On 9/11, Saira Hussain was a high school student living in a predominantly white part of the San Francisco Bay Area. On the day after the attacks, her parents sat her down to discuss safety. They said, “Please don’t tell anyone that you’re Muslim.” “Then my dad went out and bought a big American flag,” Hussain tells Teen Vogue.

At 30, Hussain is now an unsung hero for immigrants and the sanctuary city movement. She’s a staff attorney at the Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Asian Law Caucus, a legal and civil rights organization in San Francisco, where she defends immigrants, including many teens and their families, from deportation. “We work at the intersection of criminal justice and immigration,” Hussain says. “Essentially, that’s what our immigration system does. It criminalizes immigrants and then tries to remove them from our country. You really can’t talk about one system without the other.”

As an immigrant Muslim woman of color, Hussain remembers the impact of 9/11 clearly. But she didn’t imagine herself becoming a lawyer and didn’t even know any lawyers until a college internship with a civil rights attorney set her on a path to defending some of America’s most vulnerable communities. “My own experiences, combined with everything happening at the national level, really pushed me to go to law school,” says Hussain. “I graduated in the Obama era. He’s known as the Deporter-in-Chief for a reason.”

Courtesy of Saira Hussain

Trump is casting an even wider net over immigrants than Obama. “He’s talking about all immigrants, and the folks he’s focusing on are people of color,” says Hussain. With not enough Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at its disposal, the Trump administration wants to enlist hundreds of thousands of local law enforcement officials to carry out its anti-immigrant agenda — and have local communities foot the bill. Hussain worked with a coalition of immigrant rights advocates to draft the latest updates to San Francisco’s Sanctuary Ordinance. The city is one of an estimated 600 jurisdictions around the country that limit, to varying degrees, cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE.

“Sanctuary cities started in the 1980s, when President Reagan's administration was denying valid asylum claims from people fleeing civil war in Central America,” says Hussain. “But it’s only recently, since Trump started demonizing sanctuary cities as a way of scapegoating immigrants, that they’ve been part of the collective political consciousness."