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.

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

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

Bad Bunny does not sidestep that reality. He starts his acceptance speech at the Grammys as the first Spanish-language artist to win Album of the Year with “ICE out.”

He dedicates the moment to immigrants facing detention and deportation. “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens,” he tells the audience. “We are humans and we are Americans.” It is not a vague appeal to unity—it is a direct refusal to allow immigrant communities to be dehumanized on one of the most visible stages in American culture.

The Super Bowl LX halftime stage—the most-watched television event in the United States— will see its first primarily Spanish-speaking solo performer to do so. What looks like mainstream embrace is also a political punctuation mark—a Latinx artist claiming space on a stage long dominated by Anglo pop, amid renewed panic over language, immigration, and belonging.

In 1988, when N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton, the FBI sent the group a warning letter. What was dismissed as “gangsta rap” was, in hindsight, reportage—an unfiltered account of police violence years before “police brutality” entered mainstream discourse. In 2015, Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” moved from headphones into the streets, becoming a chant during Black Lives Matter protests.

Bad Bunny belongs to this lineage of music. His latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, doesn’t just entertain—it insists on the legitimacy of voices long treated as disposable, on highlighting the effects of gentrification and colonization on Puerto Rico.

That insistence has drawn predictable backlash. Right-wing politicians have renewed calls to make English the official language of the United States—a symbolic move less about unity than about policing belonging.

English may be dominant, but it has never been alone. Nearly one in five Americans speak a language other than English at home, with Spanish leading by a wide margin. The U.S. is, in fact, the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world after Mexico—yet speaking Spanish is still treated as evidence of foreignness. Spanish predates English in much of what is now the United States—spreading across Florida, the Southwest, and California long before Jamestown. English rose not because it arrived first, but because it arrived with power. Empire, war, and policy did the work.

Puerto Ricans sit at the center of this contradiction. Granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, they never crossed an international border to migrate. Yet their movement to the mainland—especially to New York—has long been framed as a problem rather than a consequence of colonial rule.

“I think the fact that he sings in Spanish also has to do with the larger context of Puerto Rican history. Some of the songs in his latest album dwell on the history of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colony, and he’s doing us a service because that history has been rendered invisible in the United States,” says Harvard scholar Alejandro L. Madrid, Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music in an interview. “There are still lots of people in this country that don’t know that Puerto Rico is part of the United States and that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens even though they speak Spanish.”

Bad Bunny’s latest album is his most Puerto Rican yet—rooted in the island’s rhythms, political memory, and unresolved relationship to the United States. It grapples with colonial extraction, debt, disaster, and the quiet forces that push people to leave home. As Yale professor Albert Sergio Laguna has noted, this album doubles down on Puerto Rican musical traditions rather than sanding them down.

American culture has always known how to turn suffering into spectacle—to cheer diversity on screen while criminalizing it on the street. Bad Bunny’s presence does not resolve that tension—it exposes it.

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

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

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

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

Liam’s detention has ignited public outrage, not because it’s unique, but because it has become a stark, human symbol of a detention system roiling back to life.

Liam and his family are from Ecuador and came to the United States in 2024 seeking asylum. School officials in Columbia Heights, Minnesota say that on January 20, federal immigration agents detained Liam and his father, Adrián Conejo Arias, outside their home after school, allegedly directing the boy to knock on the front door— a tactic described by local officials as “essentially using a 5‑year‑old as bait” to draw others out.

His mother, who is four months pregnant and also at the home that day, did not open the door—fearful of being detained herself—and has remained behind, separated from her husband and young son.

Since their arrest, a federal judge has temporarily barred ICE from removing or transferring Liam and his father while litigation proceeds, reigniting questions about the legality and humanity of detaining children with their families.

A Child Asking for His Backpack

At the press conference, Congressman Castro recounted that Liam kept asking for his backpack and his baseball cap—small childhood details that underscore how abruptly his life was upended. Castro also shared that Liam is depressed, refuses food, and sleeps a lot.

How Detention Is Funded and Structured

Family detention centers like Dilley are funded through federal ICE contracts, paid for by taxpayer dollars via the Department of Homeland Security. The bulk of ICE detention beds are operated by private prison companies such as CoreCivic and The GEO Group, which collectively receive hundreds of millions of dollars annually from those contracts. Because these companies are publicly traded, institutional investors — including large asset managers like BlackRock — hold significant shares in them, meaning the profits of detention flow into broader financial markets even as children are confined miles from home. This financial ecosystem helps explain why detention capacity can expand even when evidence shows it is harmful and counterproductive.

“Imagine Being a Child and Waking Up in Detention”

Representative Jasmine Crockett spoke plainly about what she witnessed at the Dilley facility.

“Imagine you’re a free‑willed kid,” she says about Liam, “and one day you’re put on a plane. You have one pair of pants and one shirt. Your father washes your clothes overnight. You don’t understand why.”

She described children who had stopped eating and a 16‑year‑old caring for four younger siblings after months in custody—far longer than the 20‑day benchmark that courts have said is the maximum reasonable period for holding children in immigration detention.

“What will it take for this country to have a wake‑up call?” she asked.

A Broader Pattern of Enforcement

Liam’s detention is not an isolated occurrence. After family detention centers were largely closed under earlier policies, the Trump administration’s enforcement build‑up in 2025 reopened facilities like Dilley and intensified sweeps across the country. In cities like Minneapolis and San Antonio, ICE operations have surged, resulting in thousands of arrests and growing community fear.

At the end of June 2025, roughly 58,000 people were in ICE custody, a 51 percent increase from the prior year, and about 90 percent were held in facilities managed by for‑profit firms.

Family detention, which is widely criticized by pediatricians, psychologists, and human rights advocates for its damaging effects on children’s mental health and development, has quietly re‑entered the enforcement toolkit. Rather than being a short‑term holding pattern, it has become a prolonged reality for many families caught in the immigration system.

Liam Ramos is just five years old and yet Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents used him as bait.

The preschooler had just arrived home with his father on a Tuesday afternoon in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. As they pulled into their driveway, ICE agents approached. According to school officials, officers had the child knock on the family’s door and ask to be let in—a tactic to see if anyone else was home. Then they detained both father and son.

“Why detain a 5-year-old?” Superintendent Zena Stenvik told CBS News. “You can’t tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”

Liam’s family was following U.S. legal parameters with an active asylum case and no deportation order. That didn’t matter. He and his father were taken to a detention center in Texas, where they remain today.

A Pattern of Terror

In the months I’ve been reporting on immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, the nature of the crisis has fundamentally shifted. What began as children fearing what might happen has escalated into children witnessing their parents snatched off the streets in front of them, being left home alone when caregivers are arrested, and experiencing detention conditions that advocates describe as deliberately cruel.

The Columbia Heights Public School District has become an unlikely frontline. Four of their students have been taken by ICE in recent weeks. A 17-year-old boy was pulled from his car on his way to school. A 10-year-old fourth grader called her father while being detained to tell him ICE agents were bringing her to school—by the time he arrived, both his daughter and wife had been taken to Texas.

Now ICE agents regularly station themselves near the schools, keeping children, parents, and staff in a constant state of fear. Teachers have been forced to explain to elementary school students what ICE is and what might happen if the agents come.

“We are asking to please reach out to your congressional representative to ask for an immediate and peaceful resolution to this occupation,” Stenvik said. “Please help us and other schools to again be a safe place where all belong and all succeed.”

Federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley shows that more than 2,600 immigrant children across the country were arrested in 2025. Some are as young as four years old, here on asylum with their parents. Others are U.S. citizens, racially profiled and detained without cause.

The Science of Harm

When children are separated from their parents during immigration enforcement, the psychological damage is immediate and measurable. Adverse childhood experiences—or ACEs—are traumatic events linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance abuse later in life, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The toxic stress from these experiences can fundamentally alter brain development.

Children of immigrants already show higher levels of anxiety and ACEs compared to children in households where immigration isn’t a constant fear. As I previously reported for Port of Entry, research published in the European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry journal examined 425 children in detention and found those separated from their mothers showed almost double the rate of emotional problems. Nearly half of separated children struggled emotionally. About a third showed serious signs of distress—withdrawal, anxiety, emotional volatility.

“This isn’t just the stress of migration itself,” the researchers noted. “The trauma of detention, separation, and uncertainty piles on top of whatever a child has already lived through—making everything worse.”

Becky Wolozin, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, told PBS Newshour that conditions inside family detention centers that read like something from another era. Children aren’t getting child-friendly food. Vegetables arrive moldy or infested with worms. One mother told Wolozin she had to suck the sauce off each piece of pasta to get her toddler to eat something plain, since the only other options were Teddy Grahams and juice.

The facilities violate the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 court settlement requiring safe and sanitary conditions for detained children. But Wolozin argues even compliance wouldn’t be enough.

“In 1997, the standards were what the consensus was around child welfare at that time,” she said. “Now we understand and know so much more. We know that the detention of children of any kind is really harmful.”

Deterioration in Real Time

As children spend weeks or months in detention, Wolozin has watched them deteriorate. A previously happy toddler began hitting his mother and himself in the face, so distraught over the conditions. Well-adjusted children devolve into constant sadness, nightmares, crying every night.

“One teenage boy described to me—I mean, a big kid, he was maybe 16 or 17—that he cries every night when he goes to sleep in the detention center where he’s held with his father,” Wolozin said.

Medical neglect compounds the psychological harm. Regular childhood illnesses become dangerous. One child’s earache turned into such a severe infection that she experienced hearing loss after going untreated for an extended period. When she finally received care, the antibiotics were so strong they caused significant distress.

Water containers in the facilities show visible mold and algae. Lights stay on all night, preventing sleep. Constant interruptions make rest impossible. Children have no access to school—ICE admitted as much in recent court filings. The boredom and lack of stimulation make it even harder for children to cope.

“Many of these families were arrested while complying with various different forms of immigration requirements,” Wolozin said. “I think that makes it very clear that the goal is cruelty and the goal is to make people who came to the United States often seeking safety and security to flee the United States for the countries where they felt so endangered that they had to leave.”

A Public Health Crisis

Immigration enforcement, advocates argue, isn’t just a legal process—it’s a public health crisis for children. The impacts extend beyond those directly detained. Children whose parents are arrested experience secondhand trauma. According to research compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, family separation through detention and deportation affects household finances, health outcomes, and overall well-being for years.

The effects ripple through entire communities. Students are afraid to come to school. Parents are afraid to drop them off. Teachers struggle to focus on education while helping students process trauma and fear.

Back in Texas, Liam Ramos remains in detention with his father. His school district has hired an immigration lawyer to try to bring him home. His classmates wonder when—or if—he’ll return to preschool.

If you have information about children affected by immigration enforcement, please reach out to me at jennifer@portofentrymedia.com or on signal.

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

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

On a cold January afternoon in Minneapolis, Renee Good—a white 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen—was sitting in her SUV when federal immigration agents surrounded her. An ICE agent circled the vehicle on foot. Others pulled at the door handle. When Good began to drive away, the agent fired three shots, killing her in public view.

For Somali Americans, this moment feels achingly familiar. Many fled a country where armed men operated without accountability—where militias ruled neighborhoods, where a wrong encounter could make you disappear. Now, they are watching armored federal vehicles roll through the streets of the place they were told would keep them safe.

They were not economic migrants chasing opportunity. They were refugees fleeing for their lives.

In Minnesota, they rebuilt. Somali families opened restaurants and grocery stores, established mosques, and worked as caregivers and essential workers. Their children attend public schools, learned English, and grew up American. Today, Somali is the second most common non-English language spoken in Minnesota students’ homes after Spanish. The community eventually elected Ilhan Omar to Congress.

This community is now facing one of the largest immigration enforcement operations in U.S. history.

The Department of Homeland Security deployed 2,000 federal agents across the Minneapolis–St. Paul area under what it called Operation Metro Surge. The stated justification was alleged fraud involving a few Somali residents, amplified by right-wing media coverage.

The Trump administration also terminated Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals, ordering them to leave the country by March 17. CBS News reports that DHS officials said roughly 2,500 people would be affected but a 2023 Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota fact sheet put the number of Somali TPS holders in the state closer to 430.

“This unjustifiable policy targeting Somali TPS holders is the administration’s latest bigoted attack on the Somali community,” Council of American Islamic Relations and CAIR–Minnesota said in a statement. “The Somali TPS program affects fewer than a thousand people, yet its termination carries enormous consequences for families who have lived and worked lawfully in this country for decades.”

The U.S. State Department continues to designate Somalia as a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” country—the highest danger classification. Under federal law, TPS can only be terminated if the conditions that justified protection have resolved. The government’s own warnings make clear they have not.

For Somali families, the sight of armed agents flooding their neighborhoods triggers a specific historical trauma. They fled a country where anyone with a gun could make you disappear. Now they are watching federal agents do the same, backed by a president who publicly called them “garbage.”

The fear is visible. Somali Uber and Lyft drivers have stopped working. Mosques report emptier Friday prayers. Parents keep children home. Community organizations and churches are raising money to deliver groceries to families who no longer feel safe leaving their homes. Mutual aid funds are covering rent for families whose breadwinners have been detained or disappeared into the system. Some are paying for hotel rooms after windows were smashed during raids.

Renee Good’s death became the flashpoint not because she was the intended target, but because her killing revealed the cost of a system built to intimidate. When rhetoric strips people of their humanity and policy turns neighborhoods into occupied zones, violence becomes inevitable.

Minnesota’s Somali community survived civil war, famine, refugee camps, and the long journey to a country that promised safety. Now they are being asked to survive America—quietly, indoors, under watch.

They respond the way they always have—with fear, resilience, and tea poured for strangers standing in the cold.

If you want to donate or get involved in Minnesora, check out this list of vetted resources.

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

Thousands of New Yorkers stood in line for the inauguration block party. I was lucky enough to be invited to the ceremony. As I entered, an iconic 90s Bollywood track, Chaiya Chaiya, blasted through the speakers, and I cheesed hard. Our first South Asian mayor greeting us in the language of our joy, of our diaspora, felt like a fever dream. And then Sean Paul came on— and who could stop me from being even more cringe with my millennial stank face. Because if there is a soundtrack to being a millennial New Yorker from the boroughs, it’s a combination of Bollywood and dancehall, between Queens and Kingston, between the homes we came from and the ones we built here.

I scanned the crowd and saw faces that built this moment. Activists. Elected officials. Journalists. Organizers. Friends. People I reported on early in my career—the first Bangladeshi Muslim woman City Council member from Brooklyn, Shahana Hanif. Naureen Akhter, who once served as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district leader. Activists from organizations that helped Zohran understand the immigrant communities of this city (DRUM, CAAAV, and Chhaya). People who, for decades, have held neighborhoods together, advocated for families, demanded dignity, and helped shape the city we live in. So many of them immigrants, so many of them Muslim and South Asian. We aren’t only visible—we are centered. Not as a threat. Not as a statistic. But as changemakers of this momentous city our parents survived so we could thrive.

And then Zohran said this at his inauguration, and I immediately texted my sister because he had described our childhood:

“Where else could a Muslim kid like me grow up eating bagels and lox on a Sunday?

Where else indeed.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams was sworn in to office for the third time, and yet he looked renewed. He said, he could now move forward and not just focus on pushing back.

When he spoke, he broke down in tears.

“Little Black boy, you are worth it, and you always were. Without any titles, you were enough. You deserve love. You deserve protection. And I am honored to help create a city worthy of you.”

For a city that prides itself on toughness, tenderness like this felt revolutionary.

Amadou Ly, who swore Jumaane in, was once a Senegalese kid in New York facing deportation even as his high school robotics team beat elite private schools. His brilliance couldn’t cross borders. His body could barely stay in the country. And now here he was, helping swear in the leadership of the greatest city in the world.

Zohran is not the first Muslim mayor in our region. The state of New Jersey has had at least ten. But New York—the city of immigrants, of myth, of grit and music and language and impossible dreams—has never reflected itself accurately in power. Until now. It especially matters in 2025, when immigrants once again feel under siege.

This year, New York chose something radical: it chose unity without erasure. It chose a story that belongs to all of us.

And maybe that’s why this moment feels personal. Last year, I left my marriage with a five-year-old and a two-year-old. I moved back in with my parents—yes, right in Zohran’s former Assembly district. I faced grief, fear, and exhaustion I never imagined. But I also chose myself. I chose my children. I chose to continue pursuing the career that has always felt like my calling—storytelling and journalism with kamona—the stubborn, relentless desire to live fully, as we say in Bangla.

And that brings me back to why this newsletter exists. Why I called it Port of Entry. Because all of us, whether immigrant, child of immigrants, refugee, or simply someone who has crossed invisible borders of identity, class, faith, love, memory—we all have an entry point into who we are.

I want to know what your PORT OF ENTRY is.

What histories did your family leave behind?
What new futures are you building?

What city, moment, loss, joy, migration, revolution, heartbreak, or stubborn hope brought you into the life you have now?

Hit reply and tell me.

Here’s to crossing into something braver. Here’s to belonging. Here’s to what we build next.

With love and solidarity,
Jennifer