Prospects 'slim' for Lockland father of 5 being deported to Mauritania
Amadou Sow lived peacefully for 20 years in Lockland, working legally, paying taxes. He is married with 5 U.S.-citizen children. Now ICE is deporting him.
Prospects 'slim' for Lockland father of 5 being deported to Mauritania Amadou Sow lived peacefully for 20 years in Lockland, working legally, paying taxes. He is married with 5 U.S.-citizen children. Now ICE is deporting him. Check out this story on cincinnati.com: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2018/12/28/ice-plans-deport-lockland-man-back-known-slave-state-mauritania/2433134002/
Mark Curnutte, Cincinnati Enquirer Published 2:22 p.m. ET Dec. 28, 2018
Attorneys are fighting to prevent the deportation of a father of five back to Mauritania. He has lived in the United States since 1991. Cara Owsley, cowsley@enquirer.com
Aissata Aly, of Lockland, talks on the phone to her husband Amadou Sow, who is in custody in a Morrow County prison, as she holds her son Muhammad Sow, 3, in October.(Photo: Cara Owsley/The Enquirer, Cara Owsley/The Enquirer)Buy Photo
After another restless night trying to sleep, Aissata Aly was awakened at 7:30 Friday morning by a call from her husband.
He gave her the news the family had been dreading since Aug. 22, the day he drove to Columbus for a regular appointment with immigration officials.
Amadou Sow, her husband and the father of their five U.S.-citizen children, said he was being deported.
Despite the partial shutdown of the federal government, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to schedule a charter flight to take Sow and other Mauritanian nationals back to the West African nation.
"He did nothing wrong," Aly, sobbing softly, told The Enquirer in a phone interview from her family's home in suburban Lockland. "He worked for 20 years. He paid taxes. He had work permits. He did everything a citizen did."
Sow's attorney, Alexandria Lubans-Otto, confirmed that ICE had sent him a letter in federal detention in Morrow County, Ohio, and informed him of his impending deportation.
"As a man born into a slave caste, his prospects in Mauritania are slim," Lubans-Otto said.
MORE: Does slavery await in Mauritania father of five
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She filed an emergency stay request with the federal Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) in October, yet, as of Friday morning, the attorney said, she had not heard back.
Sow belongs to a class of stateless Afro-Mauritanians that human rights groups and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency say are enslaved in Mauritania by the lighter-skinned Arab Maghreb ruling class.
"I fear for my life. They will kill me," Sow told The Enquirer in a brief phone call in October from Morrow County, north of Columbus.
Sow, 49, has lived in the United States since 1991 when he entered and asked for asylum. His lawyers and advocates believe he will be sold into slavery or killed upon his return. Generations of Sow's family were owned as slaves, Lubans-Otto said.
The Enquirer reported in-depth on Sow's family and what advocates say is the crisis caused by the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy.
A report published from Mauritania earlier this month by the Thomson Reuters Foundation indicates that those fears are well-founded. ICE had deported 98 Mauritanians in the first 10 months of 2018, compared to eight in all of 2017.
One of those 98 is a Forest Park man, Issa Sao, 37, who had been living with federal work permits for 14 years in the United States. His wife and two children are U.S. citizens. He was the family's breadwinner, just as was Sow for his family in Lockland.
"I am not scared for him having to leave his family. I am scared for what will happen to him," said Aly, Sow's wife, who also is Mauritanian.
He was among the 70,000 Afro-Mauritanians exiled and stripped of their citizenship after a two-year war in 1989 and 1990. The dispute started over grazing rights along the Mauritania-Senegal border. In all, a quarter of a million Fulani-speaking black Muslims in both countries fled their homes to escape persecution, many ending up in refugee camps in Mali.
"Life is seldom fair, but I am taking it in stride," said Awa Harouna, 23, the family's oldest child and a nursing student at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash. "But being awakened before the sun had risen this morning to hear that ICE is attempting a second deportation while the government is in shambles didn't help in the least."
In October, Sow refused to board a commercial flight from Columbus to Washington, where he would have been put on another commercial flight to Mauritania.
Ohio has the largest population of Mauritanians, with concentrated communities in Greater Cincinnati and Columbus.
The refugee resettlement program of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati brought 15 Mauritanians here in the early 2000s. Several hundred more followed to form a community of exiles in Lockland, Forest Park and the West End neighborhood of Cincinnati. Under previous federal administrations, migrants like Sow, though initially denied asylum, could stay in the United States and granted work permits. They were a low removal priority. The conditions were that they kept regular appointments with ICE and avoided all legal trouble.
Sow did just that. He worked third-shift in the same factory in Lebanon, Ohio, for 20 years and paid local, state and federal taxes, though he was not eligible for social safety net programs.
He feared being returned to Mauritania, where as much as 20 percent of the nation's 3.8 million residents live in slavery, according to the CIA World Factbook. To picture that, imagine that nearly all the residents of Hamilton County being slaves.
Family photo of Amadou Sow and Aissata Aly, last New Year's Eve. Sow was born in Mauritania but has lived in the U.S. for close to 30 years. (Photo: Cara Owsley/The Enquirer, Cara Owsley/The Enquirer)
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