African and Invisible: The Other New York Migrant Crisis

You wouldn’t know from the outside of Imam Omar Niass’s house, but the tidy brick building on a residential block in the Bronx is filled to capacity. Every night, nearly 70 men, newly arrived African migrants, sleep squashed together on the floor in an airless basement, a tangle of arms and feet and fitful dreams.

When they pray, they stumble against one another, forming a jumbled wave as they go from bowing to standing, then back to bowing and sitting. There is just one bathroom for everyone, and it can take several days to get a turn for a shower.

Still, after a recent outing to Kennedy International Airport, Imam Omar came back with five more men. Just a few days earlier, he had gone and picked up 15. And before that, 10.

“I don’t care who you are or where you’re coming from, I can’t let people sleep in the street,” he said on his drive home to the Masjid Ansaru-Deen Islamic house of worship from the airport, where he had picked up the latest arrivals, a group of Senegalese men.

The current migrant crisis has become famous for the images of busloads of Latino immigrants deposited, oftentimes coatless, in northern cities. But there has been another, hidden wave of people who have been arriving in the city for years from Latin America: migrants from Africa. They had often been living in Brazil, for example, or Mexico, working as fishermen or in factories and learning Spanish and Portuguese along the way.

As the Covid pandemic devastated so many Latin American economies, these men headed north to look for jobs, joining thousands of others from Venezuela and Central America who have fled turmoil in the hope of entering the United States.

Their arrival expands an already thriving African community that has existed in New York City for decades; there is a Little Senegal in Harlem, and more recent immigrants from Gambia have established themselves in the Bronx.

But unlike the Latino migrants who have been sent north by Republican governors, thereby becoming the face of the migrant crisis and gaining attention from news outlets and city officials in New York, the African and Caribbean migrants have been largely overlooked.

Their plight became clear after the humanitarian relief center set up on Randalls Island for the bused immigrants last fall was left half empty. Many of the expected arrivals, who were predominantly Venezuelan, were turned away at the border by the Biden administration.

When news spread that the refuge center had room, a number of migrants from West Africa showed up. Many said they had not been aware of the existence of the facility at first. Although they too had arrived from the southern border, they had taken a different route and arrived in the city with little notice.

Many Venezuelans arrived at Port Authority, in Midtown, where they were greeted by public officials and civic groups. Their African counterparts tend to arrive by plane — their tickets paid for by African community organizations — or on Greyhound buses to Chinatown, where they stepped out on their own. Most had the name of only one contact: Imam Omar.

The journeys of Black and African migrants have been no less perilous than the routes taken by migrants of other ethnic groups, even those who have traversed the Darién Gap. But according to immigration advocacy groups, Black and African migrants can face longer detention and higher bail amounts, which are left to the discretion of immigration judges, compared with what their non-Black counterparts can face. Some Black migrants have to pay as much as $35,000 to be released from detention, according to community organizations that help them financially.

The groups say that as the migrant crisis deepened over the past year, they have seen a sharp rise in the amount that Black migrants had to pay for bail. It was unclear what was the cause of the increase, except for the sheer numbers entering the country.

“Black migrants get under the radar because, as a society, we do not plan for them,” said Seydi Sarr, the Senegalese founder of the African Bureau of Immigration and Social Affairs, a small Detroit-based organization that helps migrants pay bail and plane tickets to sanctuary cities. “We don’t see them. We don’t acknowledge that they exist.”

About two million African immigrants arrived in the United States in 2019, up from 600,000 in 2000, according to the latest report published in 2022 by the Pew Research Center. (These figures exclude immigrants from the Caribbean, which make up a third of Black immigrants.)

New York City has the largest Black immigrant population — a combination of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean — of any metropolitan area. They numbered about 1.1 million in 2019.

Imam Omar estimated that he has housed about 300 men in the past two years. When he ran out of space indoors, he erected a tent in his backyard so that they wouldn’t have to sleep in the street, although the portable shower he set up recently broke down.

According to Imam Omar and other community activists, none of the migrants were aware of the facility on Randalls Island. When Mayor Eric Adams heard about the cramped conditions at the mosque, the imam said, City Hall coordinated with him to move the majority of the men to the refuge.

In early November, Imam Omar said he had sent more than 100 Senegalese migrants to the tents on Randalls Island. Still, some who have been volunteering to help the migrants have criticized the mayor for expressing interest only after the relief center had opened without receiving as many migrants as expected.

“They were not listening to us,” said Adama Bah, a community organizer who had been spreading the word for months that a wave of African migrants was arriving via different ports of entry.

Power Malu, another activist who has been working with Ms. Bah, said that Black migrants were often turned away from riding the buses from Texas, sometimes by local community groups intent on aiding Latinos. “African migrants,” he said, “weren’t being allowed on those buses.”

Mr. Malu said that officials had contacted him and Ms. Bah after the tents erected on Randalls Island generated controversy; some local politicians and immigration advocates said that the structures were inappropriate for sheltering homeless people. “That is when they said, ‘OK, let’s use the African migrants to fill this place up,’” Mr. Malu said.

City officials pushed back at this portrayal. Mayor Adams’s office has said that he immediately coordinated efforts with Imam Omar to relieve him of migrants, via the Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships.

“Some of the imams reached out to us and stated that some asylum seekers and migrants were living in terrible conditions, and we responded accordingly,” Mr. Adams said last November. “So no matter who the asylum seeker is or the migrant may be, we are going to follow the same process.”

Mankaur Ndeaya, 32, said he had spent six years in Brazil, where he was able to obtain a visa, which he said made it easier for him to enter the United States. A former air-conditioner technician, he took a plane to Nicaragua from the southern Brazilian city of Novo Hamburgo, then rode buses through Central America and Mexico until he reached the U.S. border.

“It was very dangerous,” he said of his journey. “I have seen two Senegalese die on this way. It’s not easy.” Mr. Ndeaya left Dakar for a better opportunity after his wife died. He has a 1-year-old daughter, whom he left with family back home.

“My dream is working, get a better life, helping my family, making a good life, helping my daughter, everybody of my family,” he said, showing his cellphone with a photo of his daughter in the background.

Mr. Ndeaya said he has found work at a pizzeria in Times Square, but he is still sharing the basement at Imam Omar’s mosque, which he reports is getting crowded again.

Imam Omar comes from a long line of imams in Senegal — his father, grandfather, uncles and now his 21-year-old son are imams — and manages the migrants like one gigantic congregation.

He wakes up at 4 a.m., and at 4:20 a.m. sharp he leads the call to prayer in the prayer room, located in the basement of the mosque, waking bleary-eyed men with a loud speaker.

“If you have so many cows, you have to have a stick,” he said, explaining how he keeps his flock of newcomers organized.

“I’m never, ever tired,” he said. “How can you get tired helping people?”

Brittany Kriegstein contributed reporting.