#foreign born

“When he won, I was not really surprised. As a Muslim woman who came to the USA after 9/11, unfortunately I have already been made aware and subjected to a certain vision of what being a Muslim is, and that has not changed in anybody’s eyes. With the election and the campaign, the rhetoric become more vocal, and people felt empowered to no longer be civil or courteous and to just say what they feel. So as a country, we sat there, and people were not moved enough to stop it.” —Seydi Sarr, 42, an immigrant rights advocate from Senegal who has been living in the US since 2003, in an interview with Vox’s Alexia Fernández Campbell about what it’s like to be foreign-born right now in Trump’s America.

“My parents always said this was such a racist country and I never saw it. And I think I was looking at it through a completely different filter. In my mind, I thought everyone was great and there is not a bad person here. So I gave people the benefit of the doubt.

But then during the campaign, I started to see a completely different side. I started seeing when I was scrolling through Facebook and looking at all the comments people were making and I thought, wow, we really do live in a country where people do not like undocumented immigrants. It was really hard for me to understand why they don’t. I have friends who are really, really shocked that I’m undocumented. I’m not out there advertising it, but it’s important for people to know who we are,” said Aurea Galvan, 25, an undocumented college student originally from Guanajuato, Mexico in an interview with Vox’s Alexia Fernández Campbell about what it’s like to be foreign-born right now in Trump’s America.