My neighbor’s mother had been sick for some time, but her health took a turn for the worse right around the US Presidential elections.

“Will you go to visit?” I asked her in the overly formal English I use with non-native speakers a few days later. When we could speak of anything besides the election results.

“No, no,” my neighbor said, as if I had suggested something ridiculous. She is from Bangladesh, where her mother still resided. “There is already trouble at the border. I cannot.” She detailed stories from friends, returning from visits home, and the harassments they’ve received upon return. Detainments, searches, questions. The Yemenis are having the most trouble, she says, but it is still not safe for Bengalis.

My neighbor has lived in the US for nearly 20 years. She has been waiting to receive notification of her second Citizenship Test date since submitting her request for one over the summer. The first one she passed, but says she became confused by the procedural questions following the test itself. For this, she was denied citizenship. For a middle-aged woman with only a green card raising two teenagers in Detroit, “trouble at the border” could mean any range of things, but it most certainly would mean being separated from her kids for an unacceptable length of time.

Family is of the utmost importance to my neighbor. She and her husband and two children spend most of their day together, talking, watching TV, and eating, broken up by prayer, school, or work (when her husband can find it). My neighbor spoke to her mother in Bangladesh every day by Skype. Every day but one, she told me, when the whole family went to get their eyes checked. Everyone needs glasses, she said. Like millions of people in the United States, my neighbor feels the need to get them before the Affordable Care Act is repealed and her husband’s coverage disappears.

While she was getting her eyes checked, my neighbor’s mother died. My neighbor is devastated. She will be in an extended mourning period until after the inauguration.

“I do not know how this president will be,” she told me. But it seems clear already that he will not be good for my neighbor.

**

I have lived in a predominantly Bengali neighborhood in Detroit for nearly seven months, a part of the city called Banglatown or North Hamtramck. It’s a vibrant, jarring, gorgeous part of the city: lots left empty after arson are being reclaimed for urban farmland. Brightly colored paints, likely purchased at discount, decorate homes occasionally renovated with more enthusiasm than skill. And the people: in the summer, women of three generations sit on porches, preparing vegetables, caring for babies, or teasing each other, outfitted in translucent, sparkling hijab chosen to pull out a strain of color in their dresses that most Americans only wore in the 1980s. In the winter, the women move indoors, scurrying between houses, covering their brilliant garments with mismatched overcoats, preserving their glory for later use. There are also men, slowly patrolling the neighborhood in more somber colors, stopping by to comment on my garden or the weather, or share with me the news of the day, usually from Bangladesh.

The area was first developed for workers moving to the Motor City to work on the Ford Model T production line. Most of the houses on my block were built in 1918. That year, the first Model T was released with an electric starter, an innovation to the decade-old line to respond to increasing global demand for the affordable vehicle. My father was a collector; I grew up taking Sunday rides in a Model T, although ours had the pre-1918 hand crank. It was a total pain.

It makes perfect sense to me that I would end up living in a house deeply infused with the history of American industrial production, but I would never have expected that house to be situated in a Bengali community. Still, before moving here, I had covered women’s issues as a reporter in Cambodia for seven years, so it quickly came to feel totally natural. To the women in my neighborhood, too, who sometimes mistake my Cambodian artifacts for Bengali ones.

“No, no,” I once explained to the girl across the street when she picked up a rice tin and asked if I got it in her country. “It is not Bengali. I have never been to Bangladesh.”

“Yet,” she said then in response, and says again whenever the subject comes up. “You will go, some day.”

My first Eid nearly coincided with the Fourth of July. The woman across the street offered to do my mehndi for me. She said it so naturally, as if I might have made other plans to have “my mehndi” done for Eid, and this was just one option. I had made no such plans, and spent several hours on her porch a few nights later watching a young woman paint my arm with henna, one of the more talented intuitive artists I’ve ever had the pleasure to watch. It was two months after my arrival, and the next day — Eid — was filled with feasts. Multiple feasts. I have never feasted so much in my life — an actual feast of various feasts. I was not only invited to neighbors’ houses for dinner, I had food delivered, white Styrofoam care packages filled with beans, rice, meats, greens, desserts — five total, so I feasted for days.

My talk with a four-year-old on the block soon turned to the Fourth of July, and whether or not I should expect to see fireworks for America’s birthday.

“America,” she repeated.

“Have you heard of it?” I joked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’d like to go there some day.”

She hadn’t yet started school, so may have never learned the difference between one country and another, one continent and another. But I was still surprised. “Where, um, are we right now?” I asked her.

She smiled, very wide, and laughed. It dawned on me that her family spoke Bengali, lived entirely surrounded by other Bengalis, and together they spoke largely about Bangladesh. Her family had little to no reason to clarify to the youngest generation that they didn’t technically live there.

“Um,” she said, and strained her eyes to the left — four-year-old code for, “You no longer make any sense to me and I need to go watch cartoons.”

This little stretch of Detroit has been completely layered over in Bengali culture — to such a degree that the very young in my neighborhood may not even realize they live in the United States. Until Trump. His election sent a panic through the neighbor kids that they might be forced to leave. They no longer feel safe enough in their own homes to not situate themselves in geopolitical terms.

***

The biggest fear is the Muslim registry. Bengali culture is 92% Muslim, although 100% of my neighbors practice. White liberals on Facebook vowed to defeat the registry by standing in line with their Muslim brothers and sisters in hijab and register themselves, but the thought of any white woman I know successfully wrapping a headscarf on a first try is laughable. However kindly intentioned, the show of support is equally risible: relying on individuals to do anything of their own free will is a gamble.

What many seemed to overlook is that a register of Muslims already exists, a holdover from the post-9/11 days called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS. (It is digital, of course, and was implemented without a peep from folks now claiming a wealth of headscarves hidden away in closets.) It was defanged in 2011 when the Department of Homeland Security vowed to stop using it — acknowledging that tracking country of origin was not helpful in the fight against terrorism — but the structure remains in place.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) posted an open letter last week signed by some 200 organizations. It calls on Obama to “rescind the regulatory framework” behind NSEERS, on the grounds that it “has been found to be ineffective as a counter-terrorism tool, has resulted in tremendous harm for individuals who were directly affected, and has disrupted relationships with immigrant communities.”

If you’re looking for a way to show support for your Muslim brothers and sisters, there’s a petition here. No headscarf required.

***

I spent Thanksgiving this year in a sort of reverse-Eid, preparing and baking a halal turkey, loading it up with all sorts of traditional side-dishes, modified to meet my own extensive dietary restrictions. Then I packaged the bird up in so many Styrofoam containers, one for each house on the block. I’m allergic to gluten, dairy, soy, and most of the traditional holiday vegetables, and usually cook my turkeys wrapped in bacon, so the result was an extremely complicated take on the tradition. But the girl across the street had expressed interest in a “real American Thanksgiving meal” and I wanted to make sure she got one.

Who knows if I’ll get the chance again next year.