“Is Donald Trump a bad guy?” asked Niyati Sharma, a seven-year-old, in the middle of a playdate at a friend’s home. She was talking to an eight-year-old Indian neighbour in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“No, he’s not a bad guy,” said her mother. And in a hurried attempt to end the conversation, she added, “We’ll talk about this later, OK?”

The reply had nothing to do with her actual views on Trump, as she proceeded to explain discreetly to the other mother: “I just don’t want Niyati to say these things out loud at school or in the neighbourhood.”

The sentiment may seem odd, expressed in a state as deeply blue as California, which has consistently voted Democrat in every presidential election since 1988. Not only did California vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential elections, the majority of voters in every county in the San Francisco Bay Area polled Democrat. Yet, in every Bay Area county, more residents voted for Trump than they did in 2020.

But like Niyati’s mother, many Indians in America are grappling with the uncertain political climate as well as rapid changes in the cultural landscape around them. (Niyati is not her real name. With Indian immigrants on the radar of Republican supporters, nobody wanted to be identified for this story).

Indians in the US have long considered themselves a model minority – the sort who work hard and don’t cause much trouble. All of a sudden, they find themselves at the centre of a rift between two factions of Trump supporters: tech billionaires who support H-1B temporary work visas for high-skilled immigrants and MAGA hardliners who believe these immigrants are stealing American jobs.

Indians account for the largest share of H-1B visa holders, and are consequently at the receiving end of the ire of Trump supporters who believe their new president will Make America Great Again.

For many Indians, the spotlight on H-1B visas feels like a target on their back. This is true not just of Indians on a visa but those who have green cards that give them permanent residence as well as those who are citizens, as xenophobic sentiments against a community puts everyone at risk, irrespective of their immigration status.

Even though a majority of the San Francisco Bay Area voted for Harris, the growing support among working-class white residents for Trump is a worrying sign for many immigrants, given that this support ties in with the larger MAGA base.

Rajeev Seth, a green card holder who lives on the peninsula, recently attended a gathering at a popular South Indian restaurant in Fremont, a Bay Area town jokingly known as “Azaadnagari” for its large Indian population. Seth noticed a middle-aged white man staring at them and found it unsettling. He felt conspicuous, being part of such a large group of Indians in full public view, particularly in Fremont, Silicon Valley’s manufacturing hub, home to the likes of Tesla’s Fremont Factory.

Indians in other parts of the Bay Area share this sentiment. Nisha Pillai, who grew up in the US, finds that in some heavily Indian pockets, Indians have not integrated with the Americans around them, leading to a sort of oil-and-water mixing between races and communities.

Trump’s own Indian-American appointees have faced racial slurs. Memes depicting Chennai-born Sriram Krishnan as a dish of butter chicken began to do the rounds on X after Trump appointed him as a senior advisor on artificial intelligence. A right-wing commentator said Krishnan’s appointment went against Trump’s “America First” policy.

Trump himself has reversed his stand on H-1B visas. He had criticised the programme during his first stint as president eight years ago, but is now praising it. Indians have long voted for the Democratic party but over the last few years, many have felt that the party supports undocumented immigrants while ignoring issues faced by high-skilled legal immigrants.

Faced with xenophobic slurs from the far-right supporters of Trump, as well as equally vocal Republican support for skilled immigration, Indians find themselves in a peculiar position, unsure of who their allies are or where their loyalties should lie.

Immediately after being sworn in as president, Trump signed an executive order curtailing birthright citizenship. The US constitution grants citizenship to all babies born on US soil. Trump’s executive order, which sought to limit birthright citizenship if a mother was undocumented or on a temporary visa, invited a spate of lawsuits and has since been blocked by a federal judge.

But there were reports that some pregnant Indian women in the US had sought preterm C-sections to beat the February 20 deadline when the order was supposed to come into effect.

Trump also signed an executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programmes in the federal government. Many companies have followed suit, rolling back DEI initiatives in the last week. Many Indians in Silicon Valley have greatly benefitted from such programmes aimed at giving a diverse workforce a seat at the table.

Between November 2024, after the election, and Trump’s inauguration on January 20, companies such as Amazon sent emails to immigrant employees asking them to reschedule travel plans that would return them to the US on or after the day the president was sworn in, fearing a crackdown on immigration.

During the election campaign, Trump supporters were prominent across the San Francisco Bay Area, with pop-up stores selling MAGA merchandise from Mountain View in South Bay – home to the Google headquarters – to wealthy towns like Danville on the eastern edges of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The neighbourhood in which Niyati and her family live, once predominantly white, has rapidly turned brown over the last four years. Older white residents are selling their homes to younger Indians with children who want access to the good public schools in the area. Despite the overwhelmingly large population of Indians, many of whom are on a visa or green card, the neighbourhood saw virtually no signs of support for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the run-up to the presidential elections.

On the other hand, Trump supporters were visible, driving trucks with banners through strip malls and planting posters in their front yards. A few blocks from Niyati’s home, the bumper sticker on a neighbour’s car read “F@$k Harris”.

“The only support I saw for Kamala Harris was a magnet on a friend’s refrigerator in Sunnyvale,” said Ananya Chatterjee, an Indian immigrant on a visa, a stark contrast from what she witnessed during the previous two presidential elections.

On a rainy January afternoon eight years ago, Chatterjee, with her baby strapped to her, attended the 2017 women’s march against Trump in San Francisco. Held the day after Trump’s inauguration as president, the march was possibly the largest single-day protest in US history.

In Silicon Valley, too, there were massive protests against Trump’s immigration policies during his first term. Google employees took to the streets to protest Trump’s immigration ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries entering the US. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin had addressed the rally, showed solidarity with their employees and criticised Trump.

Fast forward to the present: Google donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and both Pichai and Brin attended the inauguration last week, seated with the Trump camp. In 2021, Facebook had deplatformed Trump, but the account was reinstated in 2024. Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, too, attended Trump’s inauguration and donated $1 million to the inaugural fund.

Indians who worked at Silicon Valley’s big tech companies say they were truly proud of their employers for having the courage to stand up to the government eight years ago. Big Tech’s pivot in support of Trump has left many immigrants feeling deeply insecure about their future.

“I remember being part of a protest in San Jose against Trump’s plans to build a wall along the Mexico border and deport immigrant families,” says Chatterjee. “My American friend, who worked in big tech, was there too. She had designed and painted her own banner, with a caricature of Trump, that read ‘Another Prick With No Wall’, a play on the title of a song by the rock band Pink Floyd.”

Back then, Trump’s election was seen as a bad joke on America. This time round, Chatterjee is coming to terms with the fact that she is well and truly living in Trump’s world.

The resentment towards well-paid Indians in tech is not new to the Trump regime. Two years ago, Dheeraj D’Souza, who had moved to the Bay Area from Mumbai, recalls an argument with a pest-control worker over how much to pay him. “In the middle of the discussion, the man looked at me and said he, too, once worked in tech, but his job had been moved to India,” said D’Souza. “It felt like a weird thing to say. He didn’t know anything about me, but guessed from my brown skin that I was another Indian techie in the Bay Area.”

The conversation that took place during the Biden regime now seems to be taking place on a national scale.

Anahita Mukherji is an award-winning Indian journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.