How Ice Went Rogue

A long-running inferiority complex, vast statutory power, a chilling new directive from the top—inside America’s unfolding immigration tragedy. 

- Franklin Foer

Settling into a sense of safety is hard when your life’s catalog of memories teaches you the opposite lesson. Imagine: You fled from a government militia intent on murdering you; swam across a river with the uncertain hope of sanctuary on the far bank; had the dawning realization that you could never return to your village, because it had been torched; and heard pervasive rumors of former neighbors being raped and enslaved. Imagine that, following all this, you then found yourself in New York City, with travel documents that were unreliable at best.

This is the shared narrative of thousands of emigrants from the West African nation of Mauritania. The country is ruled by Arabs, but these refugees were members of a black sub population that speaks its own languages. In 1989, in a fit of nationalism, the Mauritanian government came to consider these differences capital offenses. It arrested, tortured, and violently expelled many black citizens.

The country forcibly displaced more than 70,000 of them and rescinded their citizen ship. Those who remained behind fared no better. Approximately 43,000 black Mauritanians are now enslaved— by percentage, one of the largest enslaved populations in the world.