Musician Khalidou Sy recalls the night his concert was shut down before he was taken away by the Mauritanian police and jailed for five days.
While he was never given a reason for his detention, in his show Sy criticized the lack of electricity available to the Mauritanian public and called on the authorities to make a change.
The arrest, he says, was a close call.
“Life in Mauritania was very rough. The country is very segregated and racism is very high,” he says.
In October 2023, Sy, his wife and infant child arrived in the US following a perilous 15-day journey through Central America. When traveling between Mexico City and the US border, the bus transporting the family was stopped by an armed gang and the passengers were robbed.
“We were told that it could happen, so I hid our money in the baby’s diaper, so they didn’t find it,” Sy recalls.
Two years on, Sy and his family have made a home in Ohio, and are part of a growing community of Mauritanians living in Lockland, a small village north of Cincinnati.
Among the vast constellation of immigrant communities in the US today, Mauritanians are among the smallest. Until 2023, the foreign-born population was estimated at just 8,000 people.
But over the past two years, thousands more have come to the US, settling in Cincinnati and Columbus, via an expensive and oftentimes dangerous route often involving travel to Turkey, Colombia and traversing the treacherous Darién Gap, before crossing the US-Mexico border in Arizona, where immigrants typically file for asylum status.
Their presence in Lockland, however, has attracted vitriolic responses from rightwing national media that claim immigrants have upended life for long-standing residents. The uproar has caught the attention of the Trump administration, with many now becoming caught up in the administration’s vast deportation web.
Today, there are more than 19,000 cases for Mauritanian nationals pending in US immigration courts, making it the second-highest number of people from an African country after Senegal, a country with nearly four times the population. According to the Deportation Data Project, at least 90 people have been deported by ICE to Mauritania since Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January.
Many belong to the Fulani ethnic group whose communities stretch across west Africa and who have been subjected to human rights abuses in several countries. Mauritania was the last country in the world to abolish slavery, although the practice persists, with around 149,000 people thought to be held as slaves.
Mauritania is dominated by a minority Arab-Berber government and human rights abuses of the country’s Black population have persisted, leading to a surge in undocumented migration to the US over the past two years.
“I don’t know any Black person who wants to live in a country that is very similar to South Africa during the apartheid era and where slavery is still a reality,” says Amadou Ly of the Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in the US.
“It is simple as that. In my opinion, that is the main reason Black Mauritanians don’t want to be deported.”
During the 1800s, the Miami and Erie Canal that connected the Ohio River with Lake Erie hundreds of miles to the north ran through Lockland, making it a bustling center of transportation and manufacturing.
Unlike its plushier neighbors, today Lockland is a working-class village home to artist studios, unadorned Guatemalan restaurants, mechanic shops and heavy industry. Its median household income is just 60% of the US national rate or one-third that of Wyoming, a well-to-do, tree-lined city on Lockland’s western border.
Few locals can put their finger on just why around 3,500 Mauritanian immigrants ended up here over the past two years, although affordable housing and access to entry level jobs are thought to be two main drivers. What’s clear is that the increase in population led to a major strain on the city’s housing and fire department resources. Local authorities say that one housing complex that became popular with Mauritanians saw up to 12 people living in apartments that were fit to accommodate four residents.
Some residents reportedly complained about low water pressure and blocked drains, issues that Mauritanian immigrants were blamed for. And because Mauritanians initially did not have permission to work, many were unable to pay income taxes to the local authorities that would then fund essential resources.
Voicemails and emails sent by the Guardian to Mark Mason, the mayor of Lockland, and other village officials were not responded to.
All the while, the threat of deportation lingers.
Last month a friend of Demba, who has Mauritanian heritage and volunteers at a bike repair workshop in Lockland, was deported to Senegal after attending a mandatory immigration check-in.
“He had an appointment in Cleveland and when he walked out, ICE took him,” Demba says.
“People just come here to work.”
On a freezing December evening, Demba and a half-dozen others are working together and chatting at the bike repair workshop in a garage run by Vincent Wilson, the interim president of Queen City Bike.
Wilson estimates the organization has assisted 400 to 500 Mauritanian immigrants with bikes that help them get around the city.
“I started to notice that as I was riding my regular errands around town on my bike, I was seeing these men out and about in the community. [I thought] it’d be way easier if you had a bike to get around,” he says.
He says that while many Mauritanians can now afford cars to get to and from their jobs, often at food processing and manufacturing plants, the community is on edge.
“The biggest thing that we’ve seen is people going to Cleveland – everyone’s [immigration] court appearances are in Cleveland – and getting detained in Cleveland. I know a couple of guys who are in jail in Butler county right now for traffic infractions, who are probably going to end up being sent back home.”
Many of the new arrivals came from a desert region of Mauritania close to the Senegal border where social norms are vastly different from those in the US.
Sy says it took some time for immigrants to adapt.
“A couple of years ago, we had a lot of complaints in Wyoming and Lockland that the migrants didn’t behave well; they weren’t [following] social norms that we weren’t used to,” he says.
“You can’t come to somebody’s country and do reckless things. But I think the situation is way better now.”
That’s in large part due to the new arrivals receiving work permits, allowing them to buy cars, rent their own properties and contribute in broader terms to the Lockland and wider Cincinnati communities.
Sy says he applied for asylum when he entered the US more than a year ago but is still awaiting a decision and fears that his next check-in with Ice could be the one that sends him back to Mauritania.
“Anything can happen,” he says.
“I wish it would never happen, but you never know.”
