Mohamed and Sherkia Diaby have lost much of what they built together in 11 years of marriage.

After a year and a week in federal immigration custody, Mohamed Diaby was released March 20 and is now free. Yet has a stack of legal bills to pay. He lost the job he'd held for two years in a mattress factory because he lost his work permit. He also lost his driver's license and the apartment he shared with his wife in Westwood.

"I lost everything and have to start over again," he said while sitting in the cramped living room of his mother-in-law's house in College Hill.

Diaby and his wife are living there until they can get re-established. They even sent their 10-year-old daughter, Issa, a U.S. citizen, to live with Mohamed's sister in the Bronx. There, she is learning Mauritanian culture and several languages, including Swahili and Arabic.

Despite the many losses, the challenge of starting over in the United States, he said, is a much better option than the alternative of being deported to his native Mauritania. What he lost here can be regained and rebuilt. Not so in his homeland in northwest Africa.

"As soon as you get to Africa, you are either a slave or a refugee," said Diaby, who isn't certain of his age but whose documents show he's 51.

Diaby 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.

Yet U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement officials haven't been deterred from attempting to send a growing number of Mauritanians back, despite the objections of human rights activists and groups. The agency deported 98 Mauritanians in the year ending in October 2018. ICE sent back just eight in the previous year. Dozens more, including Amadou Sow, of Lockland, remain in ICE custody.

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The Mauritanian government is now refusing to grant the most basic travel document, the laissez-passer (French for let pass), which would allow a Mauritanian who's being deported to enter the country. In Diaby's case, that's what the government did through its embassy in Washington, D.C.

In a letter dated Dec. 4, 2018 to ICE officials, the Mauritanian counselor in charge of consular affairs wrote: "It appeared throughout the interviews and from the documents provided that the main persons concerned are all Senegalese or Gambian nationals who fraudulently obtained Mauritanian documents to access American territory to file unfounded asylum claims."

Not so, said Diaby. "I am Mauritanian."

The failure to receive a travel document from the Mauritanian government led ICE officials to attempt to deport Diaby to one of several other West African nations, said one of his lawyers, Charleston Wang.

"Luckily, currently, Mauritania is refusing to take black Mauritanians, and this is in line with the policy of that government to make Mauritania more white," Wang said.

He filed for habeas corpus, requiring the person under arrest be brought before a judge or into court. At that point, Wang said, ICE then tried to deport Diaby to another country.

"I objected that such a move is not authorized because the immigration judge ordered removal specifically to Mauritania," Wang said. "I think this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, and the Department of Justice – not the Department of Homeland Security – decided to release my client from ICE detention."

Diaby had been moved to the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, a privately-owned prison near Youngstown. He and two other Mauritanian men from Ohio, which has America's largest Mauritanian population, were released. Lynn Tramonte, Director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, met them at the bus station and said, "They asked me to thank every one working on this effort."

He'd been held previously at the Morrow and County jails. Butler County's contract with ICE is worth an estimated $1.4 million annually with an additional $30,000 paid to the county to transport prisoners.

ICE pays Butler County $53.20 a day per detainee and a $29.29 hourly rate for guards, according to ICE contracts acquired by the National Immigrant Justice Center.

Back home, Diaby recalled his incarceration. At an ICE appointment Feb. 7, 2018 in Columbus, an official told him to get travel document from the Mauritanian embassy. He went to Washington and was refused.

ICE arrested him at his next appointment, March 13.

Facing an uncertain future without a country

While Diaby is free for the time being, he remains a man without a country. He has been in that limbo for 30 years.

In 1989, the Mauritanian government rescinded citizenship rights of tens of thousands of Black Moors, telling them to leave the country. Diaby became a refugee in neighboring Senegal. He could not re-enter Mauritania. His mother and father died while he was away.

He traveled to New York in 2000 and applied for asylum, which was eventually denied. In 2013, he was ordered to leave the United States voluntarily, which he did not do.

He found a new family in Cincinnati, where he relocated for work. Ohio is thought to have the country's largest population of Mauritanians, split between the Columbus and Cincinnati areas, according to the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.

"He works so hard, he is a workaholic," Sherkia Diaby said of her husband. "He should have citizenship by now."

Said her mother, Tondra Guyton, "He 's wonderful. I love them both. He's good to my daughter. He's good to me."

Under the Trump administration, ICE changed a long-standing U.S. policy that allowed people such as Diaby to stay here lawfully, though they'd formally been denied asylum. They were required to keep regular appointments with ICE. In return, they received work permits that allowed them to legally hold a job and drive – and pay federal, state and local taxes.

Ahead of Diaby are a series of steps: Regain his work permit and license. Get his manufacturing job back at the mattress factory in Northern Kentucky.

He has built and rebuilt his life many times before, most recently in 2013. Diaby served five years in prison on money laundering and selling counterfeit movies and music at his string of local convenience stores, Hamilton County court records show. Applicants for permanent residency and then citizenship must prove "good moral character," which is more difficult to show with a criminal record.

Diaby said he served his time and paid his debt to society. He said served the full five-year sentence because he didn't want to be on parole.

Now, the couple plans to resume their life, including bringing their daughter back from New York. "This is the place we could come and have a better life," said Diaby, leaning his tall, lean frame forward in a small chair.

"You can survive here. This is the land of opportunity. If you work hard, you can make something of yourself. A lot of people here are good people. I want to be one of them."