Immigrant Mauritanians in the US like to debate what Ohio city has the largest Mauritanian community in the US, and while Columbus won out not too long ago, a growing number are calling Cincinnati home.

Nevertheless, Mauritanians are still being deported back to Mauritania – a northwest African nation once ruled by colonial France – with a Moorish government that has been arresting, torturing, and extorting Black Mauritanians for decades, all state-sponsored human rights abuses, and the reason they’ve settled in the US in the first place.

This new video from FWD.US exposes the apartheid state in Mauritania. Several Ohioans are featured in the piece.

According to the Ohio Immigrant Alliance director Lynn Tramonte, the Trump administration more than doubled the number of deportations to Mauritania, compared with the Obama Administration.  

So how are Ohio Mauritanians doing under the Biden administration?

“He’s not deporting many long-settled Mauritanians,” says Tramonte from the Cleveland area. “But he may still be deporting new asylum seekers. We know of some who were detained but released to make their cases. For Mauritanians, the deportation problem has gotten a lot better under Biden.”

But some are still being sent back, which has inspired a growing national movement pressing the Biden administration to stop deporting people to Mauritania and bring refugees who were deported home.

In recent weeks, dozens of Black Mauritanians gathered in Washington, DC to protest apartheid in Mauritania and demand accountability and reform, while 87 organizations supporting Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) sent a letter to the Biden administration. One of these groups is the Columbus-based Mauritanian Network for Human Rights led by Houleye Thiam. 

The letter stated, “(We) organizations request an immediate 18-month designation of Temporary Protected Status, or Deferred Enforced Departure, for Mauritania. Given the ongoing extraordinary conditions that have triggered a humanitarian crisis, reports of widespread human rights violations, and continuing practice of enslaving its Black population and forced statelessness, it is impossible for Mauritanians to safely return to Mauritania at this time.”

US Representatives Joe Neguse (D-CO) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn) have called for the Department of Homeland Security to grant Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Enforced Departure to Mauritania. But Rep. Joyce Beatty, who is chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and represents the largest number of Black Mauritanians outside of Cincinnati, has not. She supported an end to Mauritanian deportations in 2018, but since then has remained silent on the need for TPS or DED.

Coincidently, Rep. Beatty earlier this year added an amendment to the Ukraine Comprehensive Debt Payment Relief Act (H.R. 7081), which instructs the Secretary of the Treasury “to use the voice and vote of the United States to seek…to provide economic support for refugees from Ukraine, including those of African descent, and for countries receiving refugees from Ukraine.”

Rep. Beatty should be commended, but here in Ohio, she seems to have forgotten about her own constituents from Mauritanian who also fled a life-threatening situation.

“Rep. Beatty had a meeting with Houleye Thiam and other Black Mauritanian leaders in 2018, and I was there, and she promised a lot of help, but did nothing,” said Tramonte.