With Trump in office, Afghan refugees cannot seek asylum in US

Minutes after US President Donald Trump took office on Monday, the hopes of hundreds of Afghan refugees, who were slated to be resettled in the US, were dashed as they received notice that their flights had been – at least for the time being – suspended. Reuters first reported the alleged flight cancellations, citing an unnamed Trump administration official, and the details were subsequently confirmed by Sean VanDiver, the head of the Afghan Evacuation Alliance, a group of US veterans and advocacy groups.

The Afghan Evacuation Alliance confirmed on Tuesday that the flights were not fully canceled and that Afghans with pre-approved US visas would not be affected, only refugees. Middle East Eye also confirmed through its sources that Afghan refugees reported receiving notices of the suspension of the evacuation process. Trump signed a series of executive orders on Monday, which included a pause on refugee admissions. The White House’s redesigned website now states that the administration is "pausing refugee resettlement after communities have been forced to absorb large and unsustainable numbers of migrants, straining community safety and resources."

The move leaves thousands of Afghans already displaced in third countries with little or no recourse, as returning home is not a viable option for many of them. “Most of the people we are talking about are people who fled to Pakistan, so they are hiding from Pakistani authorities trying to deport them, often in safe houses in Pakistani cities,” Arash Azizzada, co-founder of Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, told Middle East Eye. In October 2023, Pakistan announced a plan to deport any Afghan refugees who decided not to leave the country voluntarily. As of early January 2025, a staggering 783,918 people have returned to Afghanistan. The second phase of the plan has yet to be implemented.

Reuters reported that 200 unaccompanied Afghan refugee children were also removed from flight manifests to the US on Monday. Layla Ayub, an immigration lawyer with the ANAR project, told Middle East Eye that while she had not yet heard of her clients being affected, she was closely monitoring the situation. “It is deeply concerning that they have been placed in this position. Many of these people could and should have been resettled much earlier, but the Biden administration did not act with enough scale,” she said. In 2023, Congressman Mike Waltz, now Trump’s national security adviser, criticised then-US President Joe Biden for “abandoning thousands of allies and making security promises that were not kept.”

The first Trump administration ran on a promise to end "endless wars" and reached an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 known as the Doha Agreement. After 17 years of bloody war and multiple failed attempts at diplomacy, US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar signed the deal earlier that year, with former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a witness. The Taliban agreed that Afghanistan would not be used by al-Qaeda, ISIS-K or other radical groups to conduct attacks "threatening the security of the United States". In return, the US pledged to reduce its troop presence in Afghanistan, followed by a full NATO withdrawal. In April 2021, Biden announced that the US would leave Afghanistan, and in August, the US fully withdrew, with the weeks-long evacuation being primarily remembered for the astonishing scenes at Kabul airport as thousands of Afghans desperately tried to secure passage out alongside US forces.

The Taliban, who had fought against both the US and the Afghan government, quickly took over much of the country that year. By the time of the US withdrawal, the Afghan government had completely collapsed, and Taliban forces entered the capital. Azizzada told Middle East Eye that the US has a responsibility to "continue to make amends". “When the US fought a 20-year war, money or spending was never really an issue – a war that led to the Taliban being back in power, endemic corruption, and the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians,” he said. “So I really don’t believe any of \[their] arguments. The US started the war. It must continue to make amends now, no matter \[which] administration is in power, because the harm was also done by both Republicans and Democrats.”