From Bullied Kid to Civil Rights Fighter: How Second-Generation Immigrants Are Defending Democracy

A note slipped into a high schooler’s locker, calling him a terrorist. A six-year-old locked in detention, unable to get treatment for leukemia. A Palestinian woman arrested for exercising her right to protest. These aren’t hypotheticals—they’re the cases that landed on the desks of Daniel Hatoum and Sarah Xiyi Chen, two second-generation American advocates who’ve turned personal pain into a mission to protect everyone’s civil rights.

Hatoum still remembers September 11th vividly. He was in elementary school when the world shifted, and with it, the way people looked at his family. By high school, the discrimination had a face: a note accusing his twin brother of being a“terrorist”who wanted to blow up their small Texas town. The experience was crushing. It was also clarifying.“Honestly, I became a civil rights attorney to fight my own personal bullies,”Hatoum says. Today, as Senior Supervising Attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), he channels that anger into defending people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, often alongside their families.“The parents came to this country to raise their children and give them hope for a better life—the same reasons my parents are here,”he explains. For Hatoum, it’s personal. It’s also essential.

Down the hall at TCRP, Sarah Xiyi Chen approaches the work with similar urgency but through a different lens. As a voting rights advocate, she battles gerrymandering and voter suppression—the systemic barriers that silence entire communities. Texas ranks among the most heavily gerrymandered states in the country, and Chen’s team filed an amicus brief last year challenging district maps redrawn in 2021 and 2025 that they argue intentionally discriminated against Black and Latino voters. The case, LULAC vs. Abbott, didn’t yield a courtroom victory; the Supreme Court allowed the challenged maps to remain in effect. But Chen doesn’t see it as a loss.“Filing a lawsuit, even one we think will lose, is still worth it to show people that lawyers are willing to fight for them and speak out against injustice,”she says. That willingness to fight anyway—to create what the late John Lewis called“good trouble”—is the real win.

The work is exhausting. There are setbacks. There are nights when Hatoum considers saying no. But then comes an Instagram DM from someone who heard him speak at a rally, thanking him for giving them hope. Or a family walks free from detention because public pressure became too much to ignore. Or a woman named Leqaa Kordia, arrested after a peaceful protest in New York City, gets released and decides to fight on behalf of others still detained. These moments remind both Hatoum and Chen why they’re doing this: because their own families came here seeking safety and opportunity, and everyone deserves that same shot.

What’s remarkable about their work isn’t just the legal strategy—it’s the understanding that justice isn’t an individual victory. When Chen talks about what people can do, she doesn’t offer a single solution. She offers many: poll work, mutual aid, calling representatives, pushing back against misinformation online. Small, sustainable actions that add up. When Hatoum talks about his clients, he talks about their bravery, not his own.“They demonstrate the good of humanity we spend every day fighting for,”he says. That’s not just civil rights work. That’s leadership rooted in empathy, forged in the crucible of discrimination, and aimed at something bigger than any individual case: democracy itself. The Texas Civil Rights Project is building it one courtroom, one vote, one act of resistance at a time.