Members of Congress have written a letter to the Biden-Harris administration requesting President Joe Biden grant Mauritanians Temporary Protected Status (TPS) due to “ethnic cleansing” in the Northwestern African country.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fl., told theGrio that more than half of the Mauritanian population is “vulnerable to enslavement-like conditions.”
She stated that Black Mauritanians, who are at a higher risk of being enslaved, have sought refuge in the United States to escape sexual assault, family separation, and murder.
Currently, 8,000 Mauritanians live in the U.S., and Cherfilus-McCormick says it is the duty of the United States to protect them from deportation and grant them TPS.
“As a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, our obligation as being the conscious…is to speak up for Black people who are suffering these conditions,” she said.
In the letter, Cherfilus-McCormick along with Reps. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, and Mike Carey, R-Ohio, stated that, if Black Mauritanians were deported back to their African nation, they “would likely face violence and potentially death.”
In 1989, Mauritania stripped citizenship from roughly 50,000 Black people, forcing them to surrender their nationality documents. Black Mauritanians, for decades, have been subjected to racial profiling, torture, extortion, and slavery.
Although slavery was outlawed in 1981 and criminalized in 2007, Congressional members argue that the government does not successfully enforce anti-slavery laws, which allows the practice to prevail. Black Mauritanians who face enslavement are often sexually assaulted, separated from relatives, and killed.
Black Mauritanians who are not enslaved also face hardship when trying to achieve daily activities because of a language barrier. Most of the country’s Black population speaks French, which was widely spoken throughout the nation before the…
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