Hijab-wearing White House staffer quits Trump administration

Hijab-wearing ex-White House Muslim staffer of Bangladeshi-origin has said that she quit her job after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his controversial travel ban, which made her last for eight days in the new administration.

Rumana Ahmed was hired in 2011 to work at the White House and eventually the National Security Council (NSC).

According to local U.S. media reports, she said, "I am a hijab-wearing Muslim woman and I was the only hijabi in the West Wing.

The Obama administration always made me feel welcome and included."

Ahmed said that like most of her fellow American-Muslims, she spent much of 2016 watching with "consternation" as Trump "vilified our community".

"Despite this or because of it, I thought, I should try to stay on the NSC staff during the Trump Administration, in order to give the new president and his aides a more nuanced view of Islam, and of America's Muslim citizens," she said.

Ahmed, whose parents immigrated to the US from Bangladesh in 1978, said inspired by then president Barack Obama, she joined the White House in 2011, after graduating from the George Washington University.

Ahmed's personal account comes amid a spike in incidents of intimidation and assault targeting hijab-wearing women across the US following Trump's electoral triumph.