September 29, 2015

Like many other Americans, Zahra Billoo has a strong memory of 9/11 and its impact on her country. But what the California native remembers most clearly are the ensuing anxious calls from her father.
“I have memories of being awoken by frantic calls from my dad, worried that I would go outside wearing the hijab and be attacked,” she says.
From there, she also remembers the amping up of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Islamophobia that began to brew.
“Perhaps most vivid in my memory is seeing dozens, sometimes hundreds of people lined up in front of government buildings,” she says, referring to the men adhering to the “special registration” calls between 2002 and 2011.
She was involved as a volunteer in a human rights observer program through the Muslim Public Affairs Council at the time, taking note of the names and contact information of the men queueing up, so that if they didn’t come out, there would be a sense of who the missing people were.
“People who looked like me were going into government buildings and potentially not coming out,” she says, referring to deportations.
These events led her to become a civil rights lawyer, with the training and ability to be outspoken on issues she says have been worsening in the last decade and a half.
Today, at just 31, she is the executive director of the San Francisco chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), where her hands are full tackling issues like employment discrimination (“are people free to practice their faith at work without fearing losing their job?”), and racial profiling cases.
“The FBI routinely visits Muslim families in their homes and questions them without grounds,” she says. “Our responsibility is that ordinary Americans know what their rights are, and know what they should and shouldn’t do when these visits occur.”
Continue reading: The Guardian