Aid groups criticize unverified reports of Trump plan to send Afghans to the DRC

Refugee advocates on Wednesday criticized an unverified report of a Trump administration plan to send roughly 1,100 Afghans to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC. The New York Times first reported the plan on Tuesday, citing the president of AfghanEvac, a refugee advocacy organization, who said he’d been briefed on the plan. The Afghan refugees in question are currently housed at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, where they’ve been in U.S. custody since before Trump took office early last year.

What has the State Department said about all this? The U.S. State Department told WORLD it was continuing to work on voluntary resettlement options for the residents of Camp As Sayliyah, including removal to a country that wasn’t the United States or Afghanistan. But the State Department would not disclose details about those discussions, it said. It did not explicitly confirm the existence of a plan to move Afghans to the Congo.

Who are these Afghans? The refugees include people who fought against the Taliban in Afghanistan who’ve been fully vetted by the U.S. government, according to AfghanEvac. The DRC has been embroiled in armed conflict for decades, according to the Christian refugee advocacy group World Relief. Both it and Afghanistan host some of the biggest humanitarian crises in the world, World Relief said.

What have they said about the move? Through a statement shared by AfghanEvac, the residents of Camp As Sayliyah said, simply, “We do not want to go to the Democratic Republic of Congo.” The residents of the camp added that they had been through enough war and could not bring their families into a country involved in another one. They also said they could not go home because they feared the Taliban would kill them.

How does the U.S. government assess the situation in the DRC? The State Department has sweeping Level 3 and Level 4 travel advisories in place for the DRC, warning Americans to reconsider travel to the country as a whole and warning them explicitly not to travel to certain areas of the country. The U.S. government has a Level 4 travel advisory in place for Afghanistan.

Can the United States take on Afghan refugees? Nothing prohibits the United States from bringing the refugees in Qatar stateside, AfghanEvac explained. America took in roughly 190,000 refugees from Afghanistan last year. Sending these refugees to Congo would not be an acceptable option, the organization said. “You do not solve the world's number one refugee crisis by dumping it into the world's number two,” AfghanEvac said in its statement.

What has President Trump said publicly? Trump has been vocal in his criticism of Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden-era plan to evacuate Afghans who worked alongside U.S. soldiers during the war in Afghanistan. In November, the president posted an image of Afghans in the process of being airlifted out of the country, calling it “horrendous.” He went on to accuse the Biden administration of allowing hundreds of thousands of undocumented and unvetted Afghans to flood the United States. His comments came after two National Guard members were shot in an ambush attack near the White House in November. The suspect in the attack, a 29-year-old Afghan national who was resettled as part of Operation Allies Welcome, according to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro.

Dig deeper: Read my report about how the United States, late last year, began re-vetting Afghan refugees let into the country during the Biden administration following that shooting.