Jai Shankar, a longtime DC resident, is facing deportation for the United States after reporting a crime to local police. Below is an action alert from DC Tenants’ Advocacy Coalition. Please take a few moments to sign the petition and call ICE to prevent Jai’s deportation. Imagine calling the police to report a crime and finding yourself instead handcuffed and detained. This is what happened to long-time DC resident Jai Shankar after he called the DC police to report his stolen camera. Jai recently testified at a DC hearing as to why we need a bright line between...

The following is a guest post by Prerna Lal, co-founder of Dreamactivist.org. Meet Hadi Syed Zaidi. He’s an upstanding 25-year-old American of Pakistani descent. His grandmother is a U.S. citizen and his parents emigrated from Pakistan when Hadi was merely 4 years old. For the last three weeks, Hadi has been locked up in a detention center in California awaiting deportation from the only country he calls home. His crime? None. Hadi doesn’t even have a speeding ticket. Shortly after 9-11, the Department of Homeland Security engaged in one of the most egregious cases of...

As a Muslim, over the past few weeks, I have been repeatedly approached about the Lowe’s TLC controversy. I’ve signed the petitions and voiced my concern, but when sitting back and taking stock of the situation, a greater fear pervades my mind. As a society, we have become indifferent on the borders of apathy. Controversy surrounding Islam has been the norm for the past 10 years. This is just another drop in the bucket of an ever increasing well of anti-Muslim sentiment. While Lowe’s has the right to spend its advertising money how it sees fit, the act of pulling ads...

The Bay Area has seen two attacks on South Asian residents in just the past three weeks. On November 21st, a 32 year old Indian man was assaulted outside a Lucky store in San Jose. The group of assailants punched him, spat on him and called him a terrorist. No suspects have been apprehended, leaving the victim to deal with the cost of a broken jaw and six missing teeth. And on the evening of December 4th, a Sikh man in his mid-50s was stabbed in the torso as he waited for a flight at Fresno Yosemite International Airport. The suspect was arrested as he ran from the airport,...

The following is a letter from SAALT Executive Director Deepa Iyer. Dear Friend, Today, The New York Times’ Campaign Stops section carried SAALT’s opinion piece about xenophobia and racism in our political discourse. As the presidential election approaches, we must raise our voices against political scapegoating of South Asians, Muslims, and Arab Americans. At a time when our communities are still grappling with post-9/11 backlash, and hate crimes against Muslims have staggeringly increased, such remarks foster a climate that can be hostile for many in the community. Read...

The FBI recently released its annual Hate Crime Statistics report. It showed a 50% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes over 2009 levels, and a spike of 11% in anti-Latino hate crimes. This isn’t a coincidence. These numbers follow a period of marked xenophobia in politics, from the enactment of Arizona’s draconian new immigration law to anti-mosque activity nationwide. These numbers may not even tell the whole story. Undocumented populations - including South Asians - are susceptible to such violence, but are loath to report incidents for fear of deportation and...

This is how Tennessee State Representative Rick Womick celebrates Veterans Day: Rick Womick: Personally, I don’t trust one Muslim in our military because they’re commanded to lie to us through the term called Taqiyya. And if they truly are a devout Muslim, and follow the Quran and the Sunnah, then I feel threatened because they’re commanded to kill me. Eli Clifton of Think Progress: You believe they should be forced out? Womick: Absolutely, yeah. Womick has since doubled down by going on the radio to say that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military...

We Belong Together, an initiative of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, and others, seeks to bring attention to the ways in which unjust immigration laws affect women, children and families. Young people and children all over the country are writing letters to express A Wish for the Holidays: that all families be able to stay together. Teachers and youth facilitators can have their students be part of this national letter-writing campaign to raise the voices of children and youth with one unified wish: an end to...

When I was fifteen, I remember seeing this image plastered across news outlets: The boy, then six years old, is Elian Gonzalez. Caught up in a family dispute between relatives in Miami, Florida and his father in Cuba, he was taken away by the U.S. Border Patrol pursuant to a federal magistrate’s order. Elian reunited with his father and returned to Cuba shortly thereafter. This was, of course, an extreme case. The United States government is no longer in the business of forcibly interfering with families, right? Wrong. The Applied Research Center (ARC) has just released a...

Earlier this week, Kentucky State Senator and gubernatorial candidate David Williams recently made disparaging comments about Hinduism while on the campaign trail. In addition to SAALT’s letter to David Williams, Executive Director Deepa Iyer has written an op-ed responding to Williams’ comments: Kentucky candidate for governor should apologize for anti-Hindu remarks By Deepa Iyer As someone who grew up in the Indian and Hindu community in Kentucky, I was shocked by the bigoted remarks that Kentucky’s challenger for governor recently made. David Williams, who...