothered me, because Ramadan did not arrive at JFK. It did not begin in the 21st century. It has been observed on this soil for centuries. It survived enslavement, shaped early American diplomacy, moved through the civil rights movement, endured post-9/11 surveillance, and now lights up American skylines.

From now until Eid-ul-Fitr, I’m spending every week inside a different chapter of that history—the Ramadan fasts kept quietly by enslaved West African Muslims, the 1805 White House dinner rescheduled around a fasting envoy, Islam at the 1893 World’s Fair, and the long road through Black American Islam, civil rights, surveillance, and into the complicated, visible, plural American Muslim present.

Follow me on Instagram and TikTok for visual companions to the newsletter every week.

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 child while undocumented. I am that child.

I write about diaspora communities. I’ve covered immigration for years — spoken to distressed migrants calling from the border, spent hours with refugee families as they shared their most horrifying stories.

But this constant assault on children by the U.S. government feels unbearable.

I commend Lidia, who has been around the clock speaking to the kids at Dilley and following up on their cases and as I write this, is on her way to Mexico to find Juan and his mom.

I can only hope the Mexican government steps in, because for a baby that young, even a common cold can be deadly.

It is a sad day to be American.

There are still hundreds of children stuck at Dilley. Donate to their commissaries so they can access basic essentials. It’s the least we can do.

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 NYPL. “This exhibition became an opportunity to give MENA history a visible voice and presence in New York.”

This effort to centralize and showcase MENA histories also illuminates how these communities navigated the racial hierarchies of their time. Early immigrants quickly learned that race was the master category of belonging in America, shaping who could claim citizenship, own property, or gain social legitimacy.

What It Means to Be “White”

Christian Syrian and Lebanese communities who are among the first immigrants from the MENA region litigated their way into whiteness by showing their ties to the Holy Land at the turn of the twentieth century, when citizenship was limited to free white people and the formerly enslaved.

This is part of the reason why the the U.S. still classifies MENA people as white—a legal designation rarely reflecting lived experience. New York State is finally breaking with that history: state law now requires agencies to track Middle Eastern and North African communities separately from the “White” category, listing Egyptians, Moroccans, Algerians, Palestinians, Iranians, and more.

NYPL’s exhibition offers a window into that complicated history.

The exhibition shows how MENA communities documented themselves when official histories ignored or misrepresented them. The New York Public Library collected newspapers in Arabic and Armenian starting in the 1890s, some of them existing nowhere else in the world. Business directories from 1908 listing every Arab business in New York. Middle Eastern records by major American music company Columbia and Victor in the 1930s because they realized this growing community was craving music from back home.

The Pen League, including Kahlil Gibran, reshaped Arabic literature, tackling immigrant life and serialized in newspapers because American publishers would not. They self-published and built their own platforms—an act of survival and freedom.

Performing Belonging

There’s a section of the exhibition on self-orientalization that I can’t stop thinking about. Hassan Ben Ali, a Moroccan acrobat, literally brought camels to Coney Island in the early 1900s. This was peak American orientalism in popular culture—a legacy of World’s Fairs where performers learned that Americans wanted exoticism, the “East” they’d invented. So early immigrants gave audiences what they expected.

But as the community grew, so did resistance to tropes. In the 80s and 90s, the Iranian playwright Reza Abdoh staged productions in hotel receptions, ballrooms, parking lots, streets—avant-garde theater that put him at the forefront of New York’s experimental scene.

Mutual Aid and Survival Across Generations

The exhibition also traces something quieter—mutual aid.

Early MENA communities built networks of survival. In 1907, the Syrian Ladies Aid Society—Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian women—taught English, helped newcomers find housing, and supported small businesses. Today, Egyptian-American organizer Rana Abdelhamid carries on that legacy in Queens, fighting gentrification, building political power, and advocating for census recognition.

Documenting while fighting back

What the exhibition also reveals is the absence of post 9/11 storytelling.

“These communities were busy fighting back, hiding, surviving. Libraries were probably the last thing on their minds and not institutions they saw as repositories for their archives or organizing efforts,” explained Abid. “That’s something I’m deeply concerned about today. We need to ensure that this history is preserved through materials produced by the community itself, not filtered or narrated by others.”

In the 2001 documentary The Complexity of Living as an Arab in America, filmed just weeks after 9/11, a Palestinian American woman says it plainly: as long as she is Palestinian and American, she will never be safe. Being both means being neither.

Muhammad Judah’s story ends at Ellis Island but his experience is transformed and continues in every citizenship guidebook still being passed around, in every mutual aid network, in every bodega owner, every self-published zine, every artist refusing to explain themselves and every organizer fighting gentrification and census misclassification.