Hijab-wearing White House staffer quits over Trump travel ban

She worked only 8 days in new admin

A HIJAB-WEARING Muslim exwhite House staffer of Bangladeshi-origin has said she quit her job after US President Donald Trump announced his controversial travel ban, lasting just eight days in the new administration.

Rumana Ahmed was hired in 2011 to work at the White House and eventually the National Security Council (NSC).

“My job there was to promote and protect the best of what my country stands for. I am a hijab-wearing Muslim woman — I was the only hijabi in the West Wing — and the Obama administration always made me feel welcome and included,” she wrote in an article published in The Atlantic.

Ahmed said that like most of her fellow American-muslims, she spent much of 2016 watching with “consternation” as Trump “vilified our community”.

“Despite this — or because of it — I thought I should try to stay on the NSC staff during the Trump Administration,inorder to give the new president and his aides a more nuanced view of Islam, and of America’s Muslim citizens.

“I lasted eight days. When Trump issued a ban on travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries and all Syrian refugees, I knew I could no longer stay and work for an administration that saw me and people like me not as fellow citizens, but as a threat,” she said.

Ahmed said the evening before she left her job at the White House, she notified Trump’s seniornationalsecuritycouncilcommunications adviser, Michael Anton, of her decision. “His initial surprise, asking whether I was leaving government entirely, was followed by silence — almost in caution, not asking why. I told him anyway,” she wrote.

“I told him I had to leave because it was an insult walking into this country’s most historic building every day under an administration that is working against and vilifying everything I stand for as an American and as a Muslim,” Ahmed said.

RUMANA AHMED