Black Mauritanians’ Ongoing Search For Safety
Updated January 2023; download PDF
Deportation, Arrest, Torture, Expulsion, Oppression Solutions and the Sacredness of “Home”
The Mauritanian government is engaged in a slow-motion ethnic cleansing against its Black population. Black Mauritanians from Fulani, Soninke, Wolof, and other ethnic groups have rich histories and cultures that the Moorish government has been trying to extinguish for decades.
In most cases the world has failed to act, or even notice. That must change. This backgrounder discusses the real state violence that Mauritania carries out on its Black residents, the United States’ role in repressing Black Mauritanians, and steps the U.S. must take to allow Black Mauritanians to recover from, and move past, these harms.
CONTENTS
The Mauritanian Government Is Still The Oppressor
Language Erasure
Police Violence
Land-Grabbing and Extinction of Families – Then and Today
Statelessness: Another Form of Repression and Erasure
The U.S. Became Complicit In Harming Black Mauritanians
Deported To Danger
The Brutal Detention and Deportation Machine
Beyond Responses, Solutions
Support from Congress and the Community
Necessary U.S. Policy Changes
The Sacredness of “Home”
The Mauritanian Government Is Still The Oppressor
In a seminal 1994 report, “Mauritania’s Campaign of Terror,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote: “long before ‘ethnic cleansing’ entered popular parlance, its effects were painfully apparent in Mauritania. Since 1989, tens of thousands of black Mauritanians have been forcibly expelled, and hundreds more have been tortured or killed; an undeclared military occupation of the Senegal River Valley, where many of the blacks live, subjects those who remained to harsh repression. The campaign to eliminate black culture in Mauritania, orchestrated by the white Moor rulers, reached its height in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and continues today.”
Although written in 1994, many of this report’s painful findings remain relevant in 2022. HRW writes: “a chronic and insidious pattern of violations against black Mauritanians, including indiscriminate killing, detention, torture, rape, and beating by the military and militia forces stationed in the valley has been the result. The abuses have been associated with attempts to seize land owned by blacks, expel them from the country, deny their civil rights, and institutionalize control over them.”
Unlike thirty years ago, the Mauritanian government is not carrying out mass murder on a daily basis—although police violence against Black people is common and unchecked. And while slavery remains an egregious problem, it would be wrong to think that the repression of Black Mauritanians begins and ends there. Today’s Mauritanian government is using tools like land-grabbing and denaturalization to disappear and destroy Mauritania’s Black ethnic groups. Simply put: Mauritania is still not a safe place to be Black today.
There is a huge gap between perception and reality when it comes to Mauritania’s human rights record, fueled by the government’s successful clampdown on accurate information and the lack of international observers and media in this country. While Mauritania’s ongoing problem with slavery is well-known, if not well-understood, other tactics used to repress Black people mostly fly under the radar screen.
For example, on November 28, 2021, while Assistant Secretary of State Catherine Phee congratulated the Mauritanian government for making “progress” on human rights, Mauritanian police beat peaceful protestors nearly to death. It seems the only progress the Mauritanian government has made was to get better at hiding its actions.
The Mauritanian government’s goal is still to reduce the Black population in the country, which actually forms the majority despite declarations from “official” sources. Rather than genocide, however, the government is using tools to limit Black Mauritanians’ mobility, rights, and access to a means to survive. These tools include: police violence, land-grabbing, and statelessness.
Language Erasure
French and Arabic have co-existed as the two languages of government in Mauritania for decades. Black Mauritanians mostly speak French, plus one or more native languages, such as Fulani, Soninke, or Wolof. Most do not know and have not received instruction in Arabic. For years, the Mauritanian government has been slowly eliminating the use of French in public life. Now, there is near-total Arabization of government services. For example, the following services are conducted only in Arabic:
Exams required for certain jobs, such as police and medical positions
Hospital records
Birth certificates and other governmental records
Police and court records
Highly trained neurosurgeon, Dr. Aminata Boubacar Diop, was denied employment in the civil service because she does not know Arabic. She points out that the patients she would see in this position do not speak Arabic either, but do share common languages with her. Another man interviewed by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance failed the police exam because he did not know Arabic.
Black schoolchildren are beginning to get instruction in Arabic, while their families prefer they learn to read and write French. That choice is being taken from them in order to “Arabize” the culture. And it leaves generations of older children and adults of all ages locked out of official life because they do read or understand Arabic.
The erasure of languages spoken by Black Mauritanians is not incidental. It’s part of the multi-layered apartheid regime the Mauritanian government has put in place to keep Black Mauritanians from achieving agency and power.
Police Violence
(Content Warning – graphic images and violence)
In 2018, a peaceful protest calling for the release of abolitionist (and intended presidential candidate) Biram Dah Abeid from prison was met with violence by the Mauritanian government. Front Line Defenders, the global human rights organization, reported that twelve human rights activists were attacked by Mauritanian police. Disturbing photos of the victims of police brutality, which included the wife of Biram Dah Abeid, were published on the blog CRIDEM. View photos of this police violence against human rights activists in Mauritania [strict content warning].
In 2019, Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ghazouani declared himself the winner of the country’s presidential elections, sending military tanks into the streets and closing off Internet access nationwide. He arrested opposition leaders like Samba Thiam in a strong show of force against Black Mauritanians advocating for civil and human rights. Ghazouani is the hand-picked successor of former President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who is now facing criminal corruption charges for his actions while president.
In 2020 Abbas Diallo, a Black Mauritanian, was gunned down by security forces in the south of Mauritania as he was returning from work in Senegal. The reason this father of six was killed by the police? Violation of the COVID curfew. Diallo was Black. No one has ever been held accountable for his murder by police. Also in 2020, observers witnessed Mauritanian police using a “Derek Chauvin” type hold on a Black man. These two incidents became public, but the vast majority of these situations are never reported in the media.
In 2021 and 2022, Ghazouani’s security forces beat peaceful demonstrators, including a pregnant woman protesting the seizure of her family’s land, and others commemorating the lives of 28 Black soldiers who were murdered by the Mauritanian government in 1990. Their injuries resulted in lost teeth and broken bones. Photo documentation has circulated in the diaspora, but there has been no media coverage of these incidents.
In fact, the beatings of protestors by Mauritanian police occurred the very same day that Assistant Secretary of State Catherine Phee hailed “Mauritania’s efforts to address long standing human rights issues, combat corruption, and defeat Covid-19,” calling them “profound and progressive.”
The fact that the U.S. State Department does not have an accurate picture of what is happening to Black people in Mauritania today is of deep concern. State Department reports are relied upon in U.S. immigration court, where judges consider asylum claims and decide whether or not it is safe to deport someone. State Department assessments may inform actions in other areas, such as U.S. trade policies and the Department of Homeland Security’s deliberations over the potential issuance of Temporary Protected Status.
Land-Grabbing and Extinction of Families – Then and Today
Land-grabbing was one of the tactics the government used to drive Black Mauritanians out of the country in the 1990s, and it remains so today.
In a 2021 report, the Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in US described how the current Mauritanian government takes land and water access that has been in Black Mauritanians’ bloodlines for centuries and uses it for profit, with no consideration for how the people who relied on these resources will survive. The current exodus of Black Mauritanians to the United States and Europe is related to both state violence and co-option of these long-held resources needed to survive.
Iba Sarr, president of the southern branch of the Free Federation of Artisanal Fishing (la Federation Libre de la Peche Artisanal), laments the impact on N’Diago residents:
The state is creating a town [by the newly-constructed port], and it’s going to change the area, bring in others, and limit our access to resources—and we have no information about it. We have been here a long time, but we will get nothing. They will take our land and our resources, and we should have been told that they are doing this. They are not protecting us….
We used to have an abundance of fish, and today we have fewer fish—the conditions have become so much scarcer. Russian fishing boats and Chinese and Turkish ships have also been pillaging the seas. Every day we try to defend our community. The problem is that we have powerful businessmen who are looking to exploit us and they tell the world that Mauritania does not have a fishing tradition, but we do. . . . We want to practice responsible fishing; our life depends on it. Our life is the sea—we have nothing else.
Similar to the rarely-enforced anti-slavery laws in Mauritania, a policy to compensate the victims of land-grabbing exists—on paper. But, like the anti-slavery laws, this policy is almost never enforced. Villages are becoming extinct. The Mauritanian government does not include Black Mauritanians in decisions about development and or access to mineral rights on land they and their ancestors have relied on for generations.
Statelessness: Another Form of Repression And Extinction
In 2011, Mauritania instituted a national Census which resulted in the de-naturalization of Black Mauritanians who were not living in the country at the time, as well other Black Mauritanians subjected to heightened tests by government officials. For example, in order to “prove” their citizenship, Black Mauritanians are required to produce death certificates for multiple generations of their family members, an impossible feat in a country where 41% of children do not even have birth certificates. Mauritanians of Arab origin were not subjected to the same impossible tests. Protests about the de-naturalization of Black Mauritanians were met with arrests and the death of at least one activist.
To this day, the Mauritanian government refuses to recognize the citizenship of many Black Mauritanians who fled the genocide in the 1990s and early 2000s, or were forcibly deported by Mauritania. Without proof of citizenship, people cannot work, travel, or leave their homes without risk of harm.
The police often stop Black people walking down the street and demand to see their identity documents. If none are produced, individuals are extorted, beaten, and sometimes jailed.
The U.S. Became Complicit In Harming Black Mauritanians
Until the Trump administration took office, deportations from the U.S. to Mauritania were deliberately rare. Some Black Mauritanians who fled the country in the late 1990s and 2000s won asylum in the U.S., but others were denied for technical or unfair reasons. They didn’t have a lawyer, or were represented by unscrupulous “legal” advisors, and couldn’t navigate U.S. immigration law alone. Some didn’t know about the one-year filing deadline, or didn’t receive notice about an upcoming hearing. Court-appointed interpreters spoke the wrong dialect.
Others lost their cases because the immigration judge decided they were “not credible.” In this scenario, White, Christian judges—with no cultural background or trauma training—were empowered to assess the “credibility” of conservative Muslim men. The people seeking asylum had witnessed family members killed, and may have been tortured themselves. If they didn’t break down sobbing in the courtroom, did that mean they were lying? Many of these judges thought so. What a dangerous, false assumption.
Despite losing their cases, previous presidential administrations exercised prosecutorial discretion to forego these deportations, understanding the dangers Black Mauritanians would face if returned. In the eight years President Obama was in office, only 67 people were deported to Mauritania. Instead, many who had lost their asylum cases were put on Orders of Supervision with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They were allowed to work legally. They paid taxes, bought homes, started businesses, and raised families—living peaceful lives for decades.
Everything changed in 2017, when President Trump began to prioritize the deportation of long-settled immigrants who had Orders of Supervision with ICE. From a moral perspective, the deportations of long-term U.S. residents who regularly attended “check in” meetings with the U.S. government does not make sense. But the Trump administration approached it from a logistical perspective, with the goal of deporting as many people as possible—regardless of the consequences. And that is what they did.
In just one year, the Trump administration deported more people to Mauritania than the Obama administration did in eight years. Only 67 people were deported to Mauritania by the Obama administration, while the Trump administration deported 98 in FY 2018 alone. The FY 2021 number is not available, but using the low number of 15 as an educated guess, we can see that the average annual deportations of Mauritanians rose 462% when Trump took office.
This change in policy was first documented by The Atlantic in the article, “How Trump Radicalized ICE.” A video that accompanied the article followed Columbus, Ohio residents who had been living the “American Dream,” until it became an American nightmare. A series of respected members of the Ohio Mauritanian community—including a Quran teacher, Seydou Sarr—were arrested at ICE check-ins and deported to a country they all feared. Word spread and frightened Mauritanians began to sell their homes, cash out their retirement accounts, and prepare their families for a life apart, unraveling all of the safety they had found.
Deported To Danger
At the same time ICE ratcheted up deportations to Mauritania, the U.S. Trade Representative terminated Mauritania’s trade preferences under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, over its poor efforts to end slavery. Said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative C.J. Mahoney: “Forced or compulsory labor practices like hereditary slavery have no place in the 21st century. This action underscores this Administration’s commitment to ending modern slavery and enforcing labor provisions in our trade laws and trade agreements.”
Despite this acknowledgement, deportations continued.
The Ohio Immigrant Alliance interviewed 117 Black Mauritanians who were deported from the United States—or left the country out of fear of deportation—during the Trump administration. Many were arrested and held in horrific jails in Mauritania after their deportation, until their families paid a bribe. Others paid bribes at the airport and were able to avoid immediate arrest or a lengthy detention, but could not remain in Mauritania safely.
Many of the Black Mauritanians who were deported now live in Senegal. An additional cohort, fearful of the change in U.S. policy, fled before being deported, and now live in Canada or other African countries. Only fourteen of the 117 people interviewed by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance currently live in Mauritania, and most of them are in hiding. They don’t have identity documents and are at risk of detention and torture at any time. Read more here and listen to their experiences.
The arrests and abuse of people deported from the U.S. to Mauritania have been documented by Reveal, Reuters, and Truthout, which published pictures from inside one Mauritanian jail, as well as Biram Dah Abeid, the internationally-renowned human rights defender.
Deporting stateless people to a country that persecuted them, and dehumanized them by stripping them of their citizenship, is clearly wrong. Yet, as with other Trump administration immigration policies, the human cruelty was deliberate.
The Mauritanian government will not recognize the citizenship of people it had rendered stateless, or issue them passports. Passports are typically required in order to deport someone. So the Trump administration found a workaround, facilitating the deportation of Black Mauritanians with laissez-passers. Issued by the Mauritanian embassy, these are temporary travel documents that are immediately invalid once the person touches down on Mauritanian soil. They are not considered evidence of Mauritanian citizenship and cannot be used to obtain identity or travel documents in Mauritania.
People deported to Mauritania without identity documents are frequently exploited by the Mauritanian police, including at the airport upon arrival. If the police stop someone walking down the street, ask him for his identity document, and he cannot produce one, the person is often beaten, extorted, and/or taken to jail until he can pay a bribe. People interviewed by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance and the media report that they are consistently denied identity documents by Mauritanian officials upon deportation.
After nearly two decades in the United States, Seyni Diagne was deported to Mauritania and immediately arrested in the airport. He had originally sought asylum in the United States after Mauritania deported him to Senegal during the Mauritanian genocide. While Mr. Diagne lost his asylum case, he was allowed to remain in the U.S. under an Order of Supervision, until the Trump administration started revoking these permissions in 2017.
When Mr. Diagne arrived in Mauritania in 2018, ICE lied and told a Mauritanian police officer that he was a criminal in the U.S. and had been in prison. The police asked Mr. Diagne for his Mauritanian papers, which he did not have because the Mauritanian government no longer considered him a citizen.
He was imprisoned in a Mauritanian jail and held without trial for almost twenty days, in conditions so unbearable that he still feels the effects to this day. While Mauritania no longer considers Mr. Diagne to be a citizen, they do consider him a traitor for having sought asylum in the United States and speaking “blasphemy” against the Mauritanian government.
In the Mauritanian jail, Mr. Diagne reported that people were not allowed to use the bathroom for days or leave the cell, so they were forced to urinate where they slept. The jail was filthy, with mosquitoes and cockroaches everywhere. Every time a detainee screamed, the guards would beat and torture him. The conditions were so horrible, Mr. Diagne even lost consciousness. Eventually, he asked to be deported (again) to Senegal, and was allowed to leave after his family paid a bribe.
Mr. Diagne has kidney cancer and Hepatitis-C, for which he received no treatment while in U.S. immigration jail or the Mauritanian prison. To this day, he deals with the effects of a skin infection he received in that jail. His hands, feet, and skin are permanently damaged, and doctors have not yet found a cure.
“AB” and four other men were deported to Mauritania in January 2021. All five men were immediately arrested in Mauritania and held in jails there, into which AB was able to smuggle a phone. The conditions were disgusting. He was able to take a few photos. AB was released after his family paid a bribe, but he is on “probation” and has to check in with the Mauritanian government every two weeks, at which time he is detained the entire day.
The other men were detained even longer in the Mauritanian jails because their families had a harder time raising the money to buy their freedom. When telling his story, AB noted that his experience was not unique. “We are suffering as Black people here in Mauritania,” he said.
The Brutal Detention And Deportation Machine
When immigration policy affecting Black Mauritanians changed in 2017, deportation was not the only harm. They were also spending months or even years in U.S. immigration jails, further destroying their mental health and their families’ finances, and then deported in shackles or worse—the WRAP torture device—on on shadowy charter planes.
The federal government uses incarceration to coerce people into accepting deportation, rather than continuing to fight their cases from jail. Being detained makes it infinitely harder to find and pay a competent lawyer, and gather documents and evidence needed to succeed in immigration cases. Incarceration is extremely expensive and emotionally taxing for families. It takes breadwinners out of homes and adds new costs, like price-gouging phone and video calls and commissaries. Lawyers’ fees also increase when a person is detained and harder to access. Incarceration compounds the stress on spouses, children, and detained people, such that they may never fully recover from these experiences.
On top of the procedural and financial hurdles created by incarceration, the government has used physical and psychological abuse, including the denial of medical care, against individuals to try to get them to accept deportation. Like Seyni Diagne before him, ICE denied medical treatment to Goura Ndiaye for months and then deported him in shackles, his hip bone necrotic and detached from his body.
In mass deportation charter flights like the one Mr. Ndiaye endured, people are shackled at their wrists, waists, and feet for hours, even when trying to eat or use the restroom. Some are tied up in “The WRAP” restraints and forced to endure hour after hour in stress positions, barely able to breathe. These flights are deliberately hard to track, and detained people are not given advance notice of their deportation date so that they can try to prepare. The whole process is deliberately disorienting and gratuitously dehumanizing.
Said Breanne Palmer, Interim Policy & Advocacy Director at the UndocuBlack Network, “Black people in America, including Black immigrants, are familiar with the U.S. government’s unrepentant misuse of medical devices and experimentation on Black bodies. DHS and its component agencies must be held accountable for coercing Black immigrants onto deportation flights with what amounts to a torture device. It is time for all people to be outraged by the myriad ways Black immigrants are targeted by DHS for egregious harm.”
Beyond Responses, Solutions
Support from Congress and the Community
In January 2023, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown (D) and Representative Mike Carey (R-OH/15) sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, requesting the designation of Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Enforced Departure for Mauritanians in the United States. They write:
Beyond enslavement… Black Mauritanians forcibly returned to their country face the threat of suffering human rights abuses including arrest, torture, and detention without due process. This is especially true for Mauritanian activists and journalists who speak out against slavery and human rights issues…. Some of those who have been imprisoned after being forcibly returned to Mauritania have reportedly been subjected to inhumane conditions including unsanitary cells, lack of water, and torture.
Pressure for protection of human rights in Mauritania has long been a bipartisan issue. President Trump cut off trade benefits to Mauritania because of its record, and the Biden administration renewed these restrictions after receiving inputfrom the Mauritanian diaspora. Republican and Democratic members of Congress have issued various reprimands, including this letter to the International Monetary Fund from Reps. Meadows, Garrett, Duncan, Bilirakis, Zeldin, and Perry; this letter to Secretary of State Pompeo from Reps. Chabot, Smith, Wright, Sensenbrenner, and Burchett; and this letterfrom then-Senator Harris and Reps. Nadler, Thompson, Lofgren, and Beatty.
Scores of humanitarian organizations have also called for the immediate designation of TPS or DED for Mauritania.
Necessary U.S. Policy Changes
The U.S. government must take immediate steps to reverse its role in the abuse of Black Mauritanians, prevent further harms, and pressure Mauritania to truly recognize its Black residents’ civil and human rights. The Biden administration must:
Issue accurate reports on country conditions that reflect the lived experiences of Black Mauritanians, and are not influenced by Mauritanian government propaganda.
Designate Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Enforced Departure for Mauritania.
Grant U.S. government-issued identity, travel, and work permission documents to stateless people, and stop their deportations.
Support Black Mauritanians’ meritorious asylum claims.
Allow deported Black Mauritanians, and others, to come home to the United States.
Use every tool available, including but not limited to trade sanctions, to pressure the Mauritanian government to guarantee full civil and human rights to Black Mauritanians.
The number of Black Mauritanians who need Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Enforced Departure, or return after deportation, is not large. But for those who need it, the stakes are high. Black Mauritanians in the United States consistently express the same fear of arrest, torture, and death if deported. During Trump’s deportation wave, many were forced to become refugees once again.
With a few actions, the Biden administration could bring much-needed security and relief to people in the U.S. who have Mauritanian roots, and allow families to reunite and start to heal.
The Sacredness of “Home”
Safety for Black Mauritanians will only exist in Mauritania when the government enforces anti-slavery laws; ends police brutality, extortion, and discriminatory arrests and detentions; permits the exercise of free and open speech without repression; guarantees equal access to education and opportunities for all people; restores the citizenship of stateless people in Mauritania; stops taking land, water access, and other property and resources from residents; and holds itself accountable for abuses past, present, and future.
Houleye Thiam, President of the Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in US, said: “Dictators are weapons of mass destruction. Black Mauritanians aren’t leaving their homes, families, and lives to go on an adventure. They are fleeing to survive, running from a country where Black people are oppressed, enslaved, denied citizenship, attacked, and killed simply for being Black.”
Like all people, Black Mauritanians deserve the right to not have to leave their country in order to survive. For those who do have to migrate, the U.S. can guarantee their safety and rights, and allow them to live peaceful lives in their adopted home.
This is why it is imperative for the Biden administration to designate Mauritania for TPS or DED, stop challenging meritorious asylum cases, and allow deported Mauritanians to return.
Families in the United States are struggling, financially and emotionally, because of these cruel and unnecessary deportations. Savings were depleted while attempting to contest the deportation in court and “live” in the expensive immigration detention system. A deported father or mother has little ability to work or earn a living, much less support their loved ones back home. Some families are even facing homelessness.
Volumes of studies and analysis by physicians, psychologists, and other experts in healthy child development show that family separation has serious and long-term, negative impacts on children. Financial insecurity is one factor but, according to Dr. Jack P. Shonkoff, Director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University: “the most important protection a child can possibly have to prevent long-term damage [is] a loving adult who’s totally devoted to his or her well-being.”
Testifying before Congress, Dr. Shonkoff explained: “Stable and responsive relationships promote healthy brain architecture, establish well-functioning immune, cardiovascular, and metabolic systems, and strengthen the building blocks of resilience. If these relationships are disrupted, young children are hit by the ‘double whammy’ of a brain that is deprived of the positive stimulation it needs and assaulted by a stress response that disrupts its developing circuitry.”
Children around the country are dealing with the consequences of a parent’s deportation, on top of other challenges. Fatima Sow of Ohio wrote to the Biden administration’s Family Reunification Task Force: “My kids always ask about their father. It’s hard and painful to witness…. My six-year-old son always asks me why he isn’t with his dad, why all his friends are with their dads but not him.” This father’s absence is something the government has the power to reverse, during his son’s childhood.
Awa Harouna, whose father was nearly deported, knows the hopelessness, anxiety, and fear of deportation. In episode six of the Netflix documentary, “Living Undocumented,” she explained: “You can watch a documentary (and) you can say, ‘Well, this is too bad.’ But at the end of the day, it’s just something that you’re watching on TV. And you can turn that off and go about your life.”
While some Americans can turn off the TV, others in Ohio and across the country are dealing with the impact of deportation every day. They often feel like their stories are not part of the national conversation about immigration, and that their pain is invisible to everyone but them. They still have hopes and dreams. Their lives and families matter.
Deportation is a human-made consequence wholly in humans’ power to change. The Biden administration has solutions at hand. It needs the will to act.
PDF here; Contact ltramonte AT ohioimmigrant.org.
