Ainee Athar: It took me years to start thinking about walking away from politics. I was really driven by my personal connection to the work. I had an opportunity to take some down time that I had never had in my life, and I took basically six months off to think about what I wanted to do next that wasn’t working on politics and working on immigration because I was so exhausted. I think there’s a lot of people who had worked in progressive activism for years who basically left around the time of the Biden administration because we were burnt out and exhausted.
Veena Hampapur: I feel like we hear more and more about burnout, we’re hearing more about rising anxiety. We are seeing athletes and celebrities take breaks for mental health. So how do we wanna think about burnout, anxiety, the emotional and mental load when you’re working in the social justice sector – especially when you have a personal connection to what you’re fighting for. From the UCLA Labor Center, we bring you Re:Work. I’m Veena Hampapur, and I’m joined today by my friend George Chacon, who is the Deputy Director of our Dream Resource Center. Thanks for co-hosting with me today George.
George Chacon: It is my pleasure Veena. Thank you so much for inviting me to your space, and I just can’t wait to talk a little bit more about our guest.
Veena Hampapur: So in today’s episode, we speak with Ainee Athar about her pathway into doing immigrant rights work, and later into climate justice work.
George Chacon: These days, Ainee lives in the Bay Area, but she’s originally from Pakistan.
Ainee Athar: When I was two years old my family decided to move to the United States. We are part of a religious community in Pakistan called Ahmadiyya Muslims, and Ahmadiyyas are highly persecuted and experience a lot of violence and discrimination.
Veena Hampapur: Ainee’s family moved around quite a bit in the 1990s and eventually, when she was 7-years-old, settled down in a suburb of Houston.
Ainee Athar: I grew up in a neighborhood in southwest Houston called Alief. It’s a common pit stop for recent immigrants. And there were also families who lived there for a long time that were Black and Latino. When I was in the third or fourth grade, we had this day where the school was putting up flags in the cafeteria of all the countries represented by the student body population. I remember going to the cafeteria and there being over 60 flags hanging up on the ceiling.
George Chacon: Ainee enjoyed the diversity in her school and neighborhood, but there were also concerns about safety.
Ainee Athar: I spent time at the mall – I spent time, you know, hanging out at Starbucks and doing kind of just typical kid activities. But there was that kind of undercurrent of violence happening in that suburban community that was always at the back of people’s mind. Because I came from this South Asian family where we were kind of expected to keep our heads down and to focus on school, I was sheltered from a lot of that. But, I heard a lot about it from my friends at school who were kind of in the middle of it all.
Veena Hampapur: Ainee was just a kid when September 11th happened – she was 10-years-old, but she noticed a change afterward.
Ainee Athar: When it comes to living in Alief I was one of many Pakistani and South Asian students. After September 11th there was definitely even in that community a shift. I remember students suddenly telling me that their parents didn’t want me to talk to them anymore, that their parents had told them you cannot be friends with Muslim kids anymore. I didn’t really say anything, and I didn’t talk to those students again, but it was just confusing.
George Chacon: Ainee enjoyed reading classic dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World. In middle school, she started noticing how opportunities were different for her classmates.
Ainee Athar: When I was in 2nd grade I was put in the gifted and talented track. There were Black students, there were Latino students and Asian students. There weren’t a lot of White people that lived in Alief, so there weren’t that many of those, but by the time we got to around 7th or 8th grade I looked around and I realized that almost all the Black and Latino students were gone. There were so many smart kids that I grew up with who ended up dropping out of high school or not getting to college or getting involved with things like dealing drugs or gang violence. When I was in middle school I got into competitive speech and debate, and it was another glimpse for me that was pretty important around inequality. You would go to these contests and see, you know, wealthy kids from wealthy schools and the amount of support and resources they had. They would get to go to fancy training camps. They would stay at nice hotels. They would have the support of their parents who were volunteers. We were just a group of very rag tag students in our crew, but we were very focused and determined and had some great coaching from teachers at the school so we were often quite successful.
Veena Hampapur: Ainee’s awareness of inequalities sparked an interest in social change.
Ainee Athar: I grew up feeling very powerless and I grew up watching a lot of people around me be very powerless because of the circumstances they were in. To hear about some of the home lives of my friends and lived experiences they were going through, with their families not being safe as well as the experiences that I was having was a really big catalyst for wanting to do something positive for the world. My own family experienced their own sorts of instability because we were very poor and we were struggling with our immigration case and my mom could not work legally. Growing up I remember my mom taking these kind of under the table jobs – kiosks at the mall or taking care of people’s children for a living.
George Chacon: When Ainee was in high school, her family’s H-1B application was rejected.
Ainee Athar: There was nothing that we could ever point to and say that this was the reason it was rejected. But we do know that the scrutiny around Muslim men really changed after September 11th. There were many applications that were kind of just arbitrarily denied among South Asian applicants and I think some of that factored into the ultimate rejection of our H-1B case. But we also had family members who experienced, for example, being put on lists and investigated and things like that.
George Chacon: It’s because of 9/11 that we created the Department of Homeland Security, ICE. Departments that to this day are impacting communities in a negative sense, you know. If there’s that political will, a lot of things can change in the structures and in the systems that we have in our government. There’s so much work left to be done in order to address that.
Veena Hampapur: Ainee’s family decided to apply for asylum.
Ainee Athar: My parents reassured me that, you know, this was just almost like a formality – like it was a done deal. So while I was nervous I was also relying on them and really, you know, believed them as a child that this would be the way we’d become citizens and that this limitation that kind of showed up in all sorts of ways in our lives would be lifted. But they did hide the extent of what was going on with our family because like any parents, they don’t want to burden their children with these, you know, difficult facts. When we were preparing for the case, I heard all these stories from both my parents and some other community members who were Ahmadiyya about the extent of the violence and discrimination that they faced in Pakistan; some of the stories were pretty jarring and it was very shocking to hear all of that. It really clicked for me what it meant if we were to be deported and to go back to that country.
Veena Hampapur: The uncertainty her family was facing really took a toll on Ainee’s emotional well being.
Ainee Athar: Honestly in high school I became very depressed. I think the stress of it all was pretty significant, but no one really knew what to do because a kid was stressed out about something like this. And I didn’t really know how to put into words what I was experiencing either. But it was pretty detrimental to my mental health to realize what was going on and what were the stakes if the situation didn’t go right. My family’s community and social life was around the mosque. And no one really talks about challenges that they’re facing. So no one was really talking about the challenges that they faced as immigrants, for example, after September 11th and so while I grew up in this community where all these people, you know, had all these things culturally in common and were bonding over religion, I felt at odds because we were going through this very significant experience and it didn’t really seem like we were supposed to mention anything. My view of the world became very small and I felt very frustrated about that. I was, you know, 16 – 17 years old thinking about my own future and wanting to go to college, wanting to think about what career I could have and what kind of adult I wanted to be, and I felt so stymied. My choices were really limited by how our family’s immigration case was playing out. I didn’t even know if I could go to college. It felt like everything in my life had kind of come to a little bit of a halt.
George Chacon: Ainee ended up attending UT Austin after graduating from high school, and her family’s immigration challenges became a bit more complicated.
Ainee Athar: Our asylum case had initially been denied and even the denial was kind of confounding a lot of the lawyers that we saw. The success of your case unfortunately can depend on something as simple as who your judge is assigned. And so we saw a judge initially that had a close to something like a 97% rejection rate. When I was a sophomore in college we were in the appeals process, and I was not really thinking that much about the case; I was trying to enjoy my college experience. And I woke up one morning to a call from my sister. She was hysterical on the phone. ICE had come to our house in Houston and arrested my parents. There was a lawyer who had made a mistake in one of the papers that they had filed in the appeal, and ICE decided to essentially file deportation proceedings. We didn’t know what the mistake was until this all happened, so we didn’t have any kind of chance to correct it. My parents were detained and held in a facility for about three weeks. Those three weeks were pretty much a blur, because it was such a traumatic and chaotic situation. All these reassurances that my parents had given me I realized were just their best efforts into making us feel better, and they didn’t reflect the reality of how the immigration system actually worked. ICE wanted to detain all of us, and they had a warrant for me. I was told by our lawyers not to go to class. When I tried to communicate what I was experiencing and what I was going through to the university administration they treated it as if it was a criminal matter, and they told me that they would not provide any kind of accommodations because it would be seen as some kind of obstruction of a legal proceeding. Those three weeks were just kind of spent in fear. I always call this kind of episode to be like an example of like state sponsored terrorism. It feels like terrorism, right? To knock on someone’s door in the middle of the night and drag away like a mother and a father to a jail cell indefinitely because of a clerical error in some paperwork and to tell their kids that they want to arrest them too.
Veena Hampapur: Ainee’s parents were released from detention, but that wasn’t the end of their immigration issues.
Ainee Athar: The Ahmadiyya community really stepped up. They helped my parents find a new lawyer and also helped them put together kind of the resources they needed to start a new legal strategy and to get them out of detention. Our lawyer was someone who is part of the Ahmadiyya community and has done a lot of these kinds of asylum cases. Really that situation was just the beginning of what would kind of transpire with the next seven years of fighting this case and having active orders of deportation against us. I was subject to ICE check-ins, which meant that they would call me randomly when I was in class, and I would have to step out and answer the call. I remember once missing a call because I was taking a shower, and seeing that I had missed the call and I just had a total meltdown in my apartment, thinking that someone was going to – that law enforcement was going to show up, guns blazing, and drag me out of my house. It was a pretty big strain, and I considered dropping out at several points.
George Chacon: Ainee thought about leaving school, but ultimately decided to stay. She was able to find ways to sense out of her experiences.
Ainee Athar: I studied political anthropology at UT, which was a major at the time that focused on social movements, on public policy, and on critical race theory. I kind of wanted a why as to why my family was experiencing this and why some of my friends were experiencing the things that they had gone through. Going through those studies, especially once my family had deportation proceedings filed against us, was very valuable in helping me make sense of the world and it was really helpful in showing me how change has happened historically in this country when it comes to organizing and social movements and influencing policy and government.
Veena Hampapur: Ainee also joined an undocumented student group on campus and began sharing her story publicly.
Ainee Athar: You know, the university is not supporting you, and you’re fighting this battle largely alone and in isolation. I felt like it was living life behind a glass wall. And so to be able to get together with other people who know exactly what you’re going through and we could have fun with each other in a way that, you know, sometimes we couldn’t with other people who we’d have to explain these limitations that we were facing in our lives. Ultimately we played a role in organizing Texas Undocumented Youth to help pass DACA. I had also started to do a lot of work where I would travel the country and share my family’s story. It was really empowering to work on campaigns and to work with the student group because you were kind of in control of your own destiny instead of waiting for other people to come save you. After I graduated, I joined an organization called Forward US, which is a national immigration reform group. So I threw myself kind of full force into advocating for immigration policies.
Veena Hampapur: Around 2017, Ainee’s family was granted asylum.
Ainee Athar: My first reaction was that it was pretty anticlimactic. It feels very strange to have gone through this very traumatizing and egregious experience all for it to end with someone handing you a piece of paper in a courtroom and saying you’re free to go. For a couple of minutes, my mom, she didn’t really believe it. She kept asking, “Is this it? Is this it?”. I felt a huge sense of relief and all this excitement immediately afterwards. But ultimately that excitement gave away to – honestly to reality, which was just because we got status doesn’t mean the challenge has ended. We still had a low income, there were all these ways in which we were behind. That includes a lot of things that people probably don’t think about. So for example, if you’re someone who didn’t have access to healthcare for years as my family didn’t, there’s probably all sorts of health issues. Because we got a green card through asylum there’s a lot of different kinds of stipulations. So I still have not gotten to travel outside the country even though I’ve had asylum status for about six years at this point. And you just kind of get a sense of all those things that you missed out on. Rebuilding your life after going through that experience takes years at a time. I would still say I’m in the process of kind of rebuilding the life that I want and my family is also in that process. There’s a lot of sense making of how my 20s went and how my childhood went. I’m also obviously very grateful of the fact that I do have status when some of my friends still don’t. I am able to think about the future in a way that I haven’t been before, and it’s something that takes a lot of practice and a lot of work to not just think about where you need to be in the next year or the next two, but to start thinking about where would I want to be in the next five years, in the next ten years. It’s definitely like a stretch exercise, and you have to kind of force yourself to do it.
George Chacon: After receiving asylum, Ainee moves to the Bay Area to work in philanthropy. Eventually, she decided to take a break and really rethink her path.
Ainee Athar: Working on something like immigration under the Trump administration burnt a lot of people out, mentally, physically. It was traumatizing, if I’m being honest, to wake up every day to a new crisis that affected, you know, some of the most vulnerable people in our country. So I wanted to work on things and have honestly a little bit of emotional distance from the work that I was doing. So I decided to not work at all, not apply for any jobs, and really just think about what I found interesting. And I had always been interested in environmental issues – I had always followed climate science. After working on something like immigration and being so directly involved, there was nothing I could do next that wasn’t mission oriented. It had to be something that I felt very profoundly about, and climate change is the existential threat of not only our generation but all the generations to come.
George Chacon: Just to talk a little bit more about burnout, I mean, we all have it, right? And that pivot to addressing climate change was pretty, pretty, big.
Veena Hampapur: One thing I’ve noticed about Ainee is that she questions what she sees around her from a young age. And then when she gets older, you know, she’s questioning herself. And she chooses to actually take a break from work and think about what she really wants to do and that really stood out to me because that’s something I’ve heard people talk about but maybe not actually do.
George Chacon: I really admire do her for that. That’s pretty awesome.
Veena Hampapur: These days Ainee is a student at the business school at Stanford.
Ainee Athar: One of the reasons I decided to go to business school was I realized I was very entrepreneurial. I figured that if I could get into a really good MBA program I would go back to school, and if not then I’d just kind of figure out another way to transition into the climate space. Luckily, I did end up getting into a great program that is tackling both climate science and technology and policy all at the same time. I think the way that people talk about it and think about it is that the world is just going to get wiped out or everyone is going to live in peace and prosperity and the reality is existing forms of inequality will become amplified in the coming years. It’s not a case where we’re all in this together. It’s a crisis that is going to affect vulnerable people the most. It’s not a question of like can we solve it. It’s a question of can we solve it in a way that’s inclusive of as many people as possible. Because the trajectory that we’re on right now is that wealthy nations and wealthy people will not experience the brunt of it, but the rest of the world will. Part of the dynamic of being a directly influenced person in advocacy and philanthropy and all these kinds of industries is that a lot of time the show is not being run by people who know the issue the best, know the people the best, know how to work on this the best. And I think over time I have gotten more and more courageous and confident and being able to say, “Yeah, I don’t have the same credentials as you but I know that I can do this. I know I can fix this problem, or take on this project, or be in charge of this thing.” I don’t have the same profile as 90% of my class at Stanford, and that can be very isolating, but it also helps me look at problems in a very different way. Climate change, it is this opportunity to really transform the way we do really basic things and the really fundamental aspects of our economy. The power and the value I see in that is that we can build industries and policies in a way that are very inclusive and very equitable if we do it right. Unlike working on certain other social issues that feel very stuck like immigration, in the climate space what’s really rewarding is that we’re often looking ahead and not simply looking back and this opportunity to kind of get to build something new is very exciting to me given that I have lived most of my life and career playing, playing, defense.
George Chacon: One thing I really struck me when listening to Ainee’s story is just her ongoing reflection of the world happening around her.
Veena Hampapur: I was also just noticing her spelling out this emotional journey that she goes through.
George Chacon: Right, especially when she was young. It kind of drew me back, when I was young, and thinking about things like tests and friends, while, you know, all this big earth shattering stuff is happening around me.
Veena Hampapur: Yeah. We say things like kids are resilient and I’m not saying they’re not but she really explains growing up feeling a lack of agency, a lack of control. I think sometimes when we’re talking about an issue or a problem someones having, we can get caught up in the facts and what needs to be done versus the emotional toll it can take in the short term and long term.
George Chacon: Right.
Veena Hampapur: How it can continue to impact you and the way you see life and what you choose to do is really important to talk about because these last few years have been…
George Chacon: It’s been hell. It’s been hell. We can say it, we can say that. Yeah, it’s been, it’s been, one for the books for sure.
Veena Hampapur: Yeah, and I think we also see the positive impact of community and what it’s like when you actually get space to process, to be seen.
George Chacon: You know, if there’s any younger listeners out there listening , it’s okay to talk about these things. You don’t have to go it alone. It’s always good to have community with you.
Ainee Athar: When you’re a youth activist in the immigrant rights movement, you travel a lot and you share you personal story and this very traumatic set of experiences that you’ve had, and now I’m in this place where I’m kind of getting to rewrite a little bit about how I want the story to go, and it’s still very difficult, because I get frustrated sometimes at being seen as this very like resilient and strong person. I think that’s true and I’m proud of what I was able to do under the circumstances that I faced. But, I would rather live in a world where people don’t have to be strong like that. I would rather them take away that there are millions of people who face a tremendous amount of adversity, there’s a lot of talent in this country that’s being held back from solving some really important problem in our world and just because you hear a couple stories here and there about someone who has overcome the odds, doesn’t mean that the odds aren’t real, you know And so, I feel a little different now about how I share my story and who I want to share it with, if that makes sense. Directly impacted people become activists, because sometimes we’re looking for a little bit of control over our own destiny. And I have a lot of friends who are undocumented, and they’re in their mid thirties. They’re thinking ‘am I ever going to get to live my life like a normal person?’ And they’re having to find their own ways of controlling their own destiny. It’s quite a difficult situation to be in for people who are still undocumented and don’t know what the future entails. But, I think that all of us have to find our own kind of locus of control in our lives, especially when we come from these communities. And whatever that is for you, try to find it because feeling disempowered or if you have no control over your life and really sitting in that feeling is quite destructive to your mental health. So find whatever it is that helps you feel like you are, you know, in charge of your own destiny and really, you know, don’t be very unapologetic about it.
Veena Hampapur: A special thanks to Ainee Athar for sharing her story. You’re listening to Re:Work, a production of the UCLA Labor Center.
George Chacon: This episode was produced by Veena Hampapur, George Chacon, and Saba Waheed. Sound design and editing by Veena Hampapur. Mixing by Aaron Dalton. Stay tuned for more new episodes, and until next time, rethink, rework.