Muslim soldier says command sergeant major forced her to remove hijab: ‘I feel violated'

A Muslim soldier who filed a complaint alleging that her religious freedom was violated when she was forced to remove her hijab now intends to file a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Army.

“I want to let people know that’s it’s not a bad thing to stand up for yourself when you’re getting mistreated,” Sgt. Cesilia Valdovinos, 26, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. 

She alleges that her troubles began in June 2018, when her brigade commander, Col. David Zinn, granted her approval to wear a hijab with her uniform; from that time forward, she claims, her hijab triggered “extremely hateful” behavior towards her, including repeated vitriol and harassment.

“I got called a ‘terrorist.’ I got called ‘ISIS.’ I hear comments that I’m the reason why 9/11 happened,” says Valdovinos, who converted to Islam in March 2016. “There’s a lot of anger and animosity.” She claims that her breaking point came while she was attending a suicide-prevention briefing with the 704th Brigade Support Battalion at a chapel in Ft. Carson, Colo. That, she says, is when her command sergeant major allegedly grabbed her arm, pulled her out of rank and forced her to remove her hijab in front of her colleagues.

“I felt embarrassed and religiously raped in a sense,” Valdovinos wrote in an email to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), an advocacy organization that is representing her. “My religious preference is only to unveil in front of my husband in the comfort of my own home.”

That incident pushed her to file an official complaint with the Military Equal Opportunity Office (MEO) on March 7 (with the MRFF’s assistance), in which she alleges a series of troubling incidents — including being called a “terrorist” by a fellow soldier and seeing no action taken when she informed his commander; being removed from her assignment as “culinary arts specialist” at a dining facility because of her “religious preference to not handle pork”; and being referred to by her sergeant as “the girl with the hood.”

Although her MEO complaint was found to be “unsubstantiated,” Valdovinos now intends to file a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Army for violating her First Amendment rights.

While the senior noncommissioned officer told the Army Times that Valdovinos was wearing her hair out of regulations underneath the hijab, Valdovinos maintains that she was not asked about her hair, and believes it would have been impossible to see her it underneath the opaque garb.