Later this week, the Trump administration may impose travel restrictions on citizens from dozens of countries, supposedly because of security concerns. According to early reports, one of the countries on the “red” list, from which all travel would be banned, is Afghanistan. Sixty thousand exhaustively vetted Afghan visa applicants and refugees, who risked their lives alongside the Americans in their country as interpreters, drivers, soldiers, judges, and journalists, and who now face imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of the Taliban, will have the golden doors to the United States shut in their face.
As the Taliban closed in on Kabul in the summer of 2021, then-Senator Marco Rubio co-authored a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to “ensure the safety and security of Afghans who have worked closely” with American intelligence agencies: “Abandoning these individuals” would be “a stain on our national conscience.” After the Afghan government fell and tens of thousands of Afghans rushed to the Kabul airport, trying desperately to be evacuated with the last American troops, Rubio excoriated Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind to be killed. Then-Representative Mike Waltz warned that “our local allies are being hunted down.” Kash Patel accused the Biden administration of “the stranding of US personnel and allies.” The Republican majority of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a damning report on the fall of Afghanistan, said that Biden’s “abandonment of our Afghan allies, who fought alongside the U.S. military against the Taliban—their brothers in arms—is a stain on [his] administration.”
As for then-ex-President Donald Trump, he was incredulous, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News: “We take the military out before we took our civilians out, and before we took the interpreters and others we want to try and help? But by the way, I’m America first. The Americans come out first. But we’re also going to help people that helped us.”
On Inauguration Day, President Trump signed executive orders pausing foreign aid and refugee processing. He turned off the flow of money to private agencies that helped Afghans start new lives in America and shut down the State Department office set up under Biden to oversee their resettlement. Since then, the number of Afghans able to enter the U.S. has dwindled to zero. The travel ban will make the halt official and permanent. All of the outrage at the Biden administration’s betrayal of our Afghan allies from the very Republicans who now command U.S. foreign policy will go down as sheer opportunism. The stain will be on them.
“All these fucking people had a lot to say about what was going on in August 2021,” says Shawn Van Diver, a Navy veteran who leads AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations that help resettle Afghan allies in this country. Politically, Biden never recovered from the chaotic fall of Kabul and the terrible scenes at the airport, climaxing in the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate that killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghans. Biden deserved blame above all for failing to take seriously America’s obligation to vulnerable Afghans who had placed their trust in this country. But during the years following the debacle, AfghanEvac and other civil-society groups worked with the Biden administration to bring nearly 200,000 Afghans to America—a little-known fact that partly redeemed its failures. Now Trump is compounding Biden’s earlier sins, this time in cold blood.
Van Diver and his colleagues are scrambling to persuade their contacts inside the administration to exempt Afghans from the coming travel ban. Many of his military friends are stunned that the president they voted for is betraying Afghans they had to leave behind. “I wonder if President Trump knows that Stephen Miller is ruining his relationship with veterans because of what we’re doing to our Afghan allies,” he told me. According to Van Diver, Rubio and Waltz—now the secretary of state and the national security adviser, respectively—are sympathetic to the veterans’ appeal; but Miller, the hard-line homeland-security adviser, will have the final say with Trump.
Forty-five thousand Afghans have completed the onerous steps to qualify for Special Immigrant Visas as former employees of the U.S. government in Afghanistan and are ready to travel. Fifteen thousand more Afghans, most in Pakistan, have reached the end of refugee processing as close affiliates of the American war effort. They’ve been waiting through years of referrals, applications, interviews, medical exams, and security vetting. Some of them have plane tickets. Another 147,000 Afghans are well along in qualifying for Special Immigrant Visas.“We did make a promise as a nation to these people that if they stood beside the U.S. mission and worked with us, that they would have a pathway to come build lives here,” a State Department official, who requested anonymity because of a policy against speaking to journalists, told me. “If we don’t keep the promises we make to our wartime allies, then our standing globally should be questioned by any other future potential allies we might have.” Afghans who finally reach the United States, the official continued, “are so incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to be in this country. They believe in the promise of this country.”
One young Afghan couple—I’ll call them Farhad and Saman, because using their real names would expose them to danger—are both veterans of the Afghan special forces, and they spent years serving and fighting alongside U.S. Army Rangers and other special operators. After the American departure, they were hunted by Talibs and took shelter in safe houses around the country, while family members were harassed, arrested, and tortured. In 2023, with the help of a small group of American supporters, the couple crossed the border into Pakistan and found lodgings in Islamabad, where they waited with their small children for their refugee applications to be processed. Last summer they were interviewed by the U.S. embassy and passed their medical exams; but security screening took so long that, by the time it was completed, their medical exams had expired. On January 2 of this year, they passed their second medical exams and were told by the International Organization of Migration that they would soon depart for the United States. “But on January 24, we realized unfortunately that Donald Trump is in office and everything is stopped,” Farhad told me by phone. “It was at the very last minute, the last stage. I didn’t expect that this would happen. It made a very bad impact on me and my family.”
Recently, stepped-up Pakistani police patrols and raids made the couple flee Islamabad to another region. Their 3-year-old daughter and infant son don’t have visas, and Farhad’s and Saman’s visas expire on April 17, with no prospect of renewal. Fear of being stopped at a checkpoint keeps the family inside their small apartment almost all the time, while their daughter wonders when she’ll be able to start school. They ask neighbors to buy food for them at the bazaar. The Pakistani government has begun to issue warnings over loudspeakers at mosques that local people who rent property to Afghan refugees will face legal consequences. “I’m stressed that the U.S. government is not going to relocate us and will not help us to continue processing our case,” Farhad said. He has sent letters of inquiry to embassies of other countries, with no reply. “I’m worried that eventually somehow I’ll be deported to Afghanistan, and deportation means I’ll be caught by the Taliban and killed. My wife will not be excluded. She will face the same consequences. I’m overwhelmed sometimes when I think what will happen to my kids—they’ll be orphans. It’s too much for me to take in.”
When Republican leaders were shaming the Biden administration for abandoning this country’s Afghan allies, they sometimes used the military phrase brothers in arms. Now, as those same Republicans in the Trump administration are betraying the same Afghans all over again, Farhad used the phrase with me. “I fought like brothers in arms with the Americans in uniform for six years, shoulder to shoulder, everywhere,” he said. “If this travel ban happens, the question is, what about the six years of friendship and fighting together? What about helping your friends and allies? That’s the question I have.”
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