(RNS) — In January, at a board of supervisors meeting in Hanover County, north of Richmond, Virginia, more than a hundred county residents signed up to air their concerns about a 550,000-square-foot warehouse that U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had applied to buy as a place to house immigrant detainees. Judging from the chatter online, civic leaders and community organizers warned that the meeting could get contentious. 

But for people of color and Muslims who planned to show up, the advice was particularly ominous. Decide for yourself if you feel comfortable joining the protest planned for outside of the meeting or to speak inside. If you go, think about using the buddy system. 

In plainer terms: Show up, speak out and make your voice heard at your own risk.

Risking arrest has always been part of social justice and faith activism, especially for persons of color. Recent stories and images out of Minnesota show that being a member of the clergy or otherwise representing a faith community hasn’t offered any protection against being recorded, doxed, tear-gassed, arrested or jailed. Answering a call to activism is even riskier for youth from Black, brown, Muslim and MENA (Middle East and North African) communities, given the arrests of Muslims on campus for speaking out.

In households where religious practice is linked with standing against injustice, how do parents guide children engaged in various forms of activism?

“This is the struggle of our lifetime, our turn to fight fascism,” said a Muslim friend who has been active in numerous social justice fights. “It’s not morally right to stay silent. But I struggle with all our babies.”

I had similar questions about my own son, a high school senior, who heard I was planning to attend the supervisors meeting in Hanover County to do some background reporting. He told me he had already registered as a speaker and that if I was driving up there, he wanted to come with me. I was surprised. I had spent a considerable amount of time over the past two years talking with his older sister as she had attended protests as a visibly (and unapologetically) Muslim American college student. But for my son, who had been more focused on his schoolwork than activism, this was new.

Decades of reporting on Muslim American communities has shown me that raising unapologetically strong, civic-minded Muslim children is a goal for more and more parents. But the risks of doing so in the era of President Donald Trump, not to mention while processing a global pandemic, the events of Oct. 7, 2023, and the devastating genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza that followed, have weighed heavily.

Sameera Ahmed, founder of the Family & Youth Institute, an organization focused on the mental health of Muslim Americans, said the first step is to ground children spiritually, assuring them that everything that happens is by God’s will, “His design,” said Ahmed.

“Your son wants to do this, and there is this part of your brain that is alert alert alert,” Ahmed added. “He has to get into college. What if he gets arrested? But at the same time, it’s in Allah’s hands. We’re in this time and moment for a particular reason, and this is our opportunity to make change. Each one of us has a test, and we need to address that accordingly.”

The Trump administration has focused its attention on the rise of antisemitism, from its crackdown on university professors and presidents to its Religious Liberty Commission hearings, but little attention has been given to targeted attacks against Muslims. National headlines have told some of these stories, such as that of Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained last March after serving as a mediator between pro-Palestinian protesters and administrators at Columbia University. Khalil recently gained his release, only to have to a judge declare that his deportation case may proceed. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national studying at Tufts, was arrested by six Homeland Security agents for publishing a commentary urging her school to divest from Israel.

But plenty of other signs of Islamophobia have drawn less notice. In Bethesda, Maryland, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian graffiti was sprayed on a wall at a prominent high school. In Brooklyn, a 12-year-old hijab-wearing Muslim girl was punched in the face as she waited for her mother near her school.

The Catch-22 of raising children to be strong and confident in their Muslim identity and beliefs is that taking a public stand for what they believe in often doesn’t end in a debate, or mutual understanding. In our contentious society, too many seem to be spoiling not just for a fight, but a full takedown. Our own government feeds the problem with its brutal crackdowns around the country.

Risk analysis is where parents must start, said Ahmed, but we should also lean on spiritual framing, especially when feeling helpless in the face of seemingly unending injustice and violence. “Leaning on the stories in the Quran and seerah (the recorded history of the life of Prophet Muhammad) helps us,” she said, ” … to channel the rage and despair. It gives us tools for resilience and purpose, which we can pass on to our children.” 

The other thing, Ahmed said, is for parents to recognize that their children are individuals with their own approaches to living their faith, passions and beliefs. “I had one daughter who was active in (the university) encampments, and I saw how it was impacting her, and one daughter who was a student athlete who felt she couldn’t get involved in that way.

“Those are the challenges that our kids are struggling with, and we’re struggling with. There is no playbook for this,” she said. “Part of what we need to say as parents is that we don’t know the outcome, we can’t predict our safety or theirs. [Our kids need to know that] we have their back. Kids who have that support tend to be more resilient.”

It was with this in mind that I took my son with me to the meeting … and breathed a sigh of relief when the roster of speakers filled up before his chance to speak could come.

(Dilshad D. Ali is a freelance journalist. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)