Bipartisanship is rare in Washington, DC these days. So when a senior Democratic Senator and a conservative Republican House member team up, it’s time to pay attention.
Today, 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.
Maryam Sy, an organizer with the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, applauded their effort. “By granting TPS to Mauritanians, the U.S. government would save the lives of hundreds of Black people, like my nephew Mamadou, who escaped slavery and persecution. It is time for Mauritania to stop being a country where Black people are persecuted because of the color of their skin; a country where Blacks are considered inferior people. The United States of America must help protect people from these despicable acts that are contrary to basic human rights, and not send them back to a country where torture and slavery against Blacks proliferate.”
There are two systems of oppression at work in Mauritania today. One is the system of slavery, which affects a portion of the Black populations and, despite being technically illegal, continues. The second is a suite of repressive policies that can only be described as apartheid. This includes language erasure; police violence; land grabbing; statelessness, and more. (See this backgrounder from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance for more information.)
As Abdoul Mbow, a Mauritanian diaspora leader, wrote in the Columbus Dispatch:
Today, the Mauritanian government has new ways to erase Black people. They refuse to issue identity documents, so that we don’t exist in official records. Without IDs, we also can’t travel or get jobs. They cancel our ways of communicating so that we have no mobility in an all-Arabic society. They still take our land, put us in jail, and beat us…. What future is there, when you have no present?
Ohio is home to the largest group of Black Mauritanians in the United States. They are refugees from the 1990s genocide and today’s apartheid regime. Prior to 2017, deportations from the U.S. to Mauritania were deliberately rare, because of the dangers. But President Trump increased deportations to Mauritania exponentially. People were arrested, extorted, and forced to flee yet again.
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 input from 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 letter from then-Senator Harris and Reps. Nadler, Thompson, Lofgren, and Beatty.
