They Were Promised Flights to the U.S. Now They’re Stuck and in Danger

Hamida organized rural women’s health clinics and a network of midwives. Mohammad guarded detainees for the U.S. Army. Hekmatullah’s brother worked on U.S. government projects. Suhrab’s father was a high-level judge who presided over sensitive cases. Kheyal trained fieldworkers for an international aid organization. All of them fled Afghanistan with their families for Pakistan, sometime after the messy withdrawal of the U.S. military in 2021. They worked their way through the lengthy process of legally entering the United States as refugees. Several of them had plane tickets to America.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Now they are stuck.

One of the first things President Donald Trump did when he arrived in office was to suspend the Refugee Admissions Program for 90 days. This effectively meant all work stopped on processing the paperwork of people fleeing to the U.S. because of persecution. One refugee agency told TIME that more than 500 flights for more than 1,000 already vetted refugees from the region were canceled.

Read More: How Christian Groups Are Responding to the Foreign-Aid Freeze

Shortly after the Executive Order was signed, the government of Pakistan, which says it houses some 1.5 million refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan (some of whom arrived during the Soviet occupation ), announced that Afghan residents who could not find a country to take them had to leave Rawalpindi and Islamabad—the cities where most of them live because they have access to the internet and government and aid offices—by March 31. After that time they will be repatriated.

According to according to Shawn VanDiver, founder of #AfghanEvac,a coalition of veterans and other groups working in the region, 15,000 or so Pakistan-based Afghan refugees were approved as ready to travel. They are now at a terrifying impasse. They cannot push forward, nor can they pull back. Their cases will not progress until at least April 25, and possibly never. They will be even more unwelcome in Pakistan beyond March 31 and nothing but poverty and jeopardy await them in Afghanistan, where recent returnees are viewed with deep suspicion or worse. One refugee says he was warned of “unknown armed men” killing returnees. “The only armed men in Afghanistan are Taliban,” he adds.

TIME talked to several people who were stranded by the pause, and agreed to use only one of their or their relatives’ names to prevent reprisals by the Afghan authorities or discovery by the Pakistani authorities.

Hamida was due to fly to Doha and then Pennsylvania on Feb. 3, with her husband and young child. On Jan. 25, she got an email from her contact at the International Organization for Migration informing her that she would not be traveling. She had left Afghanistan on the pleading of her father-in-law, who said he had been told by the local authorities that her prior work with maternal-health NGOs would mean her presence at their compound could endanger the whole family.

She is terrified of returning. Once they figure out who she is, she says, “I’m 100% sure I won’t be alive more than a week there.” She currently lives in a one-room home. The 30-month visa process, during which her claim to refugee status was vetted and approved, has depleted their savings. To avoid being picked up by Pakistani police, they lock the door of their one-room apartment and stay hidden for most of the day. Her husband no longer goes to the laboring jobs he used to do. Their child rarely goes outside. They shop for groceries at night. Now the former project manager with a staff of 60 supports her family doing at-home tailoring work. “We will try to survive here if we can,” she says. “I don’t know what we will do, but I’m sure we will not go to Afghanistan.”

Read More: How Trump’s Foreign-Aid Freeze Is ‘Shaking the Whole System’

In many ways Hekmatullah’s brother is luckier than Hamida. Hekmatullah arrived in the U.S. a year ago on a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), which is given to those who served alongside the U.S. Army. (This program is also currently not operating.) He can support his brother financially. But in other ways he’s in the same boat. Hekmatullah was told to expect his brother to arrive in Missouri on Feb. 5, but on Jan. 25 he got an email from his local refugee resettlement agency saying the trip had been canceled.

His brother, who worked for several American NGOs during the conflict is now on the move, staying at different rentals and friends’ homes every few nights to avoid being caught and sent back to Afghanistan. “The Pakistan government is searching for the Afghan refugees everywhere in Pakistan to arrest them and deport them to their country,” says Hekmatullah. “But in Afghanistan, you’re not getting deported. They will arrest you.” (The Pakistani embassy did not answer questions sent via email.)

Kheyal’s family completed the paperwork and their travel documents were requested in December. He, his wife, and children were expecting their flight details any day. “Until 20 January, we were really hopeful every day,” he says. They are surviving on savings from his previous job, which he quit partly because he was expecting to move to the U.S. Recently the Pakistani government started requiring monthly rather than six-month extensions on visas. Each one, with what might euphemistically be called “handling fees,” costs $200. The police visit his apartment building frequently.

It is 3 a.m. where he is when he speaks to TIME, but Kheyal says nobody in his house is sleeping. “Once we heard that the process is suspended, then we cannot sleep, we cannot eat,” he says. “My children are depressed. They have access to social media. They hear everything. I cannot hide anything from them.” He’s hoping to wait out the pause in Pakistan.

Read More: Inside the Chaos, Confusion, and Heartbreak of Trump’s Foreign-Aid Freeze

Suhrab’s family cannot wait. His father was a judge who had to hide in relatives’ homes when the Taliban took power, as people he sentenced came to take revenge. The judge and his family arrived in Pakistan in January 2022. Their resettlement was being handled by Welcome Corps, a Biden-era program in which a group of U.S. citizens—in this case, a church in East Tennessee—can sponsor a refugee. That program is suspended.

From the safety of the west, Suhrab sometimes works double shifts to support them. His brother, who has also left the region, sends money too. The family and the church group in Tennessee are looking for another country to take them, although very few nations give visas to Afghan passport holders. “I’m super scared,” says Suhrab, sitting in his car during a lunch break at work. “What if they catch them and they force them to get out from Pakistan? I don’t know what will happen to them.”

The church group is also taken aback. “It does surprise me that our American government is doing that, especially against refugees,” says Melva McGinnis, who coordinated the Welcome Corps program at the church, which has previously sponsored another Afghan family. “The previous government—it was like anyone and their brother can come in, legal or illegal. It isn’t fair that people that are trying to come to the States the legal way shouldn’t be allowed to come. I think they should.”

President Trump’s move was not unexpected, however. He massively reduced the number of refugees allowed into the country last time he was in office, even before the arrival of COVID-19-related restrictions. Generally surveys show a wide swath of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum support America accepting refugees, and even higher numbers support accepting refugees from Afghanistan who were allied to the American cause. Under President Biden, the number of refugees admitted per year went from a historic low of 11,400 in 2021 to a 30-year high of more than 100,000 in 2024—although the total number during his term is dwarfed by how many refugees were admitted by both President Carter (375,000) and President Reagan (660,000 over two terms).

More surprising perhaps is the abandonment of Afghan military personnel who fought alongside the U.S. forces. Mohammad helped guard detainees at a U.S. air base. He has gone through the process of applying to come to America twice. After waiting 18 months for his SIV, he also applied for a refugee visa, but the processing was not finished before the three-month pause began. He, his wife, two brothers, and sister-in-law are living in a shack in a slum. “My situation is no good,” he says. “We have no money for food or medicine.” He and his family eat once a day, with help from sympathetic locals.

VanDiver, of #AfghanEvac, says his bipartisan group is reaching out to Republicans in Congress to see if a carve-out can be made for already-approved refugees stranded in Pakistan or Afghanistan, which he estimates at about 65,000 people, including 50,000 still in Afghanistan. “We have a broad cross section of America that’s represented in our ecosystem,” he says. “Ninety percent of the American public supports this effort. It is not something that is unpopular.”

Eric Lebo, a former Navy Reservist, served with Mohammed at the air base. “We couldn’t do our job if it wasn’t for him and his soldiers,” says Lebo, now a truck driver in California. “There’s all kinds of refugee and immigration stuff going on,” he adds. “But I mean, people like Mohammed are soldiers who served alongside the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Their lives are in danger.”

Mohammed’s brother and parents still live in Afghanistan. Recently, he says—and texts a gruesome photo—his brother was shot in the face. Mohammed thinks the assailants mistook his brother for him.

Source link