A lady fled her war-torn homeland, however discovered extra trauma in San Francisco

The morning began like most in the Saleh family’s tiny studio six floors above Turk and Hyde streets in the Tenderloin. The four children rose from their mats on the floor as their parents emerged from the closet where they shared a small mattress.

Abu Bakr Saleh, the father and sole earner in the family of refugees who fled the war in Yemen, rushed to begin a 16-hour double shift at a grocery store and a KFC. His wife, Sumaya Albadani, began an isolating day of cooking, cleaning and waiting for the others to return.

The kids — Ahmed, 16, Asma, 15, Raghad, 12, and 10-year-old Maya — rode a rickety elevator downstairs, down to one of the city’s most distressed blocks, before fanning out to their four schools.

But on Sept. 29, 2021, Raghad didn’t reach hers.

The sixth-grader at Francisco Middle School in North Beach — who had suffered a major trauma the year before, when an immigration fiasco forced her family to leave her with strangers in Egypt — lingered on the 400 block of Larkin Street while Ahmed ran into a shop to do an errand.

Just then, a woman in a wheelchair approached, yelling incoherently and spouting Islamophobic statements about the girl’s hijab, according to the girl and police. Raghad, still learning English, only caught portions of the diatribe, but heard three words very clearly: “Are you scared?”

Raghad Saleh, 11, poses for a portrait on Wednesday, December 8, 2021, in San Francisco, Calif. Saleh was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was attacked by a stranger several weeks ago on her walk to school.

Yalonda M James/The Chronicle 2021

“After that, she came close to me, and she hit me,” the girl told me a few months later. “She punched me in the head. I felt dizzy after that. I couldn’t believe it.”

Ahmed witnessed the attack and rushed to help. A security guard called 911. Police responded and arrested the woman on suspicion of committing assault, child endangerment and a hate crime. After getting checked out by paramedics, Raghad spent the day at home.

She hasn’t been the same since, her family said. She spends long hours playing games on her phone or watching YouTube videos. She’s listless. She cries more. She’s still fearful, saying she’s seen the suspect several times since the attack despite a protective order to stay away.

The attack was shocking, but only to a degree, in a neighborhood with one of the city’s highest assault rates. And it would ripple outward: In November, the episode would become one focus of a letter that Tenderloin families delivered to Mayor London Breed, pleading for help.

(From left to right): In this undated family photo Asma Saleh and Raghad Saleh pose for a photo in Yemen. Raghad was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was attacked by a stranger last year in the Tenderloin on her walk to school.

Photo Courtesy Abu Bakr Saleh/The Chronicle

“We are immigrants and refugees. We are children and mothers and fathers,” began the letter, penned by staff at the Tenderloin Community Benefit District and signed by 400 neighbors. “We are the Tenderloin, and you have failed us.”

The Salehs had one wish: to escape their $2,050-a-month studio for a bigger apartment in a safer neighborhood. More broadly, they sought the American dream in a city that proclaims itself a refuge.

But while San Francisco officials furiously debated what to do about a crisis of homelessness, addiction and mental illness in the Tenderloin, no one talked much about reducing harm to the many families stuck in one of the last semi-affordable stretches of the city.

In many respects, the Saleh family was living a dream life in Yemen. Abu Bakr, now 38, supported his family as an accountant for the finance ministry. Their six-bedroom home in Ibb, a city in western Yemen, was surrounded by lush gardens.

But the country’s war that began in 2014, when Houthi rebels took control of the northern part of Yemen, brought devastation. A military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States entered the fight, and it has dragged on since. The United Nations estimates 377,000 people have been killed, 70% of them young children. Millions more, including the Salehs, have been displaced.

Abu Bakr made it to San Francisco in 2016 to join his parents, who were already living in Mission Bay. He planned to get settled and then send for his wife and four children, who had fled to Egypt. Finally, on March 1, 2020, the family received visas to travel to the United States — all but Raghad. To this day, it’s not clear why.

Raghad Saleh’s father, Abu Bakr Saleh, stocks soft drinks during his shift at Saabis Groceries, a corner market in Bayview Hunterspoint, on Wednesday, January 26, 2022, in San Francisco, Calif. Saleh, who’s originally from Yemen, usually works six days a week, sometimes seven, and rarely sees his family. “I’m happy I bring my family here. I’m lucky because I stay with my kids. But I work too hard because (it’s) expensive here,” Sales said. “It’s too expensive here and I can’t save money and I stay in a bad location also. I work 85 hours a week. If I want to take a vacation, I can’t buy rent. No money. It’s too much. I work too hard.” Saleh’s 11-year-old daughter, Raghad, was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was recently attacked by a stranger on her walk to school.

Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle

As they waited, they faced a deadline — the July 1 expiration date of the visas — and a pandemic obstacle: The Trump administration suspended visa services at all U.S. embassies and consulates in March 2020 and, in June, banned most immigration to the U.S. through the end of the year.

So Sumaya and her other children made the excruciating decision to fly to San Francisco while they still could, depositing Raghad with a Yemeni family in Cairo they barely knew.

“All the time in the airplane,” Sumaya recalled, “I was crying because I left my daughter.”

The Saleh family became one of 23 plaintiffs challenging Trump’s immigration restrictions in court. The Chronicle told their story on July 29, 2020, and the next month, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo granted Raghad — who’d been stranded for six weeks — a visa.

But their new life was far from what they had envisioned.

“Thank you, my God, to bring my family here,” Abu Bakr said. “I’m happy I’m here because it’s too much problem in Yemen. No salary, no power, no water, no food. It’s war. But I work too hard because it’s expensive here, you know? I can’t save money, and I stay in a bad location also.”

Raghad Saleh (center) pulls off her mask and smiles at her family moments after she arrived at San Francisco International from Egypt. Raghad had been separated from the family due to a visa issue.

Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle 2020

Walking a few blocks with Raghad one day last December, from a Muni stop to her home, I saw what her dad meant. We strolled past a strip club with the sign “Where the Wild Girls Are.” Past people slumped unconscious in bus shelters. Past a woman screaming gibberish. Past a woman doing drugs on the sidewalk, her face bloodied. Past piles of trash and feces.

“This neighborhood is so scary,” Raghad said, moving quickly and nervously adjusting her hijab.

At night, the family doesn’t leave their studio. Still, they have trouble sleeping with the sounds of gunshots, fights and sirens.

“We don’t go to the window in case the gun comes,” said Maya, holding her fingers in the shape of a pistol.

Sumaya, speaking Arabic through an interpreter, said she was shocked when her picture of America didn’t match the reality of her new home. “From the pictures, I thought it would be really clean and now, when I walk up the street, it’s really, really painful to see all these things,” she said.

“If you walk a little bit far away from here,” Sumaya added, “You can say, ‘Yes, this is the United States I know.’”

Raghad Saleh, 11, left, crosses the street with close friends Maison, 12, center, and Hager, 12, as they head home after attending classes at Francisco Middle School on Wednesday, December 8, 2021, in San Francisco, Calif. Saleh was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was attacked by a stranger several weeks ago on her walk to school.

Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle 2021

More than two months after Raghad was attacked, her mother brought her and her brother to a mid-December meeting with Breed in the city’s main library to discuss conditions in the Tenderloin. The mayor barred journalists, but according to an audience member’s recording, she told the families she was frustrated by the neighborhood’s “horrible conditions.”

“You’re dealing with the concern of whether you might get robbed or hit over the head or attacked or spit on,” Breed told them.

People in the audience said the city was looking the other way as drug dealers created misery. And that cops just drove past rather than walking the beat. Several shared stories about their businesses being robbed, strangers attacking them, hate crimes proliferating and being forced to huddle with children at playgrounds as men brandished guns outside the gates.

Breed promised big changes. She would deploy more officers to the Tenderloin like she had in Union Square after the looting of Louis Vuitton and other luxury stores weeks before.

After the meeting, Raghad said she was upset she didn’t get to share her story of being attacked before the mayor abruptly left. “There are a lot of people who are struggling in this area and facing the same problem I did,” she said.

But the family was encouraged. The mayor had promised help.

Raghad Saleh, 11, right, holds the hand of her close friend Maison, 12, left, as they ride the bus following classes at Francisco Middle School on Wednesday, December 8, 2021, in San Francisco, Calif. Saleh was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was attacked by a stranger several weeks ago on her walk to school.

Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle 2021

Four days later, Breed assembled the news media at City Hall to announce a state of emergency in the Tenderloin meant to end “all the bulls— that has destroyed our city.” She said residents would see far more police and that they’d crack down on drug dealing, gun violence and the resale of stolen goods.

But that pledge of a Union Square-like police presence in the Tenderloin never materialized. More officers came months later — Breed said the delay owed to understaffing and the omicron virus — and only during the day.

Drug dealing continued unabated, signaling that purveyors of fancy handbags were more important to the city than low-income families like the Salehs who were left to deal with the fallout.

The family occasionally witnessed overdoses from their window. After Maya started talking about seeing “dizzy” people “laying on the floor,” it became clear she meant people passed out on the sidewalks after using drugs.

“Everybody is scared here,” Maya said. “If I walk with myself, my brain says, ‘Maya, don’t be scared.’ Everything will be OK.”

Raghad Saleh, 11, right, eats a meal with her mother, Sumaya Saleh, 39, and her sister, Maya Saleh, 10, in their Tenderloin apartment on Wednesday, December 8, 2021, in San Francisco, Calif. Saleh was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was attacked by a stranger several weeks ago on her walk to school.

Yalonda M James/

Though Raghad’s visa crisis was unique, her family’s path from Yemen to the Tenderloin was not.

Jehan Hakim, chair of the Yemeni Alliance Committee, a group calling on the United States to cease military involvement in Yemen, said her father moved her family here in the mid-1970s in pursuit of better education and more opportunities.

Word of mouth brought more families from Yemen, and eventually hundreds settled in two low-income buildings on Turk and Jones streets. Today, there are two mosques in the neighborhood and a community group that provides immigration help, but almost no other services specifically for Yemeni immigrants, Hakim said.

“We don’t have anything with wrap-around social services that’s focusing on supporting Arab people coming from other countries,” she said.

Aseel Fara, a 22-year-old outreach coordinator at the Tenderloin Community Benefit District, said the Saleh family’s story sounded like his own. When his family left Yemen, they packed into a studio apartment on the same block as the Salehs, lured by the cheapest possible rent in the city.

“We’re limited to areas such as the Tenderloin,” Fara said, “which are neglected by the city and neglected by society.”

There’s no good data on how many Yemeni people live in the Tenderloin — Arab people are supposed to mark themselves as white in the U.S. census — but Hakim guesses as many as 2,500 live in the neighborhood now.

Raghad Saleh, 11, listens to instructions from her music teacher Flora Wong as she sits by her piano during class at Francisco Middle School on Friday, January 7, 2022, in San Francisco, Calif. Saleh was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was attacked by a stranger last year on her walk to school.

Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle

Even the richest families from Yemen are poor in San Francisco, Fara said, because any money they’ve saved buys so little here, and their education and work experience back home counts for next to nothing. Men from Yemen who settle in the Tenderloin often work as janitors or grocery store clerks, he said, and the women often stay home alone during the school day.

Moving from a conservative Muslim country to the anything-goes Tenderloin can be shocking, Fara said. And it can be frightening for women to walk the streets in hijabs, which sometimes draw stares and bigoted remarks.

But despite the hardships, Fara is glad his family moved to San Francisco.

“I don’t want to take away from what America has provided us,” he said. “The opportunities are endless.”

And indeed, the Saleh children have their dreams.

Ahmed, who goes to Galileo High, told me he wants to study computer science and work as a web developer. Asma, in a program at SF International High designed for recent immigrants, hopes to be an interpreter and plans to tackle Spanish after perfecting her English. Maya, a bright-eyed girl who attends Tenderloin Community Elementary, imagines becoming a doctor.

Raghad, rarely as animated as her siblings, said she isn’t sure what her future will bring. She acknowledged she still feels depressed. She went to the counseling office at school once, but said the social worker wasn’t there, and she never tried again.

“Sometimes I dream my house from Yemen is here in the USA,” Raghad said, explaining this would be the best of both worlds.

Raghad Saleh’s sister, Maya Saleh, 10, converses with Urban Alchemy ambassador Aaron Trujillo as she returns home from school, at Turk and Hyde, in the Tenderloin on Friday, February 11, 2022, in San Francisco, Calif. Raghad Saleh was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was attacked by a stranger last year on her walk to school.

Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle

About six weeks after Breed declared her Tenderloin emergency, the Salehs told me they felt their block was a little safer and cleaner, partly thanks to ambassadors from Urban Alchemy, the nonprofit group hired by San Francisco to calm the city’s troubled core.

The blocks to the north seemed worse, so they often walked south instead — to the fields and playgrounds in Civic Center Plaza.

“Sometimes I feel sad,” Abu Bakr said, sitting on a bench during a rare day off as his daughters played. “I worry too much. I can’t save more. I can’t see my children.”

Ahmed, sitting at his father’s feet, said he’d told one of the mayor’s staff members at the library meeting about Raghad’s attack — and the family’s wish to leave the Tenderloin — but that no help had come through.

After I started asking questions, the Mayor’s Office and District Attorney’s Office pledged housing and mental health assistance for the Salehs. But eight months after the attack, none has materialized.

Finding publicly funded therapists taking new clients has proved difficult due to pandemic-fueled waiting lists, and finding an Arabic-speaking therapist is nearly impossible, explained Kasie Lee, chief of the D.A.’s Victim Services Division. The office was able to locate an Arabic-speaking therapist in private practice and is trying to secure money to pay for sessions, but Raghad still hasn’t talked to a professional about her trauma.

Obtaining a new apartment is also difficult. Lee explained that relocation assistance from the District Attorney’s Office and a state victim’s compensation fund would typically help the family cover a security deposit and first month’s rent. The problem is finding a larger, safer apartment the family can afford, long-term, on its own. The family can apply for affordable housing programs, but the wait lists are notoriously long.

Raghad Saleh, 11, right, hugs her sister Asma Saleh, 14, as they hang out at Civic Center Plaza on Saturday, January 29, 2022, in San Francisco, Calif. Raghad Saleh was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was recently attacked by a stranger several weeks ago on her walk to school.

Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle

Moving out of the city proved daunting since the family had no car and no job lined up elsewhere and couldn’t easily scrape together moving expenses.

Nothing much has happened in the case of Raghad’s alleged attacker. District Attorney Chesa Boudin charged Tinesha Scott, 48, with felony child endangerment and felony assault with a hate crime enhancement.

Boudin’s spokesperson, Rachel Marshall, said the office filed a motion to detain Scott, but a Superior Court judge denied it. The courts issued a criminal protective order, but Raghad said she has seen Scott several times since the encounter — including beneath her studio window. She said she was terrified when Scott waved at her.

“Next time,” Raghad said, “she could be holding a knife.”

Phoenix Streets, a public defender representing Scott, said his client had experienced a mental health crisis that September morning and received care at a hospital. Eight months after the attack, Scott has not received long-term treatment, which Streets blamed on “the underfunding of our mental health care system.”

And so, all these months later, everybody involved remains in pretty much the same position: The Saleh family stuck in a tiny studio on a ragged block. Raghad anxious and scared. Scott’s mental illness unaddressed. The city of San Francisco seemingly no closer to helping the families of the Tenderloin — which is no longer in a state of emergency, at least officially.

But there is one big change: Sumaya is expecting her fifth baby — a boy — in September. He’s one more reason to find a bigger apartment. One more reason to strive for a better life. One more reason to dream.

(From left to right): Maya Saleh, 10, Abu Saleh, 37, Asma Saleh, 15, Raghad Saleh, 12, and Ahmed Saleh, 16, pose for a portrait in their small studio Tenderloin apartment on Sunday, April 3, 2022, in San Francisco, Calif. Raghad Saleh was stuck in Egypt in 2020 when her family moved to San Francisco from Yemen due to Visa problems. She was attacked by a stranger last year on her walk to school.

Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle

Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf