More than 80 U.S. lawmakers demand answers on Afghan allies

Reps. Jason Crow, D-Colo., and Don Bacon, R-Neb., on Thursday led the effort to get answers from Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the future of Afghans currently in Qatar who worked with U.S. troops during the war in Afghanistan. Some of the roughly 1,100 residents of Camp As-Sayliyah in Doha are interpreters, contractors, and security personnel who fought the Taliban alongside U.S. soldiers in their home country, and others are the family members of active-duty U.S. military personnel. The U.S. government has thoroughly vetted all of them, but Trump administration policies have prevented them from coming to the United States, the representatives said in their letter.

What did the Congress members want to know? The signatories requested information from Rubio on where he planned to send the Afghans in Qatar. The administration was reportedly considering sending them to a third country that wasn’t the United States and wasn’t Afghanistan, the signatories claimed. The lawmakers criticized a plan the State Department reportedly considered earlier this year to transfer the Afghans to the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a country the State Department currently urges Americans to avoid as it is mired in both an ongoing war and an ongoing refugee crisis. They celebrated the fact that the Trump administration was, reportedly, no longer considering that plan. The members requested a briefing from Rubio on this matter by June 24.

What did the State Department have to say about the letter? The department told WORLD on Friday that the Biden administration put the Afghans in Camp As Sayliyah in the position they were in. It did so by admitting unvetted individuals to the United States and by making promises to Afghans that could not be kept, the State Department said. It added that it was now working to protect the safety and security of the American people while also safely relocating the Afghans in Qatar to other countries where they would be out of harm’s way.

Rubio told members of Congress earlier this month that his department was not allowed to admit any Afghans into the United States but was actively trying to find other countries those Afghans could go to. Rubio said they couldn’t come to the United States due to an executive order signed late last year.

President Donald Trump signed a freeze on the admissions of nationals from several countries, including Afghanistan, in June 2025, and then updated that freeze in December 2025. But just last week a federal judge declared the freeze unlawful, arbitrary, and capricious, and ordered the federal government to resume processing the immigration paperwork for people from the countries targeted by Trump’s orders.

Dig deeper: Read my report in Compassion from last year about Afghans who are military veterans in the United States whose families are still stuck in the Middle East, inside the reach of the Taliban.