This immigrant woman in San Francisco isn’t marching against Trump. But she’s ‘silently protesting.’

Priya Jayaraman's parents warned her not to talk politics outside their home. They told her, "Mind your own business, don't look at other people while they are talking."

Jayaraman, a dentist in San Francisco, says that being a woman in India back then, they just wanted to keep her safe.

She moved from India to the US in 2004, but those rules have stuck with her.

It's one reason she won't be participating in the Women's March, a sizable demonstration against President-elect Donald Trump that will follow his inauguration. That doesn't mean she's pro-Trump, though.

Jayaraman doesn't think that simply being in the US automatically allows one to be vocal. "The right to protest is an exercise in privilege," she says.

A right that she doesn't believe she has. Jayaraman is here on a H-1B employment visa for specialty occupations. Her immigration status makes her feel vulnerable.

At a protest, if things get ugly, “I could get arrested, I could get deported, or I could never get my green card,” she explains. “The 12 years that I’ve been in this country is pretty much most of my adult life, and I have worked very hard to be where I am today and I can’t see it go away.”

Jayaraman also treads lightly on social media. She is one of the members of the Global Nation Exchange discussion group on Facebook, where she first told us about her experience with protest. Still, taking part in an interview like this one, she says, is scary.

An incident from her dentistry school days, in San Francisco, which is known for its progressiveness, also gives her pause.

She had struck up a casual conversation with a student she had only just met. “I asked the resident, and these were my exact words, ‘What brings you to our neck of the paradise?’" she recalls. "This resident says, 'What do you mean ourneck of the woods? I grew up not 20 miles from here. Where did you grow up?' That really hurt."

Seven years later "and it still hurts the same," she says. Sometimes she self-censors to avoid conflicts, and debates that turn ugly. "I don't want nasty and ugly, we have too much of that already."

But as people take to the streets this weekend, she does want to participate.

“I am silently protesting,” she says. “I'm not quite comfortable in sharing how I'm silently protesting, but I am. You bet I am.”