On election night, as it became clear Donald Trump would win the presidency, Noman Munif of Lafayette saw an unfamiliar dread in his 8-year-old son’s eyes. The Muslim American tech executive asked his son, who seemed anxious and restless, what was wrong.

“Dad,” he said quietly, “they’re going to kill us.”

The words crushed Munif, 39, and left him stunned. He spent the next morning home from work, comforting his son, promising he would protect him, and holding him in bed before sending him to school. “Dad will make sure you’re OK,” Munif said.

But beneath his assurances, Munif was worried, too: “The climate doesn’t seem as peaceful as what you’d want for them — it is not the America I grew up in,” he said. “As a parent, you’re concerned with the rhetoric that’s been put out there.”

Fear and uncertainty is reverberating in minority communities across the Bay Area and the country as people come to grips with how a Donald Trump presidency could change their lives. Many hope campaign rhetoric that targeted these communities and electrified white nationalists was a tool Trump used to get elected that would not translate into policy.

But time and again they return to comments the president-elect made during the campaign: a proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country; a call for police to use “stop-and-frisk” tactics that in the past have singled out African Americans; a promise to deport millions of people who are living in the U.S. without documentation.

At the same time, they worry they may face increased discrimination and violence due to what they see as the normalization of bigoted comments and actions.

“We are fearful of people who are fearful of us,” said Moina Shaiq, a Fremont resident who held “Meet a Muslim” events in the Bay Area this year in an effort to counter growing Islamophobia. “When we are wearing the hijab, they can see us as Muslim women. We do not know what to expect. Now it is OK to do things and say things which were not OK before. That’s big.”

Shaiq thought back to one moment in particular. In late October, while in Arizona for a “Meet a Muslim” event, an elderly man told the organizers that if Shaiq offended him he would slash her throat. He told them he had a knife.

“In my 38 years here, I’ve never heard something so threatening, so vocal — there is no fear. He just said it out loud,” Shaiq said. “This is the kind of stuff that Muslims in particular are encountering today that they never encountered before.”

In the days after the election, a number of hostile incidents toward minorities have been reported across the country, including at colleges and high schools. California Attorney General and Sen.-elect Kamala Harris issued a bulletin to police agencies outlining hate-crime laws, a response to “an uptick in threats of hate crimes and other violent extremism.”

According to Harris’ office, reports of hate crimes have fallen in the past decade, but jumped more than 10 percent from 2014 to 2015, mostly due to a rise in incidents fueled by religious bias.

Concerns over civil rights were the chief driver of mass protests that erupted across the country — including at Oakland Technical High School, where students walked out the day after the election. To 15-year-old sophomore Meka Jannali, the decision to take to the streets was empowering.

She and her two younger siblings cried when it became clear a winning margin of Americans had backed Trump. “It’s very disappointing that America could be that racist,” said Jannali, who is black. “It’s shocking to everyone.”

The schools superintendent in Alameda, Sean McPhetridge, was compelled to write a letter to families of students assuring that “we believe as a community and as a school district that everyone belongs here.”

Fear of what is to come extends across communities that have felt attacked by the president-elect. Exit polls by Edison Research for media clients showed the vote divided along racial lines, with 8 percent of blacks and 29 percent of Latinos voting for Trump. Polling done by other groups found the Latino community voted for Trump at a lower rate.

In a guest column in the Washington Post titled “What it means to be black during a Trump administration,” NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar explained what he saw as the consequences of the election.

“For African Americans,” he wrote, “America just got a little more threatening, a little more claustrophobic, a lot less hopeful.”

César Blanco, the interim director of Latino Victory, an organization focused on building political power in the Latino community, said in an interview, “Donald Trump has been very divisive to many communities — Latinos are just one of many. Given what he said, he can’t expect immediate trust. He has said things that are not presidential. He’s going to have to earn trust from the get-go.”

For Latinos, the uncertainty is perhaps most pronounced, with many people fearing a Trump presidency could mean a forceful removal from the U.S. In Southern California, attorneys at an immigration clinic said a workshop held soon after the election was flooded to the point they had to deny people. Most of those who attended were Latino — and undocumented.

According to estimates, more than 2 million immigrants live in California without documentation.

“I was sensing panic,” said Marissa Montes, co-director of Loyola Law School’s Immigrant Justice Clinic, which held the workshop. The morning after the election, Montes’ phone rang with people wondering what would happen to them — but she had no answers.

“I really don’t know what changes are to come,” she said.

The changes in store after Trump takes office Jan. 20 could be comprehensive and swift, said Kevin Johnson, dean of UC Davis School of Law and an immigration law expert.

Trump could do away with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a measure instituted by President Obama that allowed certain people who came to the U.S. as children the opportunity to defer deportation for two years and to gain a work permit.

Trump could change the priorities of immigration authorities to deport any noncitizens who are arrested, Johnson said, and could seek to defund cities that limit their cooperation with immigration enforcement actions, among other tools. On the campaign trail, the president-elect promised a deportation force focused on flying millions out of the country.

The potential for dramatic changes to immigration law, and the specter of raids and mass deportations, has immigrant advocates gearing up for a fight.

“I think it’s pivotal,” Montes said. “This is the time to have a unified effort to try to protect our community and do what is necessary. The best thing we have to do is to fight back as much as we can. We know that it’s going to be a war.”

Among those frightened that her life may change is a woman who came from Guatemala to the U.S. in the 1980s and lives undocumented in the East Bay. The woman, who requested anonymity, said she was devastated when Trump surged ahead, and wept with her daughter as they watched the results on television. For years, she said, she has had a job, has never had issues with the law and has paid taxes.

“For me it’s like, it doesn’t matter, we are not valued,” she said. “I have spent more of my life here — I don’t know anything there anymore. I feel in my heart that this is my country.”

The election led to a jarring conversation with her 8-year-old grandson, with whom she is particularly close. “How will you make sure they don’t come get you?” he asked her through tears.

She told him she’d be careful, but that there was a possibility something could happen. He offered her a novel strategy to avoid detection by immigration authorities: “If you don’t go outside in the sun,” he said, “you will stay white.”

The woman said that while she was scared, she was also resolute.

“We have to stay together — we have to be strong. We need to see this as an opportunity for nonprofit agencies, for people in the government who believe in the cause of immigrants,” she said. “We have to not just feel fear. This is an opportunity for all of us to get together and fight for each other.”