A group of West African migrants gathered in front of City Hall in Lower Manhattan to protest their harsh living conditions on April 16, the day the City Council was scheduled to discuss their plight. Migrants from several African countries decried the lack of housing, jobs, and language support during the asylum application process, as well as the city’s new rules, announced in March, restricting adult migrants’ legally mandated right to shelter to a maximum of 30 days.

The rule change came after a more than 300 percent increase in Africans arriving in the U.S. via the southern border, rising from 13,406 in 2022 to 58,462 in 2023. Wars, political persecution, economic deprivation, ethnic conflicts, and the climate crisis have pushed people to leave their home countries. Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, and Angola are the top four African countries of origin for migrants to the U.S. As of December 28, 2023, Senegalese migrants constituted 6 percent of all migrants living in New York City’s shelter system.

One of them is Mara, 37, a photographer and video maker from Diourbel, a city in central west Senegal, who came to the United States in 2021. His arrival added to a long history of such crossings. For almost three centuries, the United States benefited from the labor and culture of enslaved peoples from what is now Senegal. The upper Guinea coast and Senegambia, in today’s West Africa, was home to dozens of Muslim ethnic groups, including the Wolofs, Mandinka, Serer, and Fulani, which many of today’s migrants belong to. The current cohort of migrants includes the largest number of African Muslims entering the U.S. since the end of the slave trade.

White enslavers valued Muslims from Upper Guinea for their expertise in rice and indigo cultivation and often assigned them work as supervisors; their military experience was also considered an asset. Bilali Mohammed, an enslaved Muslim from Fouta Djallon, in contemporary Guinea, worked as a slave driver in Georgia and later led military campaigns against British expansion into the Sea Islands in 1813. Some white enslavers admired African Muslims’ Arabic literacy and commitment to Islam and regarded them more highly than other enslaved people. A few African Muslims from Senegambia were able to leverage this favoritism to gain manumission and amass the resources necessary to return to their homes in West Africa. One was Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, who returned in 1734 to the Muslim state of Bundu in Senegambia, not far from Diourbel, where Mara was born and brought up.

“I didn’t know about this past,” said Mara, who is now working as a barber in Harlem. Nearly three centuries after Diallo’s return to Africa, West Africans are reversing his journey across the Atlantic. Like many other migrants, Mara had to use his savings (around $10,000) to travel to the U.S. After crossing the southern border, he moved to New York City, where he hoped to find shelter among his compatriots. “I knew that finding a place to live would be very difficult,” he explained, “so I sought support in the Senegalese community.” He found a place to live in the Bronx, in a one-bedroom apartment shared with two other young Senegalese men.

African Muslim organizations play a vital role in creating mutual support networks as well as preserving a Muslim identity in the diaspora. Many Senegalese seek support among the Muslim Sufi community upon arriving in New York. The Muridiyya, a Sufi brotherhood founded in the 1880s in the Senegalese city of Touba and established in New York City in the mid-1980s, tries to provide basic material assistance, such as housing and food, for newcomers from Senegal. The Baye Fall, a Muslim Sufi sect primarily made up of young Senegalese men and a suborder of the Muridiyya, meets every Sunday in Central Park for zikr, the collective religious chants seen in Dakar.

But the Muridiyya’s network alone cannot fill the gap left by the state to meet basic needs. The increase in migrants has put pressure on it and other organizations. On 116th Street, in an area known as Little Senegal, dozens of young Senegalese migrants seek legal assistance and translation help with their asylum applications from the Association des Sénégalais d’Amérique (ASA). Migrants not granted asylum are sent to an immigration judge who will either grant them status or order their deportation. Migrants spend hours waiting in line for their court appearances or to meet with a DHS agent; many spend the night in the cold outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. The building is on the same block as the African Burial Ground National Monument, a cemetery where thousands of people of African descent, both free and enslaved, were buried from the 17th to 18th centuries.

Asylum seekers cannot legally qualify for work in the U.S. unless 180 days pass with no decision after their application is submitted. Finding a job, even more than finding shelter, is the main challenge for Senegalese migrants, who not only need to sustain themselves in the U.S. but also send money back to their families in Senegal. Mara said, “We don’t have good public hospitals in our country, and if my parents get sick, they need money to pay for private medical care.” Even after obtaining work authorization, most are confined to low-paid jobs, such as delivering food on bikes. The challenges of living in New York City and navigating the U.S. immigration system have led some Senegalese to leave the U.S. in search of asylum in other countries. Some have even returned to Senegal. But leaving the U.S. now has a different meaning. They’re not escaping slavery to return to their homes, as Ayuba Suleiman Diallo did, but departing from the country that owes their people a historical debt. Instead of returning, Mara and most of his fellow Senegalese have claimed Harlem as their home.

These photographs were taken in Harlem, the Bronx, and Lower Manhattan in November and December 2023.