Before he ever stepped into a hospital, Nikan Khatibi walked the hallways of a Texas public school as an immigrant kid with a name no teacher could pronounce right on the first try. He was brown, foreign, and underestimated. In a place where blending in was safer than standing out, he didn’t have the luxury of invisibility.
“I remember being judged before I even spoke,” Khatibi recalls. “They saw a kid with an accent, parents working multiple jobs, and assumed the ceiling was low.”
But he was quietly taking notes.
Years later, with a medical degree in hand and the weight of his community’s struggles etched into his psyche, he stepped into exam rooms not just as a doctor, but as a fighter. His patients weren’t just charts or cases — they were families like his. Working-class. Marginalized. Often ignored.
He saw the systemic failures — insurance policies that punished the poor, bureaucracies that buried the vulnerable — and he couldn’t look away. So he didn’t. He spoke up. First in local advocacy meetings. Then in state forums. And eventually, in the halls of federal power.
What shocked many — and rattled more than a few — was who he was willing to sit with.
“Nikan’s working with Trump?” people whispered. Yes. He was.
Because Khatibi never played the partisan game. While others picked sides, he picked strategies. He believed if you really wanted to shift systems, you had to go wherever power lived — and challenge it from within.
His conversations with the former president weren’t about photo ops or fame. They were about real, gritty issues: lowering prescription drug costs, addressing mental health disparities, creating economic pipelines for communities no one else was fighting for.
And while critics accused him of selling out, those closest to him knew better.
“I’ll shake any hand if it helps my patients,” he once said, without flinching.
Now, Nikan Khatibi moves between worlds — hospital corridors, political chambers, corporate boardrooms — with a calm intensity. Some still try to box him in. Physician? Advocate? Operative? Power broker?
But he’s never cared much for titles. He’s too busy breaking ceilings for the next immigrant kid who refuses to blend in
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