I had to remind myself that I was no longer in Cairo, where Egyptian police had once arrested me on charges of “masterminding the Egyptian Revolution.” I was a refugee working for minimum wage as a desk clerk in a San Francisco housing complex. The apartment building was a single room occupancy in a tough neighborhood called the Tenderloin, and our cameras regularly filmed robberies and stabbings that the police came to investigate.

Whenever I saw the police, it reminded me of the decade I spent fighting to free Egypt, my country, from a police state. I had been a democracy activist since 2004, when I stood in downtown Cairo with 300 protesters and signs that demanded an end to corruption and the rule of Hosni Mubarak, the dictator who ruled Egypt for three decades.