Board of directors

Imam Omar Niass,  runs the Jamhiyatu Ansaru-Deen mosque. 

The first thing you’ll notice about Imam Omar Niass is how much his phone rings. The 51-year-old Senegalese immigrant is standing in front of a mosque in the Bronx, where he lives. 

He is taking calls from unknown numbers, some of which are people at the southern border or in detention centers asking for help.

When he stashes his phone in his chest pocket, immigrant men leaving the mosque shake his hand and greet him. He responds to each cheerfully. He is revered and appreciated. For years, Imam Omar has provided temporary accommodation to migrants and asylum seekers fleeing poverty, war, humanitarian, and economic crises. Between 2021 and now, he has housed more than 500 people.

Imam Omar Niass was born on October 15, 1971 in Kaolack, Senegal. Son of an Imam, he studied the Qur’an from age 5 and finished at 12; then, at 15, he started teaching it to young children ages 5, 6, and 7 in a school. He moved to Mauritania for about five years for another teaching job, and later returned to Senegal to further his education, before moving to the U.S. in the 2000s where he served several mosques in New York. 

He decided to work odd jobs for Arabs to earn a living. He made $150 weekly and rented a shared room on Carpenter Avenue & East 226th Street for $75 a month. He later opened a deli grocery on a Bronx street corner in 2009, which he still runs today. Proceeds enabled him to rent a $1,200 a month three-room apartment in the Bronx, which he also used as a mosque. Often, people would visit the mosque, asking for a place to stay. 

In 2014, he noticed more people from Mauritania, Kenya, Somalia, and Eritrea visited his mosque seeking shelter. “They’ll say ‘I live nowhere.’ I live with them in my apartment.” As his small business grew, he says, “I build my credit, and I’m just thinking that for me to help the people, I have to buy my own property, which is what made me buy this place.”

That property is the mosque — Jamhiyatu Ansaru-Deen Islamic house of worship in The Bronx — which Imam Omar bought in 2015. It was recently featured in the New York Times for housing African migrants who were living in Latin America, where they worked as fishermen or in factories and learned Spanish and Portuguese along the way. While Latino migrants came into the spotlight for the migrant crisis in New York, African migrants were largely unnoticed, wrote Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura.

When the Imam moved to his new house, he took with him the migrants he hosted in his old apartment.

In 2021, however, he saw more people seeking his help than ever. Imam Omar has encountered 13 nationalities at the mosque: Mauritanians, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Sierra Leonenans, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Togolese, Malians, Guineans, Senegalese, Gambians, Ivorians, and Brazillians.