Ragini Kaur was twelve years old when her Punjabi Sikh family moved from Thailand to Hayward, just one month before the towers fell.
"I dove right into the post-9/11 America," said Kaur.
Weeks later, a Sikh man in Arizona, Balbir Singh Sodhi, became one of the first people killed in an anti-Muslim hate crime after September 11th. He was targeted for his pagg — the Sikh headwrap — and his beard.
Kaur's family, like many Sikh families across the country, were on edge.
"What's going to happen next — are we gonna be targeted?" said Kaur. "There was definitely a little bit of fear when you're seeing your dad walk out the door, and hopefully he comes back home safely."
Since then, there have been a number of hate-crimes in California against Sikhs: vandalism and shootings at gurdwaras, physical abuse and the recent messaging asking "Mr. Singh" to self deport and to "get off our roads" from the Department of Homeland Security.
All this pushed Kaur to become an activist, educating those around her — neighbors, classmates, local government — about Punjabi Sikh American identity.
“Locally, the uncles and aunties I knew started participating in fourth of July parades — donning red, white, and blue, but also showing a little bit of our culture,” said Kaur. “We're playing ‘This Land Is My Land,’ but on Sitar and Tabla.”
Twenty-five years later, Kaur is now the Regional Director for the Jakara Movement, an organization which provides services for Sikh Californians. Kaur, along with other Bay Area organizers say the fear that defined those first weeks after 9/11 never really went away — it just took on new forms.
As Sikh, Muslim, and South Asian communities mark the anniversary this month, longtime organizers with groups like the Jakara Movement and the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action are drawing a throughline from the surveillance and detention programs of the early 2000s to the ICE raids and deportations they're fighting today.
A different community, a familiar fear
Sikhs weren't the only ones vulnerable. Sabiha Basrai, who is Gujarati and Muslim, was 19 years old and starting her second year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo when the attacks happened.
"My apartment was vandalized, I received threats, and there were racist flyers put up around campus by the Cal Poly Republican Club," said Basrai. "It just really changed my sense of self. I had to claim my Muslim identity as a political act, when before it had been a very personal part of my life."
Post 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, was created, and the Patriot Act was introduced to "intercept and obstruct terrorism."
A separate federal program, INS Special Registration, required men from mostly South Asian and Arab countries to check in with the government. An estimated 1,100 people, mostly Muslim and Arab, were detained across the country.
"There were local efforts in San Francisco to make sure that there was language-accessible know-your-rights information, and legal services available, for folks who were being called up to register," Basrai said.
Basrai said she knew she had to get involved. She became a member of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, or ASATA, and sees its work as part of a much older lineage of South Asian organizing in the Bay Area. She traces the efforts back to the Ghadar Party, an anti-colonial movement founded in San Francisco in 1913 to fight British rule in India. In 1917, the U.S. Justice Department indicted dozens of Ghadar Party members for conspiring against the British government — an early example, Basrai says, of the U.S. treating South Asian immigrant activists as security threats. She says that moment was just the beginning.
"That really was a new era on the infringement of privacy," Basrai said. "We knew back then that this was just testing ground — that this was something that would eventually be applied to everybody and we are seeing that come to fruition now."
In the years since, ASATA members say they've built lasting relationships with Arab and Muslim organizations, including the Arab Resource and Organizing Center. Those coalitions helped block an annual police militarization expo hosted in Oakland, scale back Oakland's Domain Awareness Center surveillance system, end the Oakland Police Department's partnership with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force and organize protests outside San Francisco's airport during the 2017 Muslim travel ban.
In the East Bay, Kaur says Jakara Movement and her community met the moment by building awareness around Sikh culture and providing immigration-related services.
"The generation that grew up in the 9/11 era, we have become lawyers, journalists, filmmakers, educators," she said. "This generation is ensuring that the next generation is not going through the same challenges that we did."
Both Kaur and Basrai say the fear of that era didn't disappear — and now it's manifesting in ICE activity in Dublin and Gilroy, both regions with large populations of South Asian immigrants.
This weekend, to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, ASATA, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, the Center for Political Education, and Jakara Movement are holding a community discussion on their shared history of organizing and the policies that led to the creation of ICE.
