Advocates beg Trump to let in Afghan refugees

Last month, Shawn VanDiver’s advocacy organization, Afghan Evac, sent a letter to congressional leaders and the Trump administration, calling on officials to prioritize the resettlement of Afghan refugees who helped the U.S. military or face threats from the Taliban.

On a Wednesday press call, VanDiver echoed fears that the Trump administration is planning to close the U.S. State Department office overseeing Afghan resettlement efforts. A Reuters report released Tuesday credited anonymous officials with saying that the Office of the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts (CARE) is preparing to shut down processing centers in Qatar and Albania, where many Afghans finish the vetting process before leaving for the United States. World Relief also released a statement urging the State Department not to follow through on the reported closure.

“These are just plans that are being put forward,” VanDiver said on the call. “But there’s no plan for … if we take a different direction.” He said he fears that the U.S. government may not keep its promises to Afghans who supported the U.S. military, including 1,200 to 1,500 Afghans with special immigrant visas. WORLD reached out to the State Department to confirm the reported closure and did not receive a response in time for publication.

“My generation of veterans grew up fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” VanDiver, who served in the U.S. Navy off the coast of Iraq, told WORLD. “Critical to our efforts are our wartime allies.”

The Biden administration temporarily established CARE during the United States’ military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and it became the permanent hub for relocating Afghans fleeing the Taliban in October 2022. Thousands of Afghans are still waiting in Afghanistan and other countries to resettle in the United States.

President Donald Trump paused the refugee resettlement program on his first day in office, but veterans groups and a growing number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are urging him to make an exception for the Afghans who assisted the U.S. government and are now stranded. Critics of the emotional appeals for “Afghan allies” say the term doesn’t distinguish between individuals who directly assisted the U.S. government and others seeking to escape Taliban rule for other reasons.

The Trump administration’s resettlement pause affected three pathways for Afghans relocating to the United States: special immigrant visas, the refugee resettlement system, and humanitarian parole.

Afghans who worked directly for U.S. military forces or the U.S. government are eligible for special immigrant visas, which include a pathway to permanent residency and eventually citizenship. The number of these visas is capped just like the number of refugee visas each year. Between 2022 and 2025, the U.S. government issued 68,654 SIV visas, according to Nayla Rush, a senior research fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for reducing immigration. Congress added an additional 12,000 visas in March 2024, and there are fewer than 10,000 spots left, not including those for dependents.

SIV holders are not refugees, and the Trump administration clarified that suspending the refugee resettlement program would not bar SIV recipients from entering the country. But experts say the SIV program didn’t escape unscathed.

The refugee resettlement pause also ended reception and placement services for SIV holders, who must now arrange their own travel to the United States, according to an online explainer from Global Refuge, one of the nation’s largest resettlement agencies. The State Department will not renew its contracts with many of the personal services contractors staffing the Office of the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts, VanDiver said. He told WORLD he had spoken with several government sources about the staffing cuts.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., with several of her fellow Democrats, signed a letter urging the Trump administration to reconsider executive actions and directives affecting Afghans. A growing number of Republican lawmakers are also pushing Trump to continue resettling Afghans and streamlining the pathway to citizenship for those who have already arrived in the United States.

“Unlike some of the other groups they talked about, these have been vetted,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said on CBS’ Face the Nation last Sunday. He called the Afghan situation an “unintended consequence” of Trump’s order.

“They worked with our troops to defeat the Taliban, which unfortunately, Biden surrendered to,” McCaul said. “But it seems to me we ought to live up to our word, otherwise down the road in another conflict, no one’s going to trust us.” Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Morgan Luttrell, both veterans and Texas Republicans, have also indicated their support for some kind of Afghan exception.

Though there are only about 10,000 spots remaining in the SIV program, roughly 130,000 individuals, not including their family members, have applied. It’s unclear how many would actually qualify and, of those, how many are stuck outside the United States. The available tallies of Afghans waiting in their home country or third countries lump refugees and SIV applicants together. VanDiver told WORLD as of last week there were 22,465 refugees and SIV applicants in Qatar, 330 in Albania, about 23,000 in Pakistan, and roughly 40,000 in the final stages of approval in Afghanistan.

Immediately following Trump’s suspension of the refugee program on Inauguration Day, State Department officials canceled flights for nearly 1,660 Afghan refugees, according to VanDiver. He said those refugees included family members of active duty U.S. military personnel, and he argued all of the refugees in the application process stood with the U.S. government in some way. “These are judges and prosecutors who helped put the Taliban away,” he said.

VanDiver added that some Afghans who would qualify for SIV visas were unable to provide the necessary paperwork or obtain a signature from their employer proving they worked directly for the U.S. government or military. So many of them ended up in the refugee pipeline, he said.

Typically, the United Nations refugee agency or a nongovernmental organization refers each refugee to the U.S. resettlement program individually. But the Biden administration designated some Afghans as Priority 2 refugees, which groups together people with certain persecution claims who will likely qualify for admission. The category included Afghans who didn’t meet the minimum service requirement for an SIV or who worked for an NGO that received a government grant or had a cooperative agreement with the U.S. government. It also allowed some Afghans to apply for refugee resettlement themselves instead of waiting for an agency or NGO to refer them.

Rush, with the Center for Immigration Studies, said this exception widened the definition of “allies” to include individuals who had only distant ties to the U.S. government.

After four months under Taliban rule, Marjila Badakhsh qualified for the Priority 2 program. Badakhsh, now 28, trained journalists in Afghanistan before the United States pulled out of the country. The media advocacy group she worked for was affiliated with the nonprofit National Endowment for Democracy, which receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. government. Her employer closed their offices the day after the Taliban took over the government. Badakhsh spent 27 days at a U.S. military base in Qatar while the government finished vetting her refugee application. She arrived in the United States on Dec. 29, 2021.

“For me there was a future,” Badakhsh said, adding that she knows others who are also trying to exit the country. “They are still there, waiting. Hopeless.”

The Biden administration also bypassed the refugee resettlement cap and welcomed about 76,000 Afghans on humanitarian parole, which provides work authorization and temporary permission to reside in the country. Then, Biden allowed Afghan parolees to refer their family members to the refugee pipeline.

In the scramble of the U.S. withdrawal, Rush said many of those flown to the United States on parole may not have qualified for the refugee or SIV program and just “happen[ed] to be there” at the time when a plane was leaving the country. “It was chaos. It was urgent,” Rush said, but she added that doesn’t mean the United States has to resettle every Afghan yearning to escape the Taliban.

Most parolees were subject to the same vetting requirements as refugees and SIV applicants at a U.S. military base in a third country. But the State Department inspector general compiled a report in June 2020—more than a year before Kabul fell to the Taliban and thousands more flooded the program—warning that the agency lacked “a centralized database to effectively document the identity of locally employed staff and contractors.”

Both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have characterized the administration’s refugee pause and reconsideration of parole programs as a hard reset essential to ensuring participants are fully vetted and won’t overwhelm American communities. In October 2024, the Justice Department charged an Afghan national in Oklahoma, whom officials paroled into the country in 2021, with plotting an Election Day terror attack in support of Islamic State (ISIS). During an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation, Vance pointed to the arrest to defend the refugee suspension.

Rush with the Center for Immigration Studies said she would understand if the Trump administration made an exception for SIV applicants who have been accepted into the program already but haven’t yet reached the United States. But she noted cries for a broader exception for “Afghan allies” don’t make any distinction between refugees, parolees, or SIV holders.

Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan, hosts about 1.5 million Afghan refugees and asylum-seekers. The country issued a March 31 dispersion deadline to tens of thousands of refugees in Islamabad awaiting resettlement to third countries, and it threatened to deport refugees back to Afghanistan if they were unable to find another country to accept them. The International Organization for Migration and the UN refugee agency warned that many Afghan nationals, especially ethnic and religious minorities, journalists, and human rights activists, could become targets of the Taliban government if they return.

Trump directed DHS and the State Department to submit a joint report within 90 days examining whether it’s in the United States’ best interest to restart the refugee resettlement system. The first report is due April 20.