GUEST

'We are people. We are not ghosts.' Migrants 'dying to live'| activist

Abdoul Mbow
Guest columnist

Twenty-four years ago this month, Abdoul Mbow landed at JFK airport from Mauritania and started his new life. He resides in Fairfield and works as a companion for people with mental and physical disabilities. He remains an activist for Black Mauritanians' civil rights, working to improve understanding between Black and Arab Mauritanians and end slavery.

Surrounded by their three children, Vatimou Mikaill has a Facetime conversation in 2021 with her husband, Abdoulaye Lam, who is from Mauritania and was deported to Senegal in 2018. The children, from left are Mouhamed, Abdoulahi and Aminatou. Local groups are working with organizations across the nation to urge the Biden administration to bring back immigrants who were unfairly deported during the Trump administration.

A. Faye died in Guatemala, after a journey that started in Senegal. He was 29 years old. Another young man, from Mauritania, died in Colombia. Solo Ndiaye died in Mexico just this month.

He was 36. 

So many others, whose names are never reported, are literally dying to live.

To many people, it doesn't make sense. Why would a young person leave Africa for Brazil, then travel through South and Central America for a slim chance at freedom in the United States?

There is rough terrain, animals.

People who prey upon migrants, and no one to help. If the elements and the predators don’t kill you, having no food and water could. 

If you make it to the U.S. border and request asylum, which is your legal right, you will most likely be turned away, or jailed before being flown back to everything you fled.

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Not obtaining safety.

Even I have said this to people leaving Mauritania, my home country, and I know the apartheid that suffocates Black people there. “Please don’t go,” I beg. “Don’t make this dangerous journey.” And what do they say to me?

“We are dead already.”

Twenty-five years after Abdoul Mbow fled Mauritania, he is a proud U.S. citizen and still agitating for change. Mbow believes he was lucky to come here on an airplane, rather than the dangerous journey so many have to take today.

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Mauritania was never the capital of the free world, but it wasn’t always the way it is now. The Fulani people and other Black groups were there before the French colonizers and Arab elites. For centuries, we cared for the land and ocean, farmed and fished, played music and told stories, and sustained our families.

I’ve been an activist since 1966, after Mauritania's independence from France, when the new government started excluding Black Mauritanians.

In the '80s and '90s, the government carried out a genocide. They killed Black Mauritanians and took our land. They put us in jail and tortured us. They deported us to Senegal, even though we weren’t born there. 

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I was a manager with a European airline. I had an education and money in the bank. But the murders continued, and the government did unspeakable things to people who spoke up. They showed us our own graves. 

One day, I went on a business trip and when I came back, they had arrested 11 of my fellow organizers. My friends said “Abdoul, you have to leave.” I boarded a plane.

Ahmed Tidiane of Canal Winchester was persecuted in Mauritania and won an asylum case in the United States, but many other immigrants from his homeland were unable to do the same because they lacked English skills and education.

In the U.S., a former Peace Corps volunteer helped me apply for asylum. I didn’t have to fight my deportation in court, and I wasn’t put in immigration jail — adding to my trauma — like people are today. I made my case with the U.S. government and a few weeks later, was granted asylum.

Now, you could be in direct danger and no country will help you. It makes you feel less than human. Like a ghost, with nothing to lose.

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. 

This is why some people take this risk. What future is there, when you have no present?

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Mauritanian leaders in Ohio met with Rep. Steve Chabot multiple times and asked him to help. He hasn’t done much. 

As a senator, Kamala Harris supported us. But the Biden administration has turned its back on people seeking asylum. Instead of providing a way for people to get safe, they treat migration as a security problem, like Donald Trump did. 

We are people, not threats to security. Security is what we are seeking. If U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, President Joe Biden, and other leaders would walk a mile in Mr. Faye’s shoes, they would see.

We are not ghosts. We want to live.

Twenty-four years ago this month, Abdoul Mbow landed at JFK airport from Mauritania and started his new life. He resides in Fairfield and works as a companion for people with mental and physical disabilities. He remains an activist for Black Mauritanians' civil rights, working to improve understanding between Black and Arab Mauritanians and end slavery.