Originally Posted: January 30, 2017

Get to know your Muslim neighbors; what could be more American than that?

I am the son of two caring parents who built their lives in Richardson. If you were to only know my family on paper, my mother, a substitute teacher; my father, an engineer; and my brother, an Eagle Scout, you would find that we are no different than any other American family. The only hang-up in this political environment: I am also the son of two Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants.

The notion that a Muslim or an immigrant can be just as American as anyone else is now under severe attack. This positing is not just symbolic. It helps open the pathway for policies that would strip Muslims of critical rights, including the right to not undergo religious tests to the right to practice freely in religious spaces. We saw the first stages of this painful process play out over the weekend when legal U.S. residents from Muslim-majority countries were denied, before intervention by the courts, from re-entering the country they call home. READ MORE