Braxton Taylor
Afghans who have been approved to come to the U.S. as refugees, including allies during the war and a couple of hundred family members of American troops, are now stranded after the Trump administration suspended refugee flights, advocates are warning.
One in the cascade of executive actions President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office Monday ordered a suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
The executive order said the suspension would take effect Jan. 27. But flights are already being canceled, according to advocates and resettlement agencies, meaning thousands of Afghans already approved for resettlement are now in limbo, along with thousands more who are at some point in the application process.
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“There are a bunch of people who are just quietly grinding this out and a lot of veterans who are suffering in silence as their friends are begging them for help,” said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who leads AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations that has worked with the State Department to resettle Afghans since the end of the war in 2021.
For some veterans of America’s longest war, the pleas for help — and lack of any answers — are taking a deep emotional toll, VanDiver said.
“And when your friend who saved your life is texting you every morning and night, ‘Good morning, good evening, friend, brother, any news on my case?’ every single day, and you have to face the fact that your government is letting you down and letting them down and sending them to their doom … it’s soul shaking,” he said.
Under Trump’s executive order, the refugee program is suspended “until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States,” according to the text.
It directs the departments of State and Homeland Security to submit a report in 90 days on whether resuming the program is in the interest of the U.S. and every 90 days after that until Trump resumes the program.
The order does not suspend the Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, program, which specifically allows Afghans who worked directly for the military and other American government entities to immigrate to the U.S. But others who supported the American war effort — such as Afghan partner forces, aid workers and human rights activists — who aren’t eligible for SIVs are caught in the refugee freeze, advocates said.
Also in the group of stranded refugees are at least 200 family members of U.S. service members, VanDiver said.
While the order was supposed to take effect next week, resettlement agencies were sent a memo by the State Department on Tuesday saying “all previously scheduled travel of refugees into the United States is being canceled, and no new travel bookings will be made,” according to a copy of the memo posted on social media by AfghanEvac.
Neither the State Department nor the White House responded to Military.com’s requests for comment Wednesday on the memo or how the refugee suspension is affecting Afghan allies.
It’s unclear exactly how many Afghans were booked on flights that have been canceled, but monthly admissions of Afghan refugees in the last few months have averaged about 1,700, said Tim Young, a spokesperson for Global Refuge, a nonprofit resettlement agency.
In the last three months of 2024, Afghanistan was the single biggest source of refugees coming into the country, according to State Department data cited by Young.
“We had anticipated possibly being able to resettle at least a few more families before the cutoff,” Young said. “This is one of the main ways that we honor our promise to Afghan allies, the allies of America’s longest war. So this will have an outsized impact on Afghans who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us for the better part of two decades.”
VanDiver estimated that the initial 90-day suspension affects about 1,600 Afghans who have been cleared for resettlement and were scheduled for flights, out of about 10,000 total who have been approved for the refugee program.
An indefinite suspension could leave upward of 60,000 in the middle of the refugee application process in limbo, he added.
VanDiver’s organization, which still officially has an agreement in place with the State Department to work together on resettlement efforts, had hoped to prevent Afghans from being included in any anti-refugee actions by the Trump administration.
AfghanEvac organized a letter, signed by nearly 700 people and groups, that was sent to Trump and congressional leaders earlier this month warning that leaving Afghans behind “now would be a betrayal of the values we fought to defend and the trust built through years of shared struggle and sacrifice.”
With the refugee suspension now in place, VanDiver said he is hoping to appeal to Trump’s enthusiasm for dealmaking to “make a deal about these loyal people.”
While some Trump advisers, such as border czar Tom Homan and deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, are staunchly anti-immigration, others were fiercely critical of the Biden administration for leaving behind thousands of Afghan allies when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.
Those who have supported Afghan allies in the past include National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump himself campaigned heavily on criticizing former President Joe Biden for the withdrawal, though Trump set it in motion.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., an Army veteran who lost both of his legs in an improvised explosive device blast in Afghanistan, defended Trump’s refugee freeze when asked Wednesday about its effects on Afghan allies and dismissed the idea of a carveout for Afghans.
“There’s been a number of problems related to the way the withdrawal took place that has precipitated letting people in not necessarily vetted to the standards that we want them vetted to,” Mast told Military.com. “And this is what the Trump administration had done previously with Sudan and other nations. Look, we’re not letting people in without having a proper vetting. That goes for Afghanistan as well.”
While the SIV program was not included in Trump’s Day One executive order, supporters of the program are fearful that it will be targeted next.
“There’s no question,” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., a Marine veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, told Military.com in a phone interview Wednesday when asked whether he is concerned that the SIV program will be affected.
“My understanding is the SIV program is absolutely impacted,” he said, adding that his office receives calls all the time about the issue, but “there’s no question that concern and anxiety is way up after this EO.”
The SIV program allowed upward of 22,000 Afghans to come to the U.S. between 2009 and 2021 — a mere third of the total applications sent to the State Department over a decade-plus period. Thousands of applications were still pending at the time of the withdrawal.
“This is an anxious time for” Afghans, Khalil Arab, a 2019 beneficiary of the SIV program who is now the program manager for the SIVs and Allies Program at Combined Arms, told Military.com on Wednesday. “The good news is that — so far — SIV is nowhere mentioned in those executive orders that will prevent them from coming to the United States. That’s the good part. But what’s going to happen next? We don’t know.”
Amid Biden’s disastrous pullout from the country in 2021, Afghans who served the U.S. military and contractors in the war scrambled to get their SIVs approved in time lest they be left to the totalitarian Taliban regime. Many were — and still are.
Arab, who had worked for U.S. interests during the war for roughly four years, said that his own brother is awaiting relocation from Afghanistan and that he is worried about “what’s going to happen, because it’s just a matter of time when the administration decides that they’re not going to relocate those individuals as well.”
“The mentality is that we have a new administration that is completely shutting the borders,” he said of the beliefs of Afghans he has talked to about the issue. “They’re banning all the immigration channels, and basically it’s over for us. And anyone to hope for something positive [that] will come out of this administration is foolish.”
Meanwhile, the SIV backlog still continues.
Military.com spoke to one Afghan ally through encrypted messaging who had served the U.S. during the war for years, including with Special Forces up until the withdrawal, according to documents reviewed by the publication and those who had worked with him. He said that the Taliban continue to threaten his family and that his children shelter at home.
“Most of the time, we hide and we do not have food to feed the family,” he said. Military.com is not publishing his name because of safety concerns.
The Afghan sent the publication a rejection letter from the State Department dated Tuesday, which denied his SIV application for a second time, citing an employment letter that it deemed “fraudulent.”
Jimmy Allen Hill, who was his direct supervisor between 2005 and 2007 while working for the contractor DynCorp, now Amentum, in Afghanistan, detailed to Military.com his long push for getting the Afghan recognized for an SIV, which included providing recommendation letters and contacting his congressman, the contractor and the State Department to no avail.
“I saw a lot of them get killed, but he still did it and then we left and hung him out to dry,” Hill said.
“He’s done his time. He’s trying the legal way to do everything, but yet we have millions of people that are coming into this country illegally,” he added. “But if somebody tries the legal way [it’s] ‘Oh no, you can’t do that.’ That’s what it’s set up for. Vet them. If you think something’s screwed up, call their references. Hell, I’ll meet with [the State Department] … face to face if that’s what they needed.”
Arab said he would ask the administration to reconsider the ban on the refugee program and provide a pathway for Afghans who served U.S. interests in the war, even if they don’t fall under the SIV program, so they still have a chance to come to the country after vetting.
“They actually believe in the values that America actually holds dear to their heart,” he said. “So we should give them a chance to be able to come to safety and start a safe and prosperous life.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated with quotes from Rep. Seth Moulton.
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