Welcome to the biggest Pakistani community in the U.S.
I’m in the the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York,
but everyone just knows it by the name of the street – Coney Island Avenue.
That’s the name I knew it as growing up.
We used to come here to get halal fried chicken
and halal pepperoni pizza when we were kids.
When I first came to the U.S. in 1999,
my family and I used to visit here all the way from New Jersey
to eat Pakistani food
and to get a haircut.
So I thought, why break tradition?
My barber, Adeel Shakoor, came to the U.S. 10 years ago
to join the rest of his family.
The Pakistani community here started
with immigrants coming from Kashmir in the late 1960s –
and that’s where Adeel is from too.
By the 1990s, the community was thriving.
There were around 120,000 Pakistanis living in the city.
And like many immigrants, Pakistanis started driving New York’s iconic yellow cabs,
eventually taking over the city’s taxi industry.
These new immigrants helped transform this neighborhood.
These are the chips I used to eat in Pakistan.
They’re called Slanty and they’re jalapeño-flavored,
except in Pakistan they were JALApeno-flavored.
But the community also dealt with a lot of discrimination.
After 9/11, Pakistanis were harassed, spied upon,
and many of them started to feel unsafe.
Could you imagine you're here in the land of the free,
and then all of a sudden you're handcuffed like this?
And the Pakistani community on Coney Island Avenue experienced an exodus.
The fear that was within the community was tremendous.
That fear affected my family too.
First few days right after 9/11, I was afraid to put my hijab on.
But those who stayed fought hard to preserve their Pakistani identity.
So I wanted to know, how did America's largest Pakistani community fight off Islamophobia
and forge a path for the next generation?
All these stores, storefronts were gloomy, you know, like storage storefronts,
the community came in, opened up the shops and made it so vibrant.
That’s Mohammad Razvi.
His parents moved here in the '70s and brought him over when he was 6.
Do you know why your family and like other Pakistani families
chose to come here on Coney Island Avenue?
I think it was because of the mosque.
It used to be one storefront. And now it's three buildings.
This mosque, known as Makki Masjid, was the focal point of the community.
And then in 1984, Mohammad’s dad opened this grocery store a few doors down.
This is known as Punjab Grocery.
And it was just this store and the mosque.
Prior to this, all the Muslims or Pakistani Muslims
or South Asian Muslims, they used to eat kosher.
But my dad, he worked hard and he made it the halal meat.
But this grocery store wasn’t just a place to buy food –
it was a kind of a community center for newly arrived Pakistanis.
So many people came here and they said, "I didn't get my paycheck. Can I take some food?"
So my dad used to give the people food on credit.
I mean, honestly, that is a social service.
Places like Punjab Grocery became more important as immigration from Pakistan increased.
More than 75 percent of the Pakistani immigrants that came to the U.S.
came in the ‘90s and early 2000s.
And a lot of them settled in this part of Brooklyn
and completely changed how the neighborhood looked.
All the storefronts had signs in Urdu – the national language of Pakistan.
And this block of Coney Island Avenue
was renamed Muhammad Ali Jinnah Way after the founder of Pakistan.
And this Little Pakistan is a home away from home for so many people.
Before 9/11, Little Pakistan had been a thriving community.
In fact, Pakistanis had taken over a big chunk of the city’s yellow cabs.
In the 1990s, one in every five taxi drivers in New York City was from Pakistan.
And Pakistani cab drivers helped organize the biggest taxi strike in NYC history,
demanding fairer wages.
For Pakistani immigrants in New York, it seemed like the only job.
Ashraf Butt came to the U.S. in the '80s and drove yellow cabs in the '90s
after he saw how successful it was for other people.
Ashraf said that it would have been hard to bring his family and keep working as a cab driver,
so he changed careers and became a businessman.
And that career path was similar for so many of the Pakistanis that I talked to.
But while some Pakistanis were chasing the American Dream,
for many others, living in the U.S. after 9/11
became the American Nightmare.
Residents started getting harassed by both city and federal authorities.
These are actual the cards that were left in people's homes
when they were visited by federal agents,
INS agents at that time.
Community members kept coming to Mohammad, asking for assistance.
So he created the Council of Peoples Organization, or COPO,
to provide the community with legal help.
I actually was figuring that maybe I can help the community for six months, seven months.
Those seven months have now turned into 20 years.
Pakistanis in New York City were targeted under multiple programs.
Right after 9/11, the FBI rounded up 762 so-called “aliens.”
Most of the arrests had no connection to terrorism
and instead they were detained for months on end for immigration violations.
The Justice Department’s own report on the program
recorded the mistreatment of many immigrants,
like slamming them against walls and other physical abuse.
Our government itself made so many mistakes, so-called under the Patriot Act.
One-third of all these detainees were from Pakistan – more than any other group.
And most of the detainees were deported.
Mohammad says his job was to find out where people were being held,
how to get them out and stop deportation proceedings.
It didn't matter if you had documentation or you didn't.
The fear that was within the community was tremendous.
Mohammad introduced me to the owner of Papa’s Fried Chicken where I used to go as a kid.
And here's the famous Aziz Butt. This is the guy.
Aziz says his business was targeted and that he was harassed by federal authorities.
People in the community were terrified of the FBI.
Mohammad told me the story of man named Asad.
Asad came to me, running into my office and crying.
And I'm like, “Hey, is everything okay?”
He goes, “There was a card in my doorstep.”
I said, “OK, let me see the card.”
And he told me he didn't sleep at home for four days.
He's been sleeping in his car. I'm like, "Oh my God."
So Mohammad agreed to talk to the authorities on Asad’s behalf.
So the federal agent said, “Ask this person, did he ever go on a trip to Niagara Falls?”
He goes, “Yeah. I went on a trip with three of my buddies, like about two weeks ago or something.”
So the agent tells me, apparently these “Middle Eastern men” taking pictures
and one of those pictures is too close to the courthouse.
All of a sudden, they became a person of interest.
Finally, he brought the camera. He even brought his friends.
Mohammad says the FBI ended the investigation
after realizing Asad and his friends were just on vacation.
But this story isn’t unique.
In addition to the harassment,
the federal government forced more than 138,000
immigrants to register in a special database.
It was basically a “Muslim registry,”
because 24 of the 25 countries on the list had large Muslim populations.
The program led to zero terrorism-related convictions.
But the government still put 13,000 men in deportation proceedings.
People who are saying, "You know, you want us to comply, we're complying.
And then you're punishing us because you didn't find anything,
you just want to deport us."
On top of all this, there was surveillance by the NYPD.
The city would place informants inside mosques and spy on the Muslim community from within.
The NYPD’s actions actually made the community less safe –
because when the Pakistani community was facing hate crimes,
people wouldn’t want to go to the police.
They were afraid to report it to the police.
They were just feeling that nobody cares, nobody who's going to help us.
For many Pakistani Muslims, Brooklyn didn’t feel safe anymore.
They fled where?
They went to Canada or they went to other countries or they went back home
and they took their money with them.
Mohammad estimates that of the 120,000 Pakistanis that used to live here,
about 20,000 to 30,000 left for places they felt were safer.
We did a survey in the neighborhood where it showed
over 120 stores that existed, about 20, 25 stores shut down.
While immigration from Pakistan has slowed down,
Mohammad says there's still a steady trickle of Pakistanis into Little Pakistan.
Being back here, I was reminded so much of my childhood.
And I thought about my family
and wondered what memories they had of Little Pakistan.
I met up with them over the Eid holiday
and spoke to my sister,
brother-in-law,
niece,
my mom
and my dad.
After living in the U.S. for so long,
I wondered if my parents still felt close to their Pakistani identity.
We don't have a house there anymore.
We sold the house. You bought this house here in America.
When did you start feeling American?
We immigrated in 1999, but when did you feel that you were American?
- When I took the oath.
- When you took the oath of citizenship? - Yeah.
- That's when you felt American? - Yeah.
I asked my family about their experiences after 9/11
and they told me stories I had never heard before.
Before, I didn't think of myself, like so strongly about, "Oh, I am a Muslim," you know.
It was just part of growing up.
When we came here and then 9/11 happened. "Oh, I'm a Muslim," kind of that.
First few days, right after 9/11, I was afraid to put my hijab on.
Like, I don't know if there's going to be a backlash.
I didn't know how people are going to react.
So instead of putting on a hijab, I took a hoodie, a hood,
and then I went with that. But everybody in my university was so understanding.
And while there was the initial fear after 9/11,
everyone in my family said that things got worse after Trump.
Did you feel that it was unsafe to be Muslim?
It was not only Muslim.
Actually, they wanted to have a white majority and white supremacy.
We were driving down to Ohio and we stopped at a gas station.
And there was this lady in the next car.
She was cursing me so bad.
Just like that. I didn’t even say anything or do anything.
And she looked at me and she had so much hate for me.
I did feel scared at that time.
While it was hard hearing the stories, it was nice to see my family over the Eid holiday.
We actually had our prayer in a public park.
I really like it and admire that in USA that we celebrate openly.
I don't have any problem to my practice my belief.
- I think the thing that defines Pakistani culture the most is having these big families.
And I think that's something that most Pakistanis pride themselves for,
if they have a big family.
I am proud of my big family
and the fact that I can celebrate being both Pakistani and American with them.
Even though we had lived all over the world,
I found out that it was always my dad’s dream to live in the United States.
I was working in England and we came to visit here, USA.
Since we’ve moved to the U.S.,
we’ve seen the Pakistani community grow out of Little Pakistan
and create other pockets of Pakistani Americans throughout New York and New Jersey.
Despite all the harassment this community faced after 9/11,
and continues to face after Trump,
I realized as I celebrated with my family
that the story of Pakistanis in America is one of resilience.
And we’re still around to tell it.