Saidou Sow and his daughter, Maliyah, in Senegal. Sow was deported from Cincinnati in 2017 and can only see his daughter on her rare visits to Africa. (Photo courtesy of Saidou Sow.)
Deportations are being politicized, but each involves an actual human being. Seven years after being deported from Ohio, two such people are still trying to pick up the pieces.
President Donald Trump is making a big show of deporting the migrants, supposedly in big numbers and acting as if most of those being sent back to their home countries are violent criminals who came to pillage the United States. But in fact, the Guardian reported Thursday, the administration has been gaming Google to make the number his administration has been deporting look bigger than it really is.
It turns out that in his previous administration and so far in this one, it’s not true that most of those being deported have committed violent crimes, nor has Trump deported the most migrants. The latter distinction belongs to former President Barack Obama, who in his peak year, 2013, deported a well over third more than Trump did in his, 2019.
But instead of dealing in statistics, behind each number is a human with a story. Those of two who were deported from Ohio during the first Trump administration illustrate some of the costs to U.S. taxpayers — and to them.
Both men came from Mauritania and had been in Ohio well over a decade, working, paying taxes, and abiding by the law.
One was wrenched from his wife and daughter, both of whom are natural-born citizens. The other was forced into a series of incarcerations that broke his health and reduced him to begging on the streets of Senegal. And both men said they lost everything they had the minute Immigration and Customs Enforcement put them in shackles.
“It’s caused so much unnecessary pain and heartache and government spending,” said Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. “We detain somebody, put them in jail, keep them there for months, and then deport them away from their families.”
Fleeing a troubled place
There are thousands of Black Mauritanian migrants in Ohio, with 2,700 estimated to have immigrated in 2023 alone. They’ve been fleeing to the United States and Europe after decades of persecution in the northwest African country by the dominant Arab-Berber minority.
More than half of the country lives in extreme poverty and in the 1980s and 1990s, the country’s rulers subjected Black people to a series of “genocidal massacres,” deporting tens of thousands and torturing and killing hundreds more “in a state-sponsored effort to eradicate Black culture,” the group Genocide Watch reported.
The advocacy group Fwd.us describes Mauritania as an apartheid state.
“Many Black Mauritanians were stripped of their citizenship due to their race and ethnicity and are now stateless, which restricts their ability to travel within Mauritania and also makes them perennially vulnerable to arrest,” the group wrote on its website.
The last country in the world to officially abolish slavery, enslavement of Mauritanian Black people is still practiced today.
It’s hardly surprising that people are fleeing.
“It was pretty bad for us Black people,” Oumar Diallo, 57, recently said through an interpreter in a phone interview from Senegal. “We were targeted. They said we were part of a militia group (because they protested forced-removals of Black people to Senegal, a form of ethnic cleansing.) They killed one of my brothers and they were looking for me.”
So, in 1989, Diallo snuck into neighboring Senegal. Still feeling too close to Mauritania to be safe, Diallo and a friend got B2 business visas as food merchants and fled to New York.
“The reason why I came here is that we would be safe, we would be protected,” Diallo said.
Hopeful shore
Saidou Sow, 48, has a similar story. An aspiring lawyer in the late 1990s, “I was involved in politics. One day, they were trying to put everybody in jail, so I ran,” he said in a phone interview from Senegal. Of his colleagues, he said, “Most were thrown in jail, some got killed, some are refugees, some are in Europe, and some are in the U.S.”
When he got to the states, Sow lived in New York at first, but after concluding that it was too expensive, he joined many other Mauritanian migrants in Cincinnati in 2003.
His experience is like those of so many others who come to the United States seeking a better life. He worked making BMW and Mercedes parts in Florence, Ky. He worked at Schwan’s Foods preparing meals for troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. He worked as a forklift driver and as picker in a warehouse. He drove a cab.
Sow learned the hard way that the rules governing U.S. immigration aren’t nearly so simple as many Americans might think.
He married a woman who was born and raised in Kentucky and they had a daughter, Maliyah. Being married to a citizen meant that he needed to change his requested immigration status from asylum seeker to that of lawful permanent resident, or green card holder.
But then Sow got caught in the administrative labyrinth that the American immigration system is.
He said he didn’t receive a letter notifying him of a 2004 hearing in Cleveland regarding the immigration status he was seeking, so he missed it. That resulted in a deportation order that Sow worked tirelessly — and is still trying — to reverse.
Tramonte, of the Ohio Immigration Alliance, said most people don’t know how arbitrary the system can be.
“I’ve had a bunch of conversations with people who aren’t immigration experts,” she said. “They tell me how they think the system works and ask, ‘Why don’t people just do it that way?’ It got me thinking, why don’t we just make the system work the way people think it does? They think people can get a green card because of their spouse. They think that if you have a job here and you’re needed, you can get a work permit. They think that if you’re an international student, you can get a job after you graduate. They don’t know that all those pieces are broken.”
Impermanent limbo
Diallo’s path to immigration purgatory was more straightforward. When he came to Columbus in 2000, he sought asylum and got his work permit.
He worked in warehouses, lived with a woman and broke up without having kids. Asylum seekers are not generally eligible for government assistance and, as with most of them, Diallo paid taxes instead.
“There were never any issues,” he said. “No tickets or anything.”
Eventually, despite the horrible conditions in his home country and the persecution he faced there, Diallo’s bid for asylum was denied. That started years in what might have seemed an acceptable limbo. He had to show up for regular check-ins with immigration officials, but so long as he did, he could keep living and working in Columbus.
Then Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017. That March, Diallo went to his Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in.
“One of the agents told me, ‘Today, you’re not leaving,’” he said. “We’re going to keep you here.”
Later that year, Sow was driving a cab in Cincinnati when he started hearing about ICE raids in neighborhoods with large migrant populations.
“I started getting phone calls,” he said. “People are leaving their businesses. They’re closing their shops. That’s when I knew it was real.”
Then Sow got in a wreck on a rain-soaked street.
“I went to court and the next thing I know, ICE was there waiting for me,” he said. “They took me to jail.”
Both men were initially taken to Butler County Jail in Hamilton, which had a contract with the federal government to house immigration detainees. Sow was initially there for a year, Diallo for nine months. Sow was then taken to the jail in Morrow County — which early in the pandemic had a 100% infection rate — before being sent back to the Butler County facility for another seven months.
They both complained bitterly about conditions in that jail, saying they were inadequately fed, treated harshly by corrections officers, and that some other migrants held under ICE mandate were beaten.
In a phone interview, Butler County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Anthony Dwyer said the incidents Sow and Diallo claimed would have happened more than seven years ago, and that it was hard to determine their veracity. But he denied that such things happen in his jail, saying that so long as inmates do as they’re told, they’re treated well.
But that might indicate a problem inherent in holding people detained for immigration reasons in a criminal-justice facility. Sow and Diallo are adamant that they had committed no crimes, and Tramonte has questioned whether county jails are appropriate places to house people under deportation orders.
Wherever they take place, detentions should “respect people’s dignity,” Diallo said. “These are human beings and they deserve decent conditions. These people did not kill anybody. They did not commit any crimes other than seeking a safer country.”
Painful returns
After his stay in Butler County, Diallo was forced back to his dysfunctional homeland on a trip that was likely very costly to taxpayers and certainly more costly to him.
“I didn’t know I was getting deported,” he said. “I woke up one day and they said, ‘Put your clothes on. We’re taking you to Columbus.’ They put chains on my arms and feet. They put me in a car and took me straight to the airport. That’s when I knew I was getting deported.”
Accompanied by two ICE agents, Diallo was flown from Columbus to Washington, D.C., and from there to Morocco and from there to Mauritania.
The average repatriation flight costs taxpayers about $17,000 an hour, so if Diallo was taken back alone, the trip probably cost many times as much. And he was far from welcome when he got back to Mauritania.
“When deported to Mauritania, (Black people such as Diallo) are not welcomed as citizens but instead face state-sanctioned violence, the inability to work, and potentially slavery,” the group FWD.us reports.
In Diallo’s case, that meant being taken to yet another jail, this one in Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, he said.
“We were sleeping on the floor, with pee and defecation,” he said, describing his crowded jail cell. “I got sick there and I haven’t recovered.”
Throughout an hour-long interview, he was wracked by long, violent coughing fits.
Friends were able to secure Diallo’s freedom after six weeks in the Mauritanian jail, but by then his health was gone and he was destitute of the means of getting it back. Not feeling safe in his home country, he fled again to neighboring Senegal.
“I’m forced to beg to survive. I can’t afford medication,” Diallo said. “In Columbus, I was working and providing for myself. Now I can’t do any of those things.”
In other words, U.S. taxpayers spent tens of thousands to remove a peaceful, taxpaying worker and send him to a place that destroyed his health.
“I scratch my head and ask, ‘Why would we make this so horrific?” Tramonte said. “Why such a gauntlet? There should be more humanity and flexibility in the law.”
Huge loss
For Sow, the outcome hasn’t been as bleak, but he still has suffered devastating losses. He was flown to several stops in the United States as deportees were gathered and then to several drop-offs in Africa. He stressed that his hands and feet were shackled the entire time.
“It’s a trauma,” he said.
Like Diallo, Sow was immediately thrown into a Mauritanian jail, but unlike Diallo, a friend was able to get him out after about 48 hours. However, that was followed by months in yet another immigration limbo as Sow worked to get a Mauritanian passport and head back to Senegal, where he, too, felt safer.
Because he speaks English, French, and Arabic, Sow was able to get a job working on an offshore oil rig operated by BP and can afford a decent life. He talks via Whatsapp every day with his daughter, Maliyah.
But that’s hardly the same as getting to see her everyday — and it discounts what Sow worked for in Ohio.
“I feel like I was betrayed,” he said. “All of the taxes I paid, 20 years of hard work, getting nothing back. Everything I worked for in the United States is gone.”
Sow said it’s important for Americans to understand that just about every time a person is deported, that person is effectively bankrupted.
“You lose your car, your home, everything you have. You’ll never have a chance to get it back. It’s gone,” he said. “The minute they put the cuffs on you, it’s gone.”
Economic analyses indicate that mass deportations on the scale Trump promised would impose huge costs on the American people. They would cost $315 billion to implement, remove workers who pay tens of billions in taxes, reduce gross domestic product 7.4% by 2028, and push prices 9.1% higher over the same period, the analyses say.
But from Sow’s perspective, Trump’s rhetoric comes with another cost that can’t be counted.
“There was a time when I thought I was from Ohio,” he said. “It’s where my daughter was born. Then people started telling me ‘Go back home.’”