Al-Agha is a group organizer with Partnership for the Development of New Individuals and lives in Escondido. Erikat is a Palestinine-American who grew up in San Diego. She is the coverage affiliate for the Partnership for the Development of New Individuals.
Newly arrived refugee communities face extreme harassment and discrimination in the US, and justice will not be being introduced forth. Just lately, the Partnership for the Development of New Individuals (PANA), a nonprofit group that fights to advance the total financial, social and civic inclusion of refugees, was contacted by a Syrian Muslim mom of 5 kids who reported that she was sitting in a park along with her household when a girl in her 20s approached her 10-year-old daughter and requested her, “Are you Muslim or are you Mexican?” The daughter replied by saying Muslim, and was immediately struck aggressively on her again by the girl. The attacker started utilizing slurs corresponding to “Return to your nation.”
The mom, who wears the hijab, a Muslim head masking, confronted her daughter’s attacker, and encountered much more hostility when the attacker threatened to kill her daughter. Fearing for her household’s security, she known as 911. The dispatcher instructed her to take an image of the attacker earlier than she fled. When the mom went to take action, she was struck on her head, neck and eye, and her telephone smashed on the bottom. The household filed a police report, however the mom believes the police didn’t take her case severely sufficient. The attacker fled earlier than the police got here and has but to be discovered and charged.
The younger daughter now suffers from trauma and is afraid to go outdoors and socialize for worry that she could also be attacked due to her non secular background. She additionally fears for her relations who’re visibly Muslim. Her mom stated her daughter hasn’t been the identical for the reason that incident and has been experiencing vital nervousness. The household, which escaped struggle in Syria, has been in the US for 5 years and studies feeling persistently focused for its non secular background. The mom says the household fled the oppression of the Assad regime solely to face a unique kind of oppression right here. Now, the household distrusts the system and feels hopeless about getting justice for what occurred.
Findings from a 2017 Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Muslims discovered that 48 p.c reported that they had skilled discrimination prior to now 12 months, together with being “handled with suspicion,” “singled out” by regulation enforcement, and “bodily damage and attacked.” Information from PANA’s 2021 San Diego Refugee Expertise report discovered that refugees expertise excessive ranges of worry, really feel unwelcome and fear about anti-immigrant insurance policies. Sixty-five p.c of African respondents felt nervous about “being focused by a hate crime,” “talking up in public” or “feeling welcome in public areas.”
In 2015, the Division of Justice reported it had investigated greater than 800 hate crime incidents since 9/11 towards Arab Individuals, Muslims, Sikhs, South Asian American and different folks perceived to be of Center Jap origin. Working with these communities, we’ve repeatedly heard that refugees face obstacles in relation to reporting, and that these obstacles result in an undercount. An absence of English-language abilities, a distrust of presidency, additional discrimination and microaggressions, and a scarcity of cultural understanding of the policing system within the U.S make refugees much less prone to report hate crimes of any nature. Concurrently, those that do report one thing really feel it’s fruitless as a result of nothing comes out of the reporting course of aside from compounded trauma, as seen on this latest case.
This month we commemorate the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 in addition to the struggle on terror that institutionalized and funded billions of {dollars} in direction of the surveillance of Black, Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities. We should tackle not solely the hate crimes that our communities have endured, but in addition the dragnet narratives and insurance policies which have focused and criminalized our communities, and legitimized the overly broad suspicion of them. It’s due to all of those causes that refugees don’t really feel protected in San Diego.
Such insurance policies embrace the USA Patriot Act that remodeled surveillance legal guidelines to make it easier for presidency to spy on its residents, the Joint Terrorism Activity Forces which have native regulation enforcement working intently with the FBI and Countering Violent Extremism applications that basically flip service organizations and educators into informants.
At a time when the refugee disaster like Afghanistan causes us to re-evaluate our humanity, we should welcome traumatized communities and help them to rebuild their lives, reasonably than additional traumatize them, in the US.
