She’s never felt more American than during Trump’s rise, a Muslim teen says

More than ever in her life, people smiled at her like they were making an extra effort to be kinder, to be warmer, to let her know they supported her

From left, Malak El-Amri, her brother, Mohamed, and father, Abubaker Amri (Malak El-Amri)

On the evening of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Malak El-Amri, a student at the University of Kentucky, received a text from her father, Abubaker, in Cincinatti. A Muslim immigrant from Libya, Mr Amri had returned home from work to find a handwritten card in the mailbox. It would still be another week before the new president would announce his ban on migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Amri’s. But many Muslim families were already unnerved by the rise of Islamophobia during the campaign and feared what was to come.

For 19-year-old Malak, the note confirmed what she’d felt throughout the campaign. Growing up in post-9/11 Lexington, Kentucky, she often felt like an outsider. She wears a hijab and children taunted her, calling her “Osama bin Laden’s daughter.”

In the past year, with the treatment of Muslims having been such a flashpoint in the presidential campaign, she has never felt more accepted, she says. More than ever in her life, people smiled at her like they were making an extra effort to be kinder, to be warmer, to let her know they supported her.

“I’ve never felt more welcome or more American than during Trump’s rise,” she says. “It was really nice to get this letter and know people are out there and want us to stay here. It’s just as much our America as it is theirs.”

Her father came to the US as a student in 1978. Yet ever since Trump’s election, the 65-year-old has felt unsettled about the country he’s lived in for four decades, where he has raised a family and started his own small business. Mr Amri doesn’t know the neighbours who left the note very well. They do wave and offer a warm hello when they bump into him. But their note felt to him like “when you're sleeping and someone wakes you up from the dream,” he says. The people around him showed they recognised the changes coming and they cared.

Thousands of protesters against Trump’s travel ban have since poured into airport terminals, city streets and in front of the White House, to show that they care too. Their voices, it seems, are louder than those who hate.

“I see them at the airports now, it’s not just my neighbours, it’s a lot of neighbours,” says Amri. “It tells me that people are not passive. They see it not as a plight for Muslims, but a plight for the country itself.”

Trump’s ban may have a direct impact on Amri’s family. One of his daughters was born in Libya and is now studying abroad. She’s an American citizen but he’s still worried she’ll be detained at the airport when she returns home this summer. When Amri sent the text of the card to his other children, his son responded and asked his father if he was afraid of Trump.

“No,” Amri wrote back. “Because this [letter] proves there are good people all around us.”

The note also found its way to Amri’s niece, Hend Amry, a well-known Muslim voice on Twitter. She shared it with her 129,000 followers. It was retweeted and liked more than half a million times. Then in a subsequent tweet, she wrote: “This is the America that took us in as political refugees, the America that gave us a new home & the America that keeps my hope alive today.”

“For these neighbours to leave this at his door, I personally felt very grateful," Amry said later. “They didn’t have to do it, not only to extend their support, but their material support. [I tweeted it] to show people this is the America I know. These are the people I grew up with. The good people outweigh the number of bad people for sure.”

© Washington Post