Zia Ghafoori stood in the East Room of the White House in 2018, beaming as President Trump thanked him for his “noble service” as an interpreter for a team of Green Berets in Afghanistan at a ceremony honoring their bravery at the battle of Shok Valley.
But last year, Mr. Trump froze the special visa program that gave Mr. Ghafoori and other Afghans who worked with the American government over two decades of war with the Taliban a path to legal status in the United States. The president did so hours after an Afghan national who had fought in a paramilitary group linked to the C.I.A. and entered the United States on a two-year grant of parole in 2021 shot two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., one of them fatally.
Then on Tuesday, Congress quietly closed the door to the program altogether when it cleared a spending package that authorized no new visas for it.
The wind down of the program reflected a rapid political shift on Capitol Hill after the November shooting by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who did not have a special Afghan visa, but had been granted asylum by the Trump administration. Many Republicans in Congress — even some who had backed the Afghan partners program — quickly fell in line behind Mr. Trump as he vilified the same Afghan partners whom many of them had demanded the Biden administration make every effort to rescue when the United States withdrew from Kabul in 2021.
The fear of backlash from a G.O.P. base that for years has embraced Mr. Trump’s xenophobic statements about migrants — including blanket assertions that Afghans are terrorists, a suggestion he amplified after the National Guard shooting — appears to have overpowered what had been a solid bipartisan consensus around the importance of standing behind Afghans who served alongside Americans during the war.
Republican voters “think that any Afghan that got into the United States is a terrorist,” said Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, who was the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and has announced his retirement from Congress. While he said he was all for more vetting of Afghans entering the country, Mr. McCaul said any person who qualified for a Special Immigrant Visa would have worked closely with the U.S. personnel.
“So to say there are terrorists — when they actually worked alongside our military and intelligence community to kill terrorists — doesn’t make any sense,” Mr. McCaul said.
Now, Afghans with pending applications have no sense of when or whether the Trump administration might resume issuing visas. That has left many of them who are still in Afghanistan or living as refugees in another country in jeopardy.
“These Afghan allies were the ones who stood with their sons and daughters overseas,” Mr. Ghafoori said in a recent interview. “They carried their wounded, and they saved their lives.”
Authorizing more visas over the years had at times required backroom wrangling. But there was always a contingent of Republicans, many of them veterans, who demanded that Washington stand by its promise to bring Afghan partners safely to the United States.
But in an election year, and with a president who is quick to endorse challengers to primary members of his own party who cross him, no Republican has called for Congress to provide special Afghan visas for another year, or publicly opposed Mr. Trump’s indefinite pause on the program. They said nothing to dispute the president’s claims, made without evidence, that a breakdown in vetting led to the National Guard shooting.
Still, there have been no proposals from the Trump administration or congressional Republicans to increase vetting of special Afghan visa applicants.
“They’re just slamming the door shut,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “Stranding vetted S.I.V. applicants or sending Afghan families back into the hands of the Taliban isn’t about security; it’s a betrayal of the promises we made to those who risked their lives for the United States.”
Democrats said they had tried, and failed, to persuade Republicans who had supported the program in the past to include it in this year’s spending package.
“There’s a lot of veterans on the Republican side who would do it,” said Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They unfortunately don’t have the courage right now to vote publicly.”
The State Department told Congress last summer that there were around 9,000 Special Immigrant Visas still available to issue to Afghans. But the Trump administration has given Congress no indication it plans to allocate those visas to tens of thousands of outstanding applicants. Last July, there were over 1,400 Afghans in the final stages of the vetting process, and over 100,000 more still submitting documents, including a recommendation from a top military or diplomatic official.
In a statement, the State Department said the pause on the special visa program was to ensure proper vetting and to confirm the identities and visa eligibility of applicants. The department would not say whether the remaining visas would ultimately be issued.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers pushed last year for Congress to approve 20,000 more special visas for Afghans, writing in a letter to senior appropriators that applicants often take years to “complete rigorous vetting.”
Some Republicans said after the shooting that they were still pushing to include more visas in the State Department spending bill. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Iowa Republican who last year had endorsed including thousands of new visas, said it was now “vastly more difficult.”
Republicans blame the Biden administration for leaving Afghan partners stranded in Afghanistan and evacuating others to a third country where they were told they would be processed and brought to the United States. Those who called for thousands more visas in the past said they have not forgotten those Afghans.
“I’m committed to finding a pathway forward to help our Afghan partners who put their lives on the line alongside U.S. service members, while maintaining rigorous vetting and ensuring accountability at every step,” said Representative Zach Nunn of Iowa, a Republican and combat veteran who flew missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Legal experts said that while Mr. Trump cannot unilaterally end the program, it is unclear what, if any, levers Congress has to force his administration to issue the remaining visas to applicants, some of whom have already waited years and would be left with no other avenue to reach the United States if they did not receive them.
Democrats, together with the handful of Republicans who continue to support the Afghan partners program, still hold out hope of reopening the door to applicants and authorizing new visas in a future spending bill if they win control of either chamber in the midterm elections.
Mr. Crow warned that it would be a “moral stain” on the country if lawmakers failed to revive the program and “turn our back on our partners from Afghanistan.”
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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