Advocates warn deportees face retaliation risk from the Taliban
President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to deport Afghans detained in the United States to their home country via Pakistan, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press — a plan that immigrant rights organizations say could expose those deported to retaliation from the Taliban. Thousands of Afghans fled persecution in Afghanistan and feared for their lives after helping the U.S. military and aid groups there.
The U.S. intends to initially deport Afghan immigrants as early as Monday on flights from Louisiana, where the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has immigrant detention and processing facilities, to Pakistan, according to the court documents. Bloomberg first reported the plan to deport Afghans to Pakistan on Monday. On Friday, The New York Times reported that the immigrants were going to be sent to Afghanistan after arriving in Pakistan.
U.S. officials confirmed the Afghan deportations in sealed court documents obtained by the AP. In a document filed Friday in federal court in Virginia, a senior ICE official acknowledged that an Afghan immigrant had been scheduled to be on an upcoming charter flight from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Pakistan, “with further transport onward to Afghanistan.” The document was filed in the case of an immigrant who is not in custody and is challenging efforts to deport him.
In another federal court case in Oklahoma, federal prosecutors filed a document Monday disclosing that another Afghan immigrant was scheduled to be deported to Afghanistan sometime next week.
“This is absolutely unconscionable,” said Shawn VanDiver, a U.S. Navy veteran and president of the advocacy group #AfghanEvac. “It seems like there’s no end to their willingness to break the law and violate people’s human rights.”
Human Rights First, an advocacy group for refugees and asylum seekers that tracks U.S. deportation flights, said Saturday that it had confirmed a scheduled flight from Louisiana to Pakistan on Tuesday carrying Afghan immigrants. “It is beyond egregious that this administration plans to carry out an unprecedented mass deportation flight of Afghans, forcibly sending them through Pakistan and into the hands of the Taliban,” Savitri Arvey, director of policy, refugee & immigrant rights for Human Rights First, said in an email to the AP.
Arvey added, “This follows previous unconscionable deportation flights we have tracked under this administration, including Iranian Christian converts and political dissidents removed via Qatar and Kuwait to Iran, as well as a Russian political dissident removed via Egypt to Russia.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in an email to the AP on Saturday that ICE does not comment on future immigrant-removal operations, citing operational security and personnel safety. Officials at the Pakistan embassy in Washington did not immediately return email messages.
The Trump administration has deported thousands of immigrants to countries other than their own — in some instances because it is unable to send them to their own countries, as the United States does not have formal relations with those governments, such as the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and in other instances as a deterrent. In many cases, a U.S. immigration judge has determined that deportees’ lives would be in jeopardy if sent to their home countries. It was not immediately clear whether any of those designated for return to Afghanistan have protective orders against being sent there.
Some Democratic members of Congress criticized the Afghan deportations on social media after seeing the Times story Friday. “It is reprehensible that the Trump Administration plans to deport hundreds of Afghans, including women, children and those who supported U.S. forces, to Pakistan — who then risk being sent back into the hands of the Taliban. Congress must stand against this,” Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire posted on X. Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut added in his own X post, “We made a promise to our Afghan allies — that after aiding & protecting our troops during the conflict in Afghanistan, America would not abandon them. This Administration is betraying that promise, deporting them to potential torture & death.”
In September, the administration finalized a last-minute reprieve to avoid the closure of a camp in Qatar that houses more than 1,000 Afghans who assisted America’s war effort or are the relatives of U.S. service members. The administration extended for nine months the life of Camp As Sayliyah, which had been due to close Sept. 30 at the end of the U.S. budget year.
Upon entering his second term, Trump, a Republican, paused his Democratic predecessor’s Afghan resettlement program as part of a series of executive orders cracking down on immigration, including dramatically altering refugee admissions to focus on white South Africans. The refugee changes left thousands of people who fled war and persecution — and had gone through yearslong vetting processes to start new lives in America — stranded at places worldwide, including the base in Qatar.