Do not sign anything you do not understand, and do not sign anything without a copy. Ask for a lawyer. Tell every officer, every time, if you fear being sent to Afghanistan or to any other country. Then tell us what happened at afghanevac.org/removal, so we can count it and fight it.

A removal flight is being prepared. Afghan allies in detention are being told they may be sent to Pakistan or Afghanistan. Their lawyers still do not have answers about where they are going.

Meanwhile, the State Department is meeting just 41 percent of its court-ordered Chief of Mission processing benchmark, more than 13,000 Afghan allies remain overdue for decisions, and Congress is approaching another opportunity to act.

The next two weeks matter.

On November 9 and 10, veterans and Afghan allies will take their case directly to Congress. On Veterans Day, November 11, we will walk together from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol.

We need attorneys taking cases, families reporting detentions, advocates pressing Congress to protect Afghan allies, and veterans standing beside the people who stood beside us.

Here is what you need to know, and what you can do.

• The removal flight is real. Some Afghans are being told Pakistan as a destination, others Afghanistan, and no one has been shown a travel document

• Yet another deportation flight carrying Afghans landed in the Central African Republic last week, with at least 10 Afghans reportedly on board

• State is meeting 41 percent of a court order, while more than 13,000 allies wait past the deadline set by the court

• Veterans Day is November 11th, and the Promise Walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol

• Ukrainians and Sudanese kept their TPS protection while DHS decides what to do next. Afghanistan did not get that courtesy

• Election Day is November 3, and support for Afghan allies still crosses party lines

Take the actions below, then read on.

Subscribe now

ACTION THIS WEEK

• If an Afghan you know is detained, tell us today. Report it at afghanevac.org/removal. The most recent flight we’ve been told about is days away, and every report helps a lawyer move before it leaves.

• Attorneys, join Counsel Corps. Attorneys on our team are putting together a practitioner’s guide for third country and unlawful removal litigation for counsel representing detained Afghans. Sign up for AfghanEvac Counsel Corps to get it as soon as it is ready (early this week), and to prepare to take a detained case.

• Walk with us on Veterans Day. On Wednesday, November 11, veterans and Afghan allies walk together from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol. Sign up at showup.afghanevac.org/f/walk.

• Join the fly-in, November 9 and 10. We train you and put you in meetings, ideally with your own members of Congress. Sign up at showup.afghanevac.org/f/flyin.

• Write your member of Congress at afghanevac.org/tps. Ask them to sign the Afghanistan TPS Act discharge petition the day it opens. Anyone living in the United States can do it, citizen or not.

• Fund the work at afghanevac.org/donate. Your gift brings veterans and Afghan allies to Washington and keeps Counsel Corps and Battle Buddies running after we leave. Organizations and companies that want to sponsor the fly-in, email me at shawn@afghanevac.org.

Report a detention

THE FLIGHT IS BOOKED

For two weeks, detained Afghans and their attorneys have reported that ICE officers were preparing people for removal in early November. AfghanEvac has now received information indicating that a Special High Risk Charter flight is scheduled to depart Louisiana during the first week of November.

What remains unclear is where that plane is going.

Some detained Afghans have been told Pakistan. Others have been told Afghanistan. We have also received reports from sources inside the government that Pakistan may be used as an intermediate destination before onward removal to Afghanistan. The individuals whose cases we are tracking have not been shown travel documents.

That uncertainty is precisely the problem. People facing removal must have a meaningful opportunity to raise claims that they would face persecution or torture in the country to which they are being sent. Their attorneys need sufficient notice to protect those rights. And the government must comply with every applicable court order.

The details we are gathering from attorneys fill in the rest, and none of it is reassuring.

• We are hearing from inside the government that officials expect Pakistan to deport them. Pakistan is the stopover. Afghanistan is the destination.

• The man who’d been told Pakistan at the airport had already been released. A federal judge in Texas released him in September. He flew to his family, reported to his first mandatory ICE check-in in Washington state, and was re-detained on the spot and shipped to Louisiana.

• An Afghan man who had been granted protection from removal to Afghanistan, because an immigration judge found he would likely be tortured or killed there, was moved from Georgia to Jena, then to the Alexandria staging facility, and then deported to the Central African Republic. All within a week. His lawyers were given no notice.

• And last week, yet another deportation flight arrived in the Central African Republic, with at least 10 Afghans reportedly on board. It is not the first. In August, the United States sent a group of deportees that included 12 Afghans there (KabulNow). These are people being sent to a country they have no connection to, half a world from anyone they know.

• Our removal tracker has logged at least 30 reports since October 14, from at least 15 detention facilities in 11 states, from Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia to Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, and here in California. When people were given a timeframe, it was almost always the same: early next month.

Afghans have every reason to fear being sent to Pakistan. Pakistan has arrested or detained 86,644 Afghans this year and deported more than 85,000 of them across the border to the Taliban, according to UNHCR and IOM, and it keeps deporting Afghans who are waiting in the American pipeline. Sending an Afghan to Pakistan is removal to Afghanistan with a layover. Sending a man protected from torture to a country he has never seen, without telling his lawyer, is not immigration enforcement. It is a deliberate choice to make sure no court gets the chance to stop it.

On Tuesday, we briefed attorneys from across the country on what is working in court. Our team is building a practitioner’s guide for counsel involved in third country and unlawful removal litigation in the fifth or ninth circuit, and any lawyer who wants it can sign up for Counsel Corps to receive it. We are also connecting attorneys in different states whose clients could be on the same flight, so they can share what is working instead of each starting from scratch. And we are asking Congressional offices to open inquiries for every detained Afghan whose family asks us to.

Our demand is simple. DHS must say where this plane is going, give every person slated or scheduled to be on it a real chance to state a fear of that country, and remove no one with a pending habeas petition or a grant of protection. If the government is confident this flight is lawful, it should have no trouble saying so in daylight.

Why it matters These men are being moved fast and quietly, because a removal flight is the one action no court can undo after takeoff. The next ten days decide whether they get a hearing or a one-way ticket. Report every detention at afghanevac.org/removal, and if you are a lawyer, take a case.

STATE MEETS JUST 41% OF COURT-ORDERED SIV PROCESSING TARGET

On Friday, the government and class counsel filed a joint status report with Judge Tanya Chutkan in Afghan and Iraqi Allies v. Rubio, the case that forces the State Department to process Special Immigrant Visa applications on time (read the filing).

The numbers are the government’s own. In May, the court ordered State to meet monthly benchmarks for Chief of Mission decisions, the first step that confirms an applicant’s service. Over four months, State issued 3,693 decisions against a court-ordered 9,000. That is 41 percent. More than 13,000 allies have waited longer than the 120 days the plan allows, and the average wait is 666 days. State says interview scheduling has improved, down from 706 days to 291, and it deserves credit for that. But it is still capping the fix at 20 more Foreign Service Officers, five of whom have arrived, while admitting staff are being pulled into withdrawing approvals it already granted instead of deciding the cases in front of them.

Thank you to IRAP and Freshfields, who represent the allies covered by this lawsuit and pressed the court for real remedies, including overtime for trained staff and an honest accounting of how much of the unit’s time is going to revocations.

Track the cases

Why it matters A court order is not a suggestion. Every month State misses its benchmark, thousands of allies who served beside Americans stay in hiding or in limbo, and some of them run out of time. This is the case I will carry into every office on the Hill on November 9.

THE PROMISE WALK AND THE FLY-IN: NOVEMBER 9 TO 11

Three days in Washington, and we want you there.

Monday and Tuesday, November 9 and 10, we are on the Hill. Veterans and Afghan allies will meet with offices across Congress to push the bipartisan Afghanistan TPS Act (H.R. 9899 and S. 5308). It protects allies already here through July 1, 2029, requires full biometric and national security vetting, and has Republican and Democratic leads in both chambers. The discharge petition is expected to open that week, and we will ask members to sign it on day one. We will also brief staff on restarting Enduring Welcome pathways, resolving every case at Camp As Sayliyah, Chief of Mission revocations, family reunification, and more.

Wednesday, November 11, is the Promise Walk. On Veterans Day, veterans and Afghan allies will walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, carrying Lincoln’s promise to care for those who served, and deliver it to Congress. Families are welcome.

• Walk with us at showup.afghanevac.org/f/walk

• Join the fly-in at showup.afghanevac.org/f/flyin. Veterans and allies are already signing up from Salem, Oregon, to Falls Church, Virginia, to Snellville, Georgia.

• Sponsor the fly-in. AfghanEvac is seeking sponsors to help bring veterans and Afghan allies to Washington. Organizations and companies that want to sponsor, bring members, or co-sponsor, email me at shawn@afghanevac.org.

Rep. Sam Liccardo told reporters this week he and Rep Crow will move the petition after the recess, and AfghanEvac’s explanation of the bill was cited in the coverage.

Walk with us

SAME LAW, DIFFERENT RULES

Temporary Protected Status for Ukraine and Sudan was set to expire on October 19. Instead, DHS told CBS News that holders will “retain protection” while the department decides what to do, with no end date set (Visa Lawyer Blog).

I am glad those families are protected. Afghan allies were not given the same courtesy. Their TPS was terminated, and many of the people we brought here in 2021 are now losing work permits and sitting in detention. Same statute. Same department. A different choice.

Why it matters When the administration says its hands are tied on Afghanistan, this is the answer. They are not. DHS can hold protections in place when it wants to. Congress can make that permanent for Afghan allies by passing the Afghanistan TPS Act.

Learn About the Afghanistan TPS Act

WHAT AFGHANS ARE TELLING US

Our check-in with everyone AfghanEvac has worked with since August 2021 is now well underway, and the answers are coming in every day. Many of the people answering are still in Afghanistan, or have family there.

The replies are hard to read. Here is some of what people wrote to us this week, with names and identifying details removed to protect them.

• A former U.S. Army contractor, still in Kabul with his family: “My SIV case has been transferred to Pakistan, and I am currently awaiting my interview.” He is waiting on an interview in the same country that is deporting Afghans by the tens of thousands.

• A father in Afghanistan: “I always change my house. My only hope is to get good news from your side.”

• A family that has been living in North Macedonia since November 2021, still waiting to be resettled in the United States.

• And a man who has written to organization after organization since 2021: “We have not given up hope. We are simply asking for a chance to live in safety, dignity, and peace.”

One man wrote back to ask why he never received a case number from us. He deserves a straight answer, and so does everyone else who has wondered. AfghanEvac is not the government. We do not issue case numbers, and we do not make policy. What we do is push the people who do, on behalf of Afghans who have cases, and these answers are how we show Congress who is still waiting. If you get an email from an address ending in afghanevac.org, it is from us. If you have not received one, start at checkin.afghanevac.org.

Why it matters America made a promise to these families. Many of them just told us, in their own words, that the promise has not been kept. Every answer goes into the record I carry to Washington.

PAKISTAN: 86,644 ARRESTED THIS YEAR

New figures from UNHCR and IOM show that between January 1 and October 17, Pakistan arrested or detained 86,644 Afghans and sent 812,131 back to Afghanistan, including 85,821 deportations (Amu TV). More than half of the arrests were in Balochistan. Arrests dipped 47 percent in mid-October, and UNHCR is urging Pakistan to exempt people with protection needs.

Many of the people pushed out are Afghans who were waiting in Pakistan for U.S. processing, including SIV applicants whose interviews are scheduled in Islamabad. Tension between Islamabad and Kabul remains high (Washington Times).

Why it matters Pakistan is where the U.S. asked many allies to wait. Now ICE officers are telling many detained Afghans that is where they are going, and officials inside government expect Pakistan to send them on. The road ends at the same border.

THE SUPREME COURT DECLINES A.A. v. MAST

On October 19, the Supreme Court denied review in A.A. v. Mast (No. 26-164), the Afghan family’s petition in their fight over the child taken from them through a Virginia adoption by a U.S. Marine. AfghanEvac joined an amicus brief with the Chamberlain Network urging the Court to hear it. The Court rarely takes any case, and this was always a long shot. That does not make it hurt less.

Thank you to Damon Porter, Paul Rodriguez, and the team at Hogan Lovells for their work on the brief, and to the Chamberlain Network for standing with this family.

Read our Amicus Brief

CAMP AS SAYLIYAH: STILL WAITING

There are now 1,033 Afghan allies and family members at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar. As of October 17, 427 of them were children. This year, 155 people have left the camp, and 122 of them accepted the U.S. government’s offer to return to Afghanistan rather than keep waiting. The camp has nine more months. So far, it is not moving.

Why it matters These families did everything the United States asked. Every week the camp stands still, more of them decide that going home to danger is better than waiting on a promise. I will be raising every one of these cases on the Hill on November 9.

CAS Explainer

SAN DIEGO: CONGRESS AT THE DOOR

This week, Sen. Alex Padilla made an unannounced oversight visit to the ICE holding facility in the federal building in downtown San Diego, amid reports of a 45-day enforcement surge that began here. ICE would not confirm the operation (Office of Sen. Padilla).

He is not the first to walk through that door. Rep. Scott Peters, a longtime friend of Afghans, has shown up for our community more times than I can count, and so have other members of the San Diego delegation and delegations around the country.

That building is where Afghan allies in San Diego go for immigration court and ICE appointments, and where Battle Buddies have stood beside them. Oversight visits are how the people inside get seen. We want more members of Congress, from both parties, walking into these facilities unannounced, starting with the ones in Louisiana where Afghans are being staged for removal.

Why it matters A detained Afghan with no lawyer and no visitor is invisible. A member of Congress at the door changes that, and so does a volunteer in the waiting room. We would like to see members of Congress showing up all over the country.

A PARTNER STEPS INTO THE LIGHT

For five years, the Afghan Scout Relief Fund worked quietly, growing by word of mouth. This week it went public, with a new website at afghanscoutrelieffund.org that shows its programs and the students it serves. Congratulations to Stephen Gates and the whole ASRF team. Work like theirs is a reminder that the promise to Afghans is being kept every day by people who never asked for credit.

Check out their new site

BATTLE BUDDIES

Not one Afghan ally who walked in with a Battle Buddy has been detained or deported.

This week, Battle Buddies stood with allies in San Diego and showed up at the Elizabeth, New Jersey detention court, where our volunteer learned the ally had already been released and confirmed where he needed to report next.

Volunteers now earn ribbons on their DISPATCH profiles for showing up, coming back for an ally’s next appointment, leading a squad, and meeting their member of Congress at home. Three appointments in the next two weeks still need a Battle Buddy.

Log in to DISPATCH Today

We are also taking the facts to Afghan families in person. Community town halls have run from Rochester to Raleigh, with Chicago and Texas next.

NOVEMBER 3: ELECTION DAY

Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, and in many states early voting is already underway. Every seat in the House of Representatives and about a third of the Senate are on the ballot, along with governors, state legislatures, and local offices across the country. The new Congress takes office in January.

AfghanEvac is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3). We do not endorse candidates or parties, and we never will. But here is what I know to be true. Support for Afghan allies has never belonged to one party. The Afghanistan TPS Act has Republican and Democratic leads in both the House and the Senate. And in July, a bipartisan polling team, Lake Research Partners and The Tarrance Group, found that 84 percent of likely 2026 voters say the United States should keep its commitments to Afghan allies and their families.

If you are eligible, vote. You can check your registration at vote.gov. Ask the candidates on your ballot where they stand on Afghan allies. Whoever wins, we will be in their office in January.

[BUTTON: See the bipartisan polling → reports.afghanevac.org/polling]

COMING UP

• First week of November. The Special High Risk Charter flight out of Louisiana.

• November 3. Election Day.

• November 6. The D.C. Circuit hears the appeal in Afghan and Iraqi Allies v. Rubio.

• November 9 and 10. Afghanistan TPS Act fly-in. Sign up at showup.afghanevac.org/f/flyin.

• November 11, Veterans Day. The Promise Walk, Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol. Sign up at showup.afghanevac.org/f/walk.

• November 13. Comments due on the refugee 10-day rule.

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

Deportations and detention

• Trump administration deported nearly 1 million through July, report finds -- The Washington Post

• ICE failed to monitor detainee at risk of suicide who later killed himself -- The Washington Post

• Trump’s DOJ told a judge how to rule. Then it pulled her from immigration court. -- The Washington Post

Citizenship and the election

• 72 percent drop in approving new citizens leaves would-be voters in limbo -- The Washington Post

• Immigrants seeking US citizenship targeted in Trump administration’s illegal voting crackdown -- Associated Press

• Trump officials soften approach to key immigration policy ahead of midterms -- The Washington Post

Congress and TPS

• US Lawmaker Pushes To Restore Deportation Protections For 8,000 Afghans -- Afghanistan International

• DHS Allows Ukraine and Sudan TPS Protections to Continue as Expiration Deadline Approaches -- Visa Lawyer Blog

Pakistan and the region

• UN agencies: More than 86,000 Afghans held in Pakistan this year -- Amu TV

• Pakistan urges Afghanistan to act against militants and denies recruiting Afghan fighters -- Associated Press

Afghan women and girls

• Remembering a time when Afghan women had a voice and agency -- The Guardian

• Afghan women could lose one of their last paths to a higher education -- DW

A government that believed in what it was doing would announce the flight, name the country, and let the courts look. This one books a charter, keeps the destination to itself, and sends people protected from torture to a country they have never seen, without a word to their lawyers.

I cannot promise every plane stays on the ground. I can promise that every Afghan you tell us about will be counted, that every lawyer who steps up will have help, and that on November 11, veterans and the allies who stood beside them will walk to the Capitol together and hand Congress the promise it made.

Report every detention. Take a case. Comment by November 13. Walk with us on Veterans Day.

They are counting on silence. Let’s not give it to them.

IF YOU ARE AN AFGHAN IN DETENTION

Do not sign anything you do not understand, and do not sign anything without a copy. Ask for a lawyer.

Tell us what happened at afghanevac.org/removal, so we can count it and fight the policy driving this.

Since October 13, detained Afghans with final orders of removal have been told the same thing in facility after facility: they will be moved to Louisiana and removed “early next month.”

In the same week, DHS cut the time a refugee has to fight termination of their status from 30 days to 10, the Supreme Court met to decide whether to hear a case AfghanEvac joined, and we started writing to every Afghan who has trusted us with their information since August 2021.

Our Afghanistan TPS Act fly-in, November 9 to 11 in Washington, needs you in the room.

Take the actions below, then read on.

Subscribe now

ACTION THIS WEEK

• If an Afghan you know is detained, tell us. It takes about three minutes.

• Know your rights, now in Dari and Pashto. Our Know Your Rights training is at afghanevac.org/kyr with Dari and Pashto voiceover, and the translated slides go up this week. Share it with every Afghan family you know.

• Attorneys, join Tuesday’s update. Tuesday, October 20, at 10:30 a.m. Pacific, I am briefing attorneys and accredited representatives on the transfers and removals we are tracking. Email me at shawn@afghanevac.org to register.

• Lawyers, join Counsel Corps at afghanevac.org/counsel-corps. Several detained Afghans reported to us this week have no lawyer.

• Join the fly-in, November 9 to 11. Register at afghanevac.org/tps-hill-day. We set up your meetings. You bring the story. Organizations that want to join forces, email me today.

• Write your member of Congress today at afghanevac.org/tps. Ask them to sign the Afghanistan TPS Act discharge petition the day it opens. Anyone living in the United States can do it, citizen or not.

Fund our work today

“EARLY NEXT MONTH”

Beginning October 13, Afghans in ICE detention began hearing the same message. They are being transferred to Louisiana, and they will be removed early next month.

Make no mistake about it — Afghans are being targeted by ICE.

Here is what we know so far. These are reports from attorneys, families, and advocates, and AfghanEvac is still verifying them. No one has reported seeing a flight manifest.

• We have multiple reports spanning at least 10 facilities. The people reporting tell us at least 47 Afghans were given the same news at those facilities.

• The largest group is at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, where up to 31 were told together. One man there learned of his removal while he was still at Moshannon Valley in Pennsylvania.

• Reports have also come from Laredo, Texas; Otay Mesa, here in San Diego; Moshannon Valley, Pennsylvania; Folkston, Georgia; the Diamondback facility in Oklahoma; Chantilly, Virginia; and Adams County in Natchez, Mississippi, where one man was told he is headed to Alexandria, Louisiana.

• Many were told they are going to Afghanistan. Two were not told where. Most were told “early next month,” and others were told this week, next week, or a specific date.

• The signs repeat. Other Afghans told at the same time. Asked to sign travel papers or meet a consulate. Commissary accounts closed. Already moved to another facility. Phone or tablet access cut off.

• Several have a final order of removal, and many already have a habeas petition or stay request on file. One has withholding of removal or CAT protection, which generally bars removal to Afghanistan and raises the risk of removal to a third country.

• Many have no lawyer and were reported to us as needing one.

• They came every way there is: across the southern border with a CBP One appointment and without one, on other visas, as a refugee, on a Special Immigrant Visa, and in the 2021 evacuation.

Removal to Afghanistan means removal to the Taliban. Some of these men and women served beside Americans, or are the family of those who did. Some have protection and / or asylum claims the government has never heard.

We have asked Senate offices to open congressional inquiries for detained constituents, and I briefed attorneys on October 14.

On Tuesday, October 20, at 10:30 a.m. Pacific, we are holding an update for attorneys and accredited representatives on what has changed since last week and what is working in court. To register, email me at shawn@afghanevac.org.

We want to hear about it every time an Afghan is detained. Whether you are family, a friend, or a lawyer, report it at afghanevac.org/removal, and attorneys, please do it before Tuesday. Names and A-numbers are optional and encrypted, and reports are deleted automatically within 60 days. We never share individual reports with ICE, DHS, or any other agency.

If your family member is detained, report it there, and we will ask your senators to open an inquiry.

Why it matters A removal flight is the one government action no court can undo after the fact. The weeks before it are when a lawyer, a stay motion, and a call from a Senate office still make the difference, and right now, too many of these folks have none of the three.

TEN DAYS TO SAVE YOUR STATUS

Last week I told you that if a refugee missed the 30-day window to answer a Notice of Intent to Terminate, USCIS could end their status without an interview and refer them to ICE.

That window is now 10 days. DHS announced the interim final rule on October 13, and it took effect immediately when it was published on October 14, with no public comment beforehand (Federal Register). My statement is at afghanevac.org/refugee-30-day.

The International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) is leading the response to this rule, and it is the first place I would send anyone affected. IRAP has published:

• An explainer on the new rule

• An updated Refugee Revetting Toolkit for lawyers preparing clients

• Legal information for refugees on revetting and detention, with a new guide in multiple languages on answering a Notice of Intent to Terminate coming soon

• IRAP’s statement on the rule

Ten days is not enough time to find a lawyer, gather records from a war zone, or even receive a letter at an old address. For the 23,261 Afghan refugees without green cards, a single missed envelope can now become a deportation case in under two weeks.

Why it matters If you are an Afghan refugee without a green card, update your address with USCIS today on Form AR-11. If you receive a notice, call a lawyer the same day, use IRAP’s guides, and request a Battle Buddy.

CHECKING IN WITH EVERYONE WE HAVE WORKED WITH

AfghanEvac wants to make sure that every person affected by the withdrawal and its aftermath is part of a living record that cannot be undermined or ignored. Toward that, we started writing to every Afghan who has emailed or interacted with AfghanEvac since August 2021.

The email comes in English, Dari, and Pashto, and it asks one question: what has happened to you and your family since then?

The survey takes about two minutes, and every question is optional. Emails are going out in batches. If you have not received yours but you want to tell us about your circumstances, start at checkin.afghanevac.org.

If you get an email from an address ending in afghanevac.org, it is from us. We will never ask for passwords or money.

Why it matters The answers I am already getting describe families still in Afghanistan, cases with no movement in years, and people who simply want someone to know they are still waiting. Every answer makes the record harder to ignore.

WITH OUR COMMUNITY IN SAN DIEGO

On Saturday, we held an emergency town hall with the Afghan community here in San Diego at one of our usual spots.

Families came with hard questions, and they deserved straight answers. We talked through the reports of transfers and removals, what the new 10-day rule means for refugees, how to request a Battle Buddy before any appointment, and why the check-in email from afghanevac.org is real.

Arwa Zakir Kakavand, a world-class immigration attorney from Casa Cornelia’s Community Legal Response Project spoke about pro bono legal service organizations and the need for everyone to know their rights.

Thank you to everyone who came. When people are scared, the most useful thing we can all do is be in the room with them, tell them what we know, and be honest about what we do not. And make sure everyone knows they need to talk to a qualified immigration attorney.

Why it matters The reports we are acting on this week started in rooms like this one. When families trust us with what is happening to them, we can count it, raise it with Congress, and get lawyers to the people who need them.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We passed out red cards to all who attended. Any non-profit organization can request up to 250 red cards from ILRC for free.

INTRODUCING AFGHANEVAC COUNSEL CORPS

Counsel Corps is AfghanEvac’s new program for attorneys and legal professionals who represent Afghan clients, or want to. It brings practitioners up to speed on the issues that keep coming up in Afghan cases, including removal defense and habeas cases.

Right now, that need is urgent. Several of the detained Afghans reported to us this week have no lawyer. If you can take a detained case, or want training to get there, start at afghanevac.org/counsel-corps.

Members also get JULIE, at julie.afghanevac.org, our free research tool and expert desk, including a running tracker of habeas orders. JULIE is in beta, so tell us what would make it more useful.

AfghanEvac is not a law firm and does not give legal advice.

Join the Counsel Corps

THE SUPREME COURT ACTS MONDAY

On Friday, the Supreme Court met in conference to consider whether to hear A.A. v. Mast (No. 26-164). AfghanEvac joined an amicus brief with the Chamberlain Network and others urging the Court to take the case.

We should know this morning, when the Court releases its order list. If the Court grants review, the case moves to full briefing and argument on the merits.

Thank you to the team at Hogan Lovells for their work on the brief.

Learn more about our Amicus Brief

THE FLY-IN: WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 9 TO 11

The dates are set. From November 9 to 11, AfghanEvac is bringing Afghan allies, veterans, and supporters to Capitol Hill for our Afghanistan TPS Act fly-in, and I need you there.

The Afghanistan TPS Act is the single most important piece of legislation for our allies right now. Reps. Jason Crow and Sam Liccardo filed the special rule on October 1, and the discharge petition for H.R. 9899 opens after the election. It needs 218 signatures. Members sign discharge petitions when the people they represent are sitting across the table from them, and that is what a fly-in is for.

Here is how it works.

• We set up your meetings with your own representative and senators, so you are talking to the offices that answer to you.

• We prepare you with the ask, the facts, and the answers to the questions staff always raise. You do not need to be an expert. You need to be there.

• You bring the story. The interpreter who saved your unit, the neighbor who lost her work permit, the family still waiting in Qatar. Afghan allies are the most powerful voices in the room.

• Everyone living in the United States can take part, citizen or not.

Register at afghanevac.org/tps-hill-day. As of now, AfghanEvac cannot cover travel or lodging, so please plan accordingly. If that changes, you will hear it here first.

Organizations, throw in with us. If your organization wants to join the fly-in, bring members, co-sponsor, or support it another way, email me at shawn@afghanevac.org and tell me how you want to help.

Can’t make it to Washington? Write your member today at afghanevac.org/tps, and ask them to commit to signing the day the petition opens. We are asking key members directly whether they will sign.

Why it matters Whoever wins on November 3, Afghan allies wake up on November 4 without TPS. A discharge petition rewards the side that shows up, and November 9 is when we show up.

Register for our fly in

CAMP AS SAYLIYAH: 1,034 STILL WAITING

Three weeks ago, Secretary Rubio extended operations at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar for nine months.

Here is where the camp stands as of right now.

• 1,034 Afghan allies and family members are still there, and 427 of them are children.

• 833 are refugee cases. The other 201 are consular cases, nearly all of them Special Immigrant Visa holders and their families.

• Every person in the camp has been there longer than 18 months. The longest has waited 1,689 days, since March 3, 2022.

• Not one person has left the camp since October 1. Two babies have been born there in that time.

• This year, 155 people have left the camp, and 122 of them were repatriated. Which is a nice way of saying they took the bribe the U.S. government offered them to return back to Afghanistan despite the danger they face rather than continue living in limbo at CAS.

Nine months is time, not a solution. It only counts as a win if the government uses it to redo medicals, finish processing, and move eligible cases now. So far, the camp is not moving.

Learn more about CAS

Why it matters These families did everything the United States asked of them, and they have been waiting in a camp on a U.S. Army base for years. The extension stopped the clock on closure. It did not start the clock on getting them out.

BATTLE BUDDIES

Not one Afghan ally who walked in with a Battle Buddy has been detained or deported. That record still holds, including after deployments in Boston and San Diego this week.

We also launched a new system for deployments, and it now rewards the people who show up, with Battle Buddies gear. Veterans, frontline civilians, and evac volunteers, log in at dispatch.afghanevac.org, finish the training if you have not, and claim your first deployment.

If you have an appointment or court date coming up, request a Battle Buddy at afghanevac.org/battle-buddies. If you already asked, watch for our “Is your appointment still on?” email and confirm your date, so no one goes in alone.

Become a Battle Buddy

COMING UP

• October 19. Supreme Court order list in A.A. v. Mast.

• October 20, 10:30 a.m. Pacific. Attorney update on Afghan transfers and removals. Email shawn@afghanevac.org to register.

• October 25. Joint status report due to Judge Chutkan on SIV staffing.

• November 3. Election Day.

• November 9 to 11. Afghanistan TPS Act fly-in in Washington. Register at afghanevac.org/tps-hill-day.

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

Afghans facing removal

• Afghan Evac says at least 30 Afghan asylum seekers to be deported from US -- Atlas Press

Refugees under review

• Practice Alert: DHS Interim Final Rule Shortens NOIT Response Period for Refugees to 10 Days -- AILA

• Trump Administration Lays Groundwork for Mass Deportation of Resettled Refugees -- IRAP

• Trump Administration Cuts Refugees’ Deadline to Contest Status Termination, Raising Fears -- U.S. News & World Report

• Trump’s refugee admissions overwhelmingly favored white South Africans -- Axios

Enforcement and detention

• Local activists respond to reports of ICE enforcement surge -- KPBS

• Supreme Court Dismisses ICE Detention Case, Preserving Due Process Protections as Broader Legal Battle Continues -- Davis Vanguard

Afghanistan and the region

• Taliban suspends BBC Dari, Pashto, and English FM broadcasts across Afghanistan -- Committee to Protect Journalists

• Kyrgyzstan Rejects Europe’s Proposal To Accept Afghan Refugees -- Afghanistan International

• Afghanistan Records 36 Polio Cases In 2026, Says WHO -- Afghanistan InternationalEvery week I write to you about numbers. This week the numbers have names, and a date: early next month.

I cannot promise we will stop every flight. I can promise that no Afghan in detention will be invisible while we are counting, that no lawyer who wants to help will be turned away, and that no ally who asks for a Battle Buddy will walk in alone.

Report every detention. Answer your check-in. Join us Tuesday if you are a lawyer. Register for the fly-in.

We are furious. We are focused. And we are not going anywhere.

In the same week, ICE was told to arrest a thousand more people a day, an enforcement surge started in our own backyard in San Diego, and government records showed exactly how many Afghan refugees are in the crosshairs of a “re-vetting” program built to put them back in detention.

Take the actions below, then read on.

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ACTION THIS WEEK

• Write your member of Congress today. Ask your representative to commit to signing the Afghanistan TPS Act discharge petition the day it opens. It takes two minutes and anyone living in the United States can do it, citizen or not. If your member already cosponsors H.R. 9899, thank them and ask for the signature.

• Sign up for the Hill day. The election will not change what Afghan allies face on November 4, and the discharge petition opens after it. Members sign when constituents show up in their offices. We are planning around the week of November 9.

• Watch and share the Know Your Rights presentation. 300+ people signed up for Saturday’s attorney-led session. The English recording is now online, with Dari and Pashto versions on the way. Send it to every Afghan family you know, especially in Southern California this week.

• Battle Buddies, log in to DISPATCH. Our new system for Battle Buddy deployments is live. Log in this week, confirm your details, and add anything we do not have yet. If you have not finished the Battle Buddy training, complete it there. That is where deployment requests will come from now on.

• Fund the work at afghanevac.org/donate, or wear the ask to the Hill. None of what we do is government funded.

Sign up to show up on Capitol Hill

THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT CAN HELP OUR ALLIES

The Afghanistan TPS Act of 2026, H.R. 9899, is the single most important piece of legislation for Afghan allies in the United States right now.

It would designate Afghanistan for Temporary Protected Status through July 1, 2029. That protects vetted allies already here from deportation to the Taliban and restores their right to work. Applicants would still go through biometric and national-security vetting, and DHS would have to decide within 90 days. It is a bridge, not a path to citizenship, and it is bipartisan from the first line: Reps. Crow, Bacon, Liccardo, and Salazar, two Democrats and two Republicans.

This morning, I launched a new AfghanEvac Action Center effort. It takes about two minutes to send a message to your representative. We need every single person reading this email to do it today, and then send the link to five people who will do the same.

Anyone living in the United States can take part, citizen or not.

Take action NOW

SEPTEMBER: 1,214 DECISIONS. A BENCHMARK OF 3,000.

On October 7, the State Department filed its September report in Afghan and Iraqi Allies v. Rubio, the SIV class action before Judge Tanya Chutkan. State issued Chief of Mission (CoM) decisions on 1,214 first-time applications, reapplications, and appeals in September. The court’s benchmark for the month was 3,000.

That is the best month since the May 8 enforcement order, up from 916 in June, 811 in July, and 752 in August, and it is still well under half of what the court asked for. Allies still waiting at this step have been pending, on average, 666 days.

October’s benchmark is 4,000.

The staffing numbers explain why. State has said it needs 20 Foreign Service Officers on temporary assignment to clear this backlog. As of October 5, four had started.

Judge Chutkan has noticed. Her October 1 order requires a joint status report by October 25 explaining what State did to add officers from August through October, what it plans for November, and “why they have limited themselves to adding only twenty.”

That is a federal judge asking, in writing, why the government chose to staff a court-ordered program at a level it knew would fail.

And a decision is still not a visa. Chief of Mission approval moves an ally one step forward and then leaves them at a locked door, because Proclamation 10998, the travel ban that took effect January 1, still bars Afghan SIV applicants from receiving visas.

The government’s own progress report, filed September 22, lists zero visas issued to Afghan class members between June 4 and September 2. Legal aid organizations, including IRAP, still advise applicants to consider postponing interviews rather than risk a permanent denial under Section 212(f).

The pipeline is moving paper toward a wall the administration built.

We are not going to pretend 1,214 is a failure, because the people behind those decisions are real and some of them waited years. We are also not going to pretend it is compliance. The government argued last summer that missing the benchmarks “is not, in itself, noncompliance.”

The record now runs four months deep, and the answer is the same every time: not enough people, not enough urgency, and no visas at the end.

We are asking Congress to press State on two things before the October 25 filing. Fill all 20 officer slots now. And restore the SIV exception to the travel ban, because a program that approves allies and then refuses to let them travel is not a program. It is a holding pattern.

The D.C. Circuit hears the government’s appeal in this case on November 6.

Why it matters This case is the only enforceable deadline the SIV program has. Every month of the record is evidence, and the October 25 filing is the next chance to make the court, and Congress, see the choke point for what it is.

FAMILIES CAN COME HOME. THE FOURTH CIRCUIT SAID SO.

On October 1, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals refused the State Department’s request to pause the ruling in A.A. v. U.S. Department of State.

On July 29, the federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia vacated the government’s policy of applying the travel ban to the spouses and children of people granted asylum in the United States. It found that these follow-to-join family members are “clearly ‘seek[ing] asylum’” and fall outside the proclamations.

The plaintiffs are Afghan allies who won asylum here and filed I-730 petitions for families still in danger in Afghanistan. The appeals court also rejected the government’s argument that the visa decisions were beyond a court’s review.

The ruling stands while the appeal continues, which means I-730 cases can move, and they are moving.

According to IRAP, five of the plaintiffs have already brought their families to safety in the United States under the July order, and thousands of asylee reunification cases can now proceed. For covered follow-to-join asylee cases, the State Department cannot rely solely on the challenged travel-ban policy to deny travel documents while the court's order remains in force.

Why it matters For more than a year, Afghan asylees have been told their spouses and children were locked out by a proclamation. That is no longer true. If you are an Afghan asylee with an I-730 for your family, talk to your lawyer now about moving your case forward, and read IRAP’s case page.

THANK YOU, CENTREVILLE

On Sunday, many from the Northern Virginia Afghan community gathered in Centreville, Virginia, for an evening honoring me and the work of AfghanEvac. Thank you to Dr. Tarakhail for hosting, to Samad Fazli, Sharifullah Sharafat, and Lima Anwari for planning every detail in less than a week, to Nilab Ibrahimi for serving as master of ceremonies, and to everyone who spoke and came. It meant more than we can say.

One guest, Mary Akrami, who helped establish the first shelter for women at risk in Afghanistan and has now been made a refugee twice, shared a reflection on her generation’s story.

One line stays with us. “What disappointed me most is the silence.”

She is right, and she is not alone. Every Afghan family who made it to safety got there because someone showed up. That is still the job.

Now is the time to show up, at the Hill day, in the courtroom with a Battle Buddy, and in your member’s inbox. Soon it will be time to speak out, loudly and publicly. If you are not at risk of being deported, we need you to do both.

SHOW UP AFTER NOVEMBER 3. NO MATTER WHAT.

Three weeks from today, the country votes. Whoever wins, thousands of Afghan allies will wake up on November 4 facing the same uncertainty: no restoration of Afghanistan's TPS designation, precarious work authorization, and the possibility of detention or removal despite their service to the United States.

The election does not change their situation. What we do in the weeks after it can.

We have heard every reason the Afghanistan TPS Act cannot pass, many of them from coalition partners who believe there is no way that this can pass, given the makeup of Congress today. We respect them and we think they are wrong. We CAN get this done and we have to try.

We also think the path is clearer than the conventional wisdom allows. Reps. Jason Crow and Sam Liccardo filed the special rule on October 1. Once it clears the Rules Committee clock, which the sponsors expect in the lame-duck session, the discharge petition opens. If 218 members sign quickly, the House votes.

If we secure 218 signatures and force a House vote, we have an opportunity to demonstrate that protecting Afghan allies commands support across party lines. A decisive House vote would give the Senate a powerful reason to act.

None of that happens on its own. Members sign discharge petitions when the people they represent are in their offices and in their inboxes. That means you, and it means everyone.

You do not need to be a citizen or a voter to write your member of Congress or sit in their office. Every person living in the United States can do this, including Afghan allies themselves, who are the most powerful voices in the room.

So here is the ask, in two parts. Today, write your representative at afghanevac.org/tps and ask them to commit to signing the discharge petition the day it opens.

In November, come to Washington. Pick a window at afghanevac.org/tps-hill-day: the week of November 9 is when we are likely to be out there.

We set up your meetings with your own representative and senators, prepare you with the ask and the facts, and host a happy hour for everyone who comes. You bring the story: the interpreter who saved your unit, the neighbor who lost her work permit, the family still waiting in Qatar.

We cannot cover travel or lodging yet. If that changes, you will hear it here first.

Why it matters The weeks after an election are when attention drifts and promises get quietly shelved. That is exactly when Afghan allies need us to be loudest. A discharge petition rewards the side that shows up.

Write your Member of Congress

Join us on Capitol Hill

“TERROR-PRONE NATIONS LIKE AFGHANISTAN”

That is how the U.S. government describes the country our allies fled. The phrase comes from USCIS’s own internal press guidance, dated January 9, 2026, which blames the prior administration for admitting “loosely vetted aliens, often from terror-prone nations like Afghanistan.”

It is one of hundreds of pages on Operation PARRIS that IRAP obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and published on October 6.

PARRIS is the DHS program that “re-vetted” refugees in Minnesota and put 72 people on an ICE target sheet, including three Afghans and two teenage girls, ages 15 and 17.

The same guidance asks, “Will PARRIS expand beyond Minnesota?” The answer it gives is “Yes.” It says the first focus was refugees from travel-ban countries, and Afghanistan is one of them.

USCIS’s own data shows that 185,539 refugees nationwide had not yet adjusted to a green card. Afghans are the second-largest group, at 23,261, behind only the Democratic Republic of the Congo. California has 5,154 of them, Texas 2,527, Virginia 2,134, Washington 1,501, and New York 1,034.

The data counted 5,722 Afghans as more than a year past arrival, but refugee admissions stopped in January 2025. By our analysis, nearly all of the rest have since crossed that line, so the real number at risk is closer to 23,000.

The documents also show how the operation works:

• Arrest first, vet later. On January 20, the USCIS Vetting Center wrote that it had pivoted from vetting cases first to interviewing people ICE had already detained, and it called PARRIS a “model” for future operations. One Pakistani family was moved to Houston and released five days later with approved green cards.

• Termination by default. USCIS policy staff wrote that if a refugee misses the 30-day window to respond to a Notice of Intent to Terminate, USCIS can end their status without an interview and refer them to ICE. For families who move often, a stale mailing address can become a deportation case.

• New questions. The interview checklist adds six criteria that appear nowhere in USCIS’s Policy Manual. One flags possible terrorism-related grounds of inadmissibility, which is the criterion most likely to catch former Afghan soldiers and anyone forced to pay the Taliban under duress.

• It reaches beyond refugees. A January 7 memo shows USCIS also re-vetting recent green card and naturalization approvals in Minnesota.

• Their own process broke down. By March, Chief Counsel was signing off on every interview, and the Vetting Center had stopped adjudicating green card applications and asked for formal training.

The most important document, the 27-page Minnesota Pilot Review from April 2, is almost entirely redacted. Its findings, risk assessment, and statistics are all withheld.

Congress should demand it in full, along with the number of Afghans who have received a Notice of Intent to Terminate or lost their status.

There is one piece of good news. On October 5, the Tenth Circuit ruled in Mukantagara v. Mullin that federal courts can review a USCIS finding that someone did not qualify as a refugee when they were admitted. That ruling applies directly in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming.

Why it matters These are people the United States vetted overseas before they ever boarded a plane, and many should already hold green cards. The government stopped adjudicating them and is now treating that delay as grounds for suspicion. If you are an Afghan refugee without a green card, update your address with USCIS today, prepare with IRAP’s toolkit, and if you receive a Notice of Intent to Terminate, get a lawyer immediately and request a Battle Buddy.

MORE ARRESTS, ORDERED FROM THE TOP

On October 7, CNN reported that ICE leadership told officers to add 1,000 arrests a day, returning to a goal of 3,000 daily and 19,000 a week. ICE has recently averaged about 2,000 a day.

At the same time, a 45-day enforcement push called Operation Safe California began in San Diego and Los Angeles County, with more than 250 officers deployed to Southern California. One source told reporters that officers were told to “go after anybody.”

A quota does not distinguish between a person with a criminal record and an Afghan interpreter with a pending asylum case and a court date. That is the point of a quota.

Afghans are being detained across the country, and the families who write to us cannot understand why a man who served beside American soldiers is sitting in detention while his SIV paperwork waits on a desk in Washington.

Why it matters San Diego is home to one of the largest Afghan communities in the country. If you are in Southern California, know your rights, keep your documents with you, and do not go to an appointment alone. We will send a veteran with you.

THANK YOU, REP. CHU

On October 9, Rep. Judy Chu and 28 colleagues wrote to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Attorney General Blanche, and the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) demanding answers on why people cannot get out of immigration detention.

Their numbers are stark. Bond requests rose about 130 percent, from 34,845 in 2024 to 80,130 in 2025. Bond denials climbed from about 36 percent to 55 percent in the first three months of 2026. At Adelanto in California, 57 percent of bond requests have been denied since November 2025.

AfghanEvac is proud to have endorsed the letter.

Read it here

Why it matters Detention without a realistic path to release is how the system pressures people into giving up valid claims. Members of Congress are now asking about it on the record.

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS, NOW ON VIDEO

On Saturday, over 300 people signed up for our free, attorney-led Know Your Rights training, with live interpretation in Dari and Pashto.

Thank you to Arwa Zakir Kakavand, Spojmie Nasiri, Sweeta Azimi, and Laila Ayub of Project ANAR for presenting, and to our partners at the Afghan-American Community Organization, the South Asian Bar Association of San Diego, California Immigration Project, Afghan Refugee Empowerment Fund, Project ANAR, and Nowruz Media.

The English recording is up and the Dari and Pashto versions are on the way.

Watch our Know Your Rights presentation

LAWYERS, STAY TUNED

Saturday’s Know Your Rights training was the first public step for something bigger. AfghanEvac Counsel Corps is coming, and I will have a big announcement soon.

If you are an attorney, paralegal, or law student and you want to stand with Afghan allies, let us know what you’re curious about.

AfghanEvac is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. Talk to a qualified immigration attorney about your own case.

THE PUBLIC IS WITH US

New polling released October 7 by Data for Progress, the Refugee Advocacy Lab, and Refugees International found that 67 percent of likely voters want the United States to have a refugee program, including 55 percent of Republicans. Among voters who know a refugee, it is 90 percent. Sixty percent oppose third-country deportations, and 60 percent say the $269 billion set aside for mass deportation is not a good use of taxpayer money.

Why it matters The administration keeps treating its refugee and enforcement policy as a mandate. The numbers say otherwise, and members of Congress should hear that before they decide whether to sign a discharge petition.

See our polling

THE REGION

Fighting broke out again on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. On October 10, Pakistan’s military said 12 Pakistani and Afghan Taliban fighters and one Pakistani soldier were killed in Kurram, with separate clashes in Paktia’s Dand Patan district. On October 11, Islamabad declared an emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Five days earlier, the Moscow Format talks on Afghanistan ended without a joint statement after the Taliban and Pakistan could not agree on language about terrorism.

Meanwhile, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) reported that 581,600 Afghans have returned from Iran this year, and 492,300 of them, about 85 percent, were deported.

Why it matters The Afghan allies and P-1 and P-2 refugee families waiting in Pakistan are caught between artillery on the border and police at their doors. Every month the U.S. pipeline stays shut, that is where they wait.

EUROPE TALKS TO THE TALIBAN. THE WORLD KEEPS RECEIPTS.

On October 9, France confirmed “technical” talks with the Taliban to deport Afghans it considers security risks, joining Germany, Belgium, and Sweden in opening channels.

The same week, the International Criminal Court unsealed arrest warrants for two Taliban ministers for gender-based persecution, the UN Human Rights Council renewed the mandate of Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett by consensus, and the State Department’s 2026 Trafficking in Persons Report kept Afghanistan at Tier 3, citing child soldiers, forced labor, and sexual exploitation.

Why it matters Governments are documenting the Taliban’s crimes with one hand and negotiating deportations to the Taliban with the other. Our own State Department just put the record in writing. That record should make returning anyone to Afghanistan unthinkable, yet State Department staff keep trying to convince Afghans at CAS that is an easier path.

Governments cannot credibly document the Taliban's persecution while treating forced return to Afghanistan as a routine immigration-management tool.

BATTLE BUDDIES

Not one Afghan ally who walked in with a Battle Buddy has been detained or deported. That record still holds.

Veterans stood with Afghan families at appointments and hearings again this week, and the calendar is filling, with deployments set for Boston on October 15 and San Diego on October 19. With ICE under orders to raise its numbers and a new operation underway in Southern California, a veteran in the room matters more than it did a month ago.

Deployments now run through DISPATCH, our new system for matching veterans with Afghan allies’ court dates and appointments. If you are already a Battle Buddy, log in at dispatch.afghanevac.org this week, confirm your details, add what is missing, and finish the training if you have not.

You can earn ribbons and Battle Buddies gear for showing up.

If you are a veteran who is a U.S. citizen and not yet signed up, start at afghanevac.org/battle-buddies. If you are an Afghan with an upcoming appointment or court date, request a Battle Buddy at the same link.

Login to DISPATCH

COMING UP

• October 14. The Southern District of New York has set oral argument in CLINIC v. Rubio, the 75-country immigrant visa pause case, though the government has asked to adjourn it. State told consulates on September 21 that the pause is “no longer in effect,” but interviews have not broadly resumed. None of this lifts the travel ban for Afghans.

• October 16. New USCIS fees take effect.

• October 25. Joint status report due to Judge Chutkan on SIV staffing.

• November 5 to 7. AILA California Chapters Conference in San Francisco, where I lead “Reclaiming the Narrative,” a media training for immigration attorneys, on November 7.

• November 6. The D.C. Circuit hears the appeal in Afghan and Iraqi Allies v. Rubio.

• Week of November 9 to 11. Afghanistan TPS Act Hill days.

Sign up for the Hill Days

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

The SIV pipeline and the travel ban

• Afghan Allies Fear For Lives While Stuck In Immigration Limbo -- Law360

• 4th Circ. Upholds Order For US To Admit Afghan Families -- Law360

Refugees under review

• Newly Released Documents From Operation PARRIS Confirm the Scope of DHS’s Targeting of Refugee Communities -- IRAP

• Appeals Court Rules Terminations of Refugee Status are Subject to Judicial Review -- IRAP

• DHS Again Fails on Appeal to End Review of Refugee Status Change -- Bloomberg Law

• This Week by the {Immigration} Numbers (October 10, 2026) -- Austin Kocher

• Voters Continue to Back the U.S. Refugee Program While Opposing Current U.S. Immigration Enforcement Policies -- Data for Progress

Enforcement and detention

• Exclusive: ICE agents told to ramp up daily immigration arrests despite GOP unease as midterms near -- CNN

• ‘Go After Anybody’: ICE Gets Terrifying Marching Orders in California -- The New Republic

• Catch, release, catch: Inside ICE’s new ‘farce’ tactic -- MPR News

• Rep. Chu Leads 29 Members of Congress Demanding Answers on Barriers to Release from ICE Detention -- Office of Rep. Judy Chu

The region

• Pakistan Declares Emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as Border Clashes Kill 12, Army Says -- KabulNow

• Moscow consultations end without joint statement because of differences between Pak, Afghanistan -- ThePrint

• Over 492,000 Afghans forcibly deported from Iran in 2026: UNHCR -- Pajhwok

• Over 6.5 Million Afghans Returned From Iran, Pakistan In Three Years, Says UN -- Afghanistan International

Europe, the UN, and the Taliban

• France Confirms Talks with Taliban to Deport Afghans Deemed Security Risks -- KabulNow

• ICC Unseals Arrest Warrants for Two Taliban Ministers Over Gender-Based Persecution -- KabulNow

• UN Rights Council Extends Mandate of Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan -- KabulNow

• Child Soldiers, Sexual Exploitation Persist Under Taliban, Says US State Department -- Afghanistan International

• The Taliban Are Using Europe’s Fear of Migrants to Their Advantage -- The New York Times

A judge is counting. Congress is counting. Two-thirds of the country says it wants a refugee program, and the government is counting too, just the wrong things: arrests per day, refugees on a list, officers it refuses to hire.

Every one of those numbers is a choice somebody in Washington made, and every one of them can be made differently. The allies waiting in Kabul, in Islamabad, in Doha, and in ICE detention kept their end of the bargain.

The November midterm election will not end this fight, whatever the result. It is not the finish line.

Write your member of Congress today. Sign up for the Hill day. Share the training. Log in and show up in the courtroom.

We are furious. We are focused. And we are not going anywhere.

ACTION THIS WEEK

• Raise your hand for a Hill advocacy day. The discharge petition will need 218 signatures, and members sign when constituents show up in person. We are looking at three windows: November 8 to 10, November 16 to 20, and November 30 to December 3.

  • As of now, we cannot cover travel or lodging, but we will set up your meetings with your members of Congress and host a happy hour for everyone who comes.

• Register for Know Your Rights, Saturday, October 10, 4:00 PM ET / 1:00 PM PT. Free, online, attorney-led, with live interpretation in Dari and Pashto. Register at afghanevac.org/kyr and share it with every Afghan family you know.

• Ask your representative to commit to signing the discharge petition. Take two minutes on our website. If your member is already a cosponsor of H.R. 9899, thank them and ask them to sign as soon as it’s ready.

• Thank Senator Shaheen and share the SIV report. Read “Standing Strong with Our Afghan Allies”, share it with your senators’ offices, and thank @SenatorShaheen on social media for seventeen years of leadership.

  Sign up to show up

  Invest in our work

LAST WEEK

Camp As Sayliyah stays open. On September 29, Secretary Rubio signed a nine-month extension of operations at the camp with the government of Qatar. We covered it in a special edition, and I talked through what the extension means, and what has to happen next, with Beth Bailey on The Afghanistan Project podcast. 1,034 Afghan allies and family members, 72 percent of them women and children, including 150 family members of U.S. service members, are no longer facing a closure date with nowhere to go. We thank Secretary Rubio and our Qatari partners. Nine months is time, not a solution. It counts as a win only if the government uses it to redo medicals, finish processing, and move eligible cases now.

CAS Update on Beth Bailey's podcast

Medicaid benefits ended for many. On Thursday, October 1, federal Medicaid and CHIP eligibility ended for many Afghan parolees, refugees, and asylees who do not hold green cards, under last year's reconciliation law. In North Carolina alone, about 14,000 refugees and asylees lost coverage. Many Afghans affected by the change are eligible to adjust to permanent residence but remain without green cards amid prolonged adjudication delays. Applying for a green card does not restore eligibility; approval does. Emergency Medicaid remains available regardless of immigration status.

Read our guide

Honoring Captain Jennifer Moreno. On Sunday, members of the AfghanEvac team joined Maria Moreno at the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center to honor her daughter, Army Captain Jennifer Moreno. A San Diego native and Army nurse, she served on a Cultural Support Team alongside the 75th Ranger Regiment and was killed in Kandahar Province on October 6, 2013, while going to the aid of a wounded soldier. Thank you to Maria, to Livier Lazaro, and to everyone who keeps her story alive. Her service is part of the same promise we are fighting to keep.

The discharge petition process began. On Thursday October 1, Reps. Jason Crow and Sam Liccardo introduced the special rule that opens the door to a discharge petition on the Afghanistan TPS Act. More on that below, because it is the story of the week.

THANK YOU, REP. CROW AND REP. LICCARDO

On October 1, Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) and Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-CA) introduced a special rule providing for consideration of H.R. 9899, the Afghanistan TPS Act of 2026. It is a quiet, procedural step, and it matters more than most press releases.

Make no mistake about it: this is the most consequential near-term protection Congress can enact for Afghans already in the United States, and it is within reach.

A discharge petition is how a majority of the House forces a vote on legislation leadership will not schedule. The rule introduced by Reps. Crow and Liccardo is the vehicle the petition rides on. Under House rules, the petition can open for signatures only after the required committee waiting period. Once it does, 218 signatures can force the issue onto the House floor. The sponsors expect that opportunity in the lame-duck session after the midterm elections. This same process brought Haitian TPS to a House vote this spring. Now it is the Afghan community’s turn.

AfghanEvac has called for this since the day Afghanistan’s TPS designation was terminated. We said it then, and we have said it in nearly every update since: the votes exist in the House if members are asked to cast them.

H.R. 9899 is bipartisan from the start, led by Reps. Jason Crow, Don Bacon, Sam Liccardo, and Maria Elvira Salazar, with a Senate companion, S. 5308, led by Sens. Chris Coons, Lisa Murkowski, Amy Klobuchar, and Bill Cassidy. It would designate Afghanistan for TPS through July 1, 2029, allowing eligible Afghans already in the United States to seek protection from removal and work authorization.

For many of the same families who lost Medicaid on Thursday, the ability to keep working can also mean keeping employer-sponsored health coverage.

Get up to speed on our policy page

So here is the plan. Between now and November, we are lining up commitments, not signatures, because the petition cannot be signed until the clock runs out. We want every member who cosponsored H.R. 9899 to pledge to sign the day it opens. And we want every member of Congress who says they support Afghan allies to get on this petition as soon as it is available. That is how they prove it.

Ask your rep to sign

Then we go to the Hill in person. If you are willing to come to Washington, let us know.

Sign up for a day on the hill

We are grateful to Rep. Crow and Rep. Liccardo for doing the hard procedural work. Now the rest of us have to finish it.

Why it matters: The House can force a vote on protection for Afghans that leadership has refused to schedule. This is the clearest legislative path to protection Afghans in the United States have had in nearly two years.

Get a "Promises Aren't Temporary" shirt

THANK YOU, SENATOR SHAHEEN

On October 2, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen and nine Democratic colleagues published “Standing Strong with Our Afghan Allies,” a committee minority report on the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program.

It is one of the most comprehensive congressional accounts yet of what this program was built to do and what has happened to it since. More than 160,000 Afghan allies and family members have reached safety through the program. More than 155,000 applicants remain in the pipeline. In all of 2026, the State Department issued three Afghan SIVs.

The report does not stop at numbers. It walks through the extraordinary vetting Afghan allies undergo and cites inspectors general who repeatedly found that process sound. It documents the elimination of the CARE office, grounded flights, stop-work orders, TPS termination, and arrests of SIV applicants at immigration appointments.

And it gives Congress a road map: resume SIV issuance immediately, authorize 100,000 additional visas, create a permanent program for wartime allies, and require meaningful reporting and inspector general oversight.

The report also puts people behind the numbers, including Sweeta Azimi, the women of the Female Tactical Platoon, and Janis Shinwari, while documenting AfghanEvac’s work on CARE and Battle Buddies. We are grateful to the committee staff who did the hard work of building it.

None of this is new for Senator Shaheen. In 2009, she worked with Senator John McCain to create the Afghan SIV program. For seventeen years, she has fought to extend it, fund it, and fix it under presidents of both parties, often when few others were paying attention.

As she finishes her final term in the Senate, this report is both a capstone and a road map for whoever picks up the fight next.

Thank you, Senator. America made this promise in large part because you insisted on it.

Read Senator Shaheen's report

Why it matters This is now a formal Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority record, with specific recommendations attached. Read it, share it, and ask your senators which recommendations they will support. It also stands alongside the independent record AfghanEvac has built, including The Unfinished Mission, our accounting of the SIV pipeline.

Check out our library of reports

COMING UP

Know Your Rights, Saturday, October 10. Free, online, 4:00 PM ET / 1:00 PM PT, with live interpretation in Dari and Pashto. Convened by AfghanEvac in partnership with the Afghan-American Community Organization, the South Asian Bar Association of San Diego, California Immigration Project, Afghan Refugee Empowerment Fund, Project ANAR, and Nowruz Media.

The faculty: Arwa Zakir Kakavand, Managing Attorney at Casa Cornelia Law Center and president of the San Diego South Asian Bar Association; immigration attorney Spojmie Nasiri, a member of AILA’s Afghan Response Task Force; Sweeta Azimi of the California Immigration Project; and Laila Ayub of Project ANAR.

The program will include presentations in English, Dari, and Pashto covering your rights during immigration encounters, preparing for appointments and interviews, what to do if someone is detained, family emergency planning, and how to find a qualified lawyer.

Topics include understanding your rights in an immigration encounter, preparing for appointments and interviews, what to do if someone is detained, family safety planning, and how to find a qualified lawyer.

Register for Know Your Rights

AfghanEvac is not a law firm and does not give legal advice; this training is general information, and you should talk to a qualified immigration attorney about your own case.

Fee increases, October 16. New USCIS fees take effect for filings on or after October 16, including $570 for an initial work permit for certain asylum applicants, TPS holders, and parolees, and $1,050 for humanitarian parole. Immigration court fees went up October 1, including $1,590 for a green card application before EOIR. If you are planning to file, talk to your lawyer about timing this week.

SIV class action, November 6. The D.C. Circuit hears arguments in the appeal in Afghan and Iraqi Allies v. Rubio. The government’s own progress report shows zero SIVs issued to Afghan class members between June and September.

THE REFUGEE NUMBER IS SIGNED. AFGHANS ARE NOT IN IT.

The FY2027 Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions, signed September 25 and published in the Federal Register on October 2, sets a ceiling of 17,500, “primarily” for Afrikaners from South Africa. It does not mention the Afghans who served beside American troops for twenty years. Before it closed, our Count Them In campaign sent more than 3,800 letters to Congress asking for at least 5,000 places for Afghan mission partners and U.S. military families. That ask stands, and 17,500 leaves room to meet it. The national interest exception that brought two Afghans here on September 22 remains in place. Our statement is at afghanevac.org/count-them-in.

Why it matters "Primarily" does not mean "exclusively." The administration has already shown that the national interest exception can work. Now it should use that authority at scale for Afghan mission partners and the families of U.S. service members.

A LETTER FOR MILITARY FAMILIES

On September 29, Rep. Scott Peters and 19 House and Senate colleagues wrote to Secretaries Rubio and Mullin asking them to prioritize refugee processing for immediate family members of U.S. service members stranded abroad, starting with Camp As Sayliyah, and to facilitate family reunification for Afghans with relatives lawfully in the United States. Thank you, Rep. Peters, and every member who signed.

Read the letter

Why it matters The record is building in Congress, in writing, with names attached. That record is what turns a promise into a vote.

THIRD-COUNTRY REMOVALS RESUME

On September 29, the Supreme Court, 6-3, stayed the lower-court judgment in D.V.D. v. DHS, allowing the administration’s third-country removal policy to remain in effect while the case proceeds. Lower courts had found that the policy failed to provide adequate notice and a meaningful opportunity to raise country-specific fears of persecution or torture. The Supreme Court will hear the case in December.

Afghans have been placed on these flights. If you or someone you know faces removal to a third country, tell your lawyer immediately and ask for a Battle Buddy.

Why it matters: Sending an ally to a country where they have no legal status and no future, knowing they may ultimately be pushed back toward the Taliban, risks becoming refoulement with a layover.

THE REGION

On October 1, Pakistani airstrikes hit Kunar and Helmand provinces. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported at least 10 civilians killed, mostly children. Pakistan said it struck militant camps; the Taliban called it aggression. The UN has documented more than 1,100 civilian casualties from cross-border violence in Afghanistan this year, while Pakistan and Iran continue mass deportations of Afghans back across those same borders.

Why it matters The P-1 and P-2 families who write to us every week are living between airstrikes on one side and deportation buses on the other. Every month the U.S. pipeline stays shut, that is where they wait.

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

Camp As Sayliyah

• Trump is set to extend the Qatar camp housing more than 1,000 Afghans who helped the US war effort -- Associated Press

• The Afghanistan Project Podcast, Episode 157: AfghanEvac’s Shawn VanDiver talks Camp As Sayliyah -- Beth Bailey, The Afghanistan Project

• Afghan allies get reprieve as Trump admin agrees to keep Qatar refugee camp open -- Scripps News

• Qatar camp to receive reprieve -- Los Angeles Times

• US Extends Qatar Camp Housing More Than 1000 Afghan Allies for Nine Months -- Khaama Press

• US extends Qatar camp stay for more than 1000 Afghans -- Ariana News

• US still talking with countries to resettle Afghans as Rubio defends entry to white South Africans -- Associated Press

The refugee number

• IRAP Responds to Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions Prioritizing Afrikaners -- IRAP

Congress

• Ranking Member Shaheen and Senate Democratic Members Publish New Report on U.S. Commitment to Afghan Allies -- Office of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen

• Peters Demands Answers for Afghan Allies and Military Families Stranded Abroad -- Office of Rep. Scott Peters

Benefits

• Medicaid about to end in NC for thousands of refugees -- News From The States

Removals and the State Department

• U.S. Supreme Court sides with Trump administration in third-country deportations -- NPR

• Trump official central to deportation deals tapped for ambassadorship -- The Washington Post

The region

• Pakistan launches deadly air attacks on Afghanistan -- Al Jazeera

• Pakistani airstrikes in Afghanistan kill 10 civilians, Kabul and U.N. say -- NBC News

• Pakistan’s army says Afghan Taliban governor hosted militants plotting attacks -- The Washington Post

Last week proved something we have said for five years.

When people in power decide to act, things move.

• A camp got nine more months.

• A refugee exception put two Afghans on a plane.

• Two members of Congress opened a path to a vote.

None of it happened by accident, and none of it is enough.

• Families here lost their doctors on Thursday because nobody would sign their green cards.

• Families in Qatar still do not know where they will live in July.

Every one of those outcomes is a choice, and choices can be unmade.

The discharge petition is how Congress makes a different one, and it will only reach 218 signatures if members hear from you, see you in their offices, and know you are counting.

Sign up for the Hill day. Show up on Saturday. Bring someone with you.

We are furious. We are focused. And we are not going anywhere.

Secretary Rubio is extending the camp for nine months, and over 1,000 vetted Afghans who spent the last week wondering whether they were about to be put on a plane to Kabul or to Congo are, for now, safe where they are. We asked for this. So did you, more than 3,500 times over the last three weeks. Take the win, then read on, because the next 24 hours matter more than the last nine months.

• What the extension does, and what it does not

• Why this week is the best shot we have had since January 2025

• What we are asking the President to do before he signs

Start with the ways you can take action, then read on.

ACTION NOW

• Tell the President and Congress to count them in. The FY2027 Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions is expected to be signed tomorrow. Send a letter in under two minutes at afghanevac.org/count-them-in. Every letter that lands before the signature matters more than any letter after.

• Share the AP story. Trump is set to extend the Qatar camp housing more than 1,000 Afghans who helped the US war effort. Post it, forward it, and tag your members of Congress.

• Ask your members of Congress to say it publicly. A statement, a post, or a short video welcoming the extension and calling for CAS residents, U.S. military families, and family reunification cases to be included in the Presidential Determination. We are tracking who stands up this week.

• Read and share the OIG breakdown. The latest DHS Inspector General report confirmed the vetting of Afghan allies worked. Our explainer is at afghanevac.org/oig-asylum. Use it the next time someone says otherwise.

• Donate. The virtual delegations, the polling, the Hill campaign, and the reporters we brief every week are funded by readers. afghanevac.org/donate

CAS STAYS OPEN. NOW FINISH THE JOB.

Secretary Rubio is signing a diplomatic note to Qatar extending operations at Camp As Sayliyah for nine months, according to two U.S. officials who spoke to the Associated Press. The camp had been due to close today, at the end of the fiscal year, with no announced plan for the people inside it. The State Department told the AP it will “continue to work to identify options for voluntary resettlement of all Camp As-Sayliyah residents.” AfghanEvac is grateful to Secretary Rubio and to the Government of Qatar for making the right call.

The people this decision protects are not abstractions. There are over 1,000 Afghans at CAS. Seventy-two percent are women and children. At least 150 are the spouses, children, or parents of active duty or recently separated U.S. service members. Every one of them was screened by the U.S. government before travel, after arrival, or both, and every one of them was flown to Qatar on a U.S. government aircraft. Those who did not clear were denied and removed, which is what a working vetting system looks like. The people who remain are the ones the United States itself approved. Until January 20, 2025, the flight from CAS to America came within weeks. Then the administration chose to stop the flights, and the camp became a waiting room with no exit.

This did not happen by accident. Two virtual congressional delegations put members and staff face to face with residents. Twenty-three members of the House and Senate, led by Rep. Scott Peters, wrote to Secretaries Rubio and Mullin yesterday asking them to prioritize military families and family reunification cases beginning with CAS, and to name Afghan allies in the FY2027 Presidential Determination. More than 3,500 Count Them In letters reached the Hill in three weeks. Reporters kept the camp in the story. Veterans kept showing up. That is why the camp is open this morning instead of empty.

Here is what the extension does not do. It does not bring anyone home. It buys nine months, and nine months is only a win if the government uses them. The path is not complicated: put the CAS cases on the front burner now, redo the medical exams that have expired and finish whatever processing remains, for everyone who is eligible to come. Do the same for the nearly 3,000 U.S. military family members waiting around the world and for Afghan family reunification cases. For the residents whose cases were denied, work safe third-country placements where the Afghans the United States took out of Afghanistan have a real chance to prosper. Not Afghanistan. Not Congo. We are hopeful this gets resolved with people at the forefront, and we would like to see it start immediately.

CAS Explainer

THE VETTING QUESTION IS ANSWERED

State’s comment to the AP repeated the claim that CAS is a legacy of an effort “to move as many Afghans to America as possible without properly vetting them.” The government’s own inspectors disagree. The latest DHS Office of Inspector General report, released September 23, found errors in asylum paperwork from Operation Allies Welcome, and it also confirmed what every prior OIG review found: the security vetting of Afghan allies did its job.

OIG Report Breakdown

Why it matters The only stated reason for keeping vetted people out of the country has been the vetting. That argument is now closed by the administration’s own watchdog, on the same week the President decides who is in the refugee admissions determination.

THE PRESIDENTIAL DETERMINATION IS THE WHOLE GAME

The FY2027 Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions is expected to be signed tomorrow. The advance language we have seen sets a 17,500 ceiling and does not name Afghans. On September 22, two Afghans arrived in the United States through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program on an exception to policy, bringing total Afghan refugee arrivals since October 2025 to five. The Peters letter uses that arrival as proof the mechanism works when leaders choose to use it, and asks the Departments to use it at scale rather than one case at a time.

Why it matters Everything the extension bought is spent or saved in this one document. If CAS residents, military families, and family reunification cases are in it, nine months becomes a schedule. If they are not, it becomes another waiting room.

THANK YOU TO QATAR, AGAIN

Qatar has hosted this camp for over 5 years, through a missile interception over the base in July and through months of public speculation about where its residents would be sent. The Government of Qatar agreed to nine more months. That is not nothing, and it should be said plainly: an ally kept faith with people the United States has not yet decided to keep faith with.

Why it matters The third-country conversation has always been the wrong conversation. The country these people were promised is the United States.

IN THE NEWS

Trump is set to extend the Qatar camp housing more than 1,000 Afghans who helped the US war effort -- AP

For twenty months, the question at Camp As Sayliyah has been whether the United States would abandon people it vetted, flew to a U.S. base, and promised a future. This week the answer was no, or at least not yet. That is a choice, and it was made because thousands of people refused to let the other choice be made quietly. The same people can make the next choice too. The President signs tomorrow. Count them in.

We are grateful. We are focused. And we are not going anywhere.

Donate today

At home, Medicaid ends Thursday for Afghan parolees, asylees, and refugees without green cards. Abroad, 1,039 people at Camp As Sayliyah are two days from a closure date nobody has explained to them, and the President signs the refugee number by Wednesday. A lot of you have written to ask how two people got in while you wait. It is unfair, and I cover it below.

My birthday is Wednesday and I want you to show up.

Start with the ways you can take action, then read on.

Everything we publish lives at afghanevac.org, and we keep it current. Our press archive, our searchable reports and litigation database The Ledger, our resources for families and advocates, our explainers, and our action center are free and open to anyone. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe and get it Monday mornings.

Subscribe now

ACTION THIS WEEK

• Share our Medicaid guide before Thursday. Federal Medicaid and CHIP funding ends October 1 for Afghan parolees, asylees, and refugees without green cards. English, Dari, Pashto, and regional resources at afghanevac.org/obbb.

• Write Congress on the refugee number at afghanevac.org/count-them-in. More than 3,000 letters since September 8. The President signs by Wednesday, and the document Congress saw does not name Afghan allies.

• If you have a relationship inside this administration, put it on the line this week. Two Afghans got a yes on Tuesday because someone made a call. Make yours. Ask for the same yes for every eligible Afghan ally, and be willing to lose the friendship over it.

• Fund the work at afghanevac.org/donate. So far this year: 10,771 messages to Congress and federal agencies, fifteen town halls on three continents, more than a thousand public comments, a Supreme Court amicus brief, and 300-plus news stories. None of it is government funded. October brings the refugee determination, the camp deadline, and the Medicaid cliff.

• My birthday is Wednesday. Make noise for Afghans, give if you can, and work with somebody you normally would not.

THURSDAY, THE DOCTOR GOES AWAY

On Thursday, October 1, federal Medicaid and CHIP funding ends for Afghan parolees, asylees, and refugees who do not hold a green card. Congress wrote that cutoff into last year’s reconciliation law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The administration is enforcing it against the same families it has spent twenty months refusing to adjudicate. Most of the Afghans losing coverage this week are eligible for a green card. They do not have one because the government chose not to issue it, and the only reason green cards are moving at all is that Democracy Forward took USCIS to court in Dorcas and won.

Here is what families need to know. Applying for a green card does not restore benefits eligibility. Only an approved green card clears the hurdle. Afghan and Iraqi SIV holders keep their Medicaid eligibility and are exempt from the five-year waiting period that most lawful permanent residents face, so if you hold an SIV and a termination notice arrives, that notice may be wrong. Appeal it before coverage ends, and call your resettlement agency and your local benefits office about deadlines, state options, and free clinics. Emergency Medicaid continues for everyone. Our full breakdown, translated resources, regional guides, and state-by-state coverage table are at afghanevac.org/obbb, and every graphic is free for partners at go.afghanevac.org/obbb-graphics.

One development to watch. In Wednesday’s refugee consultation, USCIS Director Joseph Edlow told members that the pause on green cards for refugees has been lifted. Nobody has confirmed whether that includes Afghan refugees already in the United States. We have asked. If it does, thousands of families are one adjudication away from keeping their coverage, and the agency should say so out loud.

Why it matters A government that will not process case benefits and then cuts off access to medical support is not neutral. It is choosing. The fix is in its hands: adjudicate the applications, and confirm in writing that Afghans are covered by the lift.

THE TPS BILL WAITS ON AN ELECTION

Cosponsor counts on the Afghanistan TPS Act did not move this week. H.R. 9899 sits at eight, S. 5308 at three. Here is the honest read: nothing moves before November. After the midterm elections, the window opens, and we intend to run through it. We need Congress to be as motivated as all of us, so they need to hear from you.

We need your support to keep pushing on this and every other project we have. The Promises Aren’t Temporary shirt does dual duty: it shows you care about this and helps us fund our work. Buy one, wear it to your member’s town hall, and keep asking them to cosponsor at afghanevac.org/tps.

Get your shirt today

WHERE DOES YOUR CASE STAND?

Our updated case guide maps who holds your case, what may be stopping it, and what you can do next. It covers SIVs, refugee admissions, asylum, humanitarian parole, family cases, and border entries, inside and outside the United States. It is not legal advice. It is a map. Share it: afghanevac.org/case-guide.

ZERO. AGAIN.

On September 22 the government filed its progress report in Afghan and Iraqi Allies v. Rubio, the SIV class action. It covers June 4 through September 2, 2026. The number of SIVs issued to Afghan class members in that period is zero. Cases stuck at Chief of Mission review averaged 666 days pending. Six posts, Abu Dhabi, Baghdad, Doha, Kuwait, Muscat, and Riyadh, still had not resumed routine visa operations. The rest of the numbers are on the card above. The D.C. Circuit hears arguments in the appeal on November 6.

Why it matters These are the government’s own numbers, filed under a court order. Nobody has to characterize them. A program Congress designed to move in nine months has stopped issuing visas to the people it was built for. That is not a backlog. It is a deliberate policy choke point.

STATE PUT SIVs IN THE PUBLIC CHARGE REVIEW

A filing in Medani v. Trump on September 22 disclosed State Department cables that expressly include Special Immigrant Visas in a new system of enhanced vetting and public charge review, and it describes a post-eligibility review that can end with an issued visa being spoiled or revoked. Afghan SIV applicants are exempt from the public charge ground of inadmissibility by statute. Congress wrote that exemption on purpose, because these are people who earned their visas by serving alongside American troops.

Why it matters You do not means-test a promise. Our explainer and statement are at afghanevac.org/siv-public-charge.

BATTLE BUDDIES

On Tuesday, a Battle Buddy sat with the family of Nazeer Paktiawal, the Special Forces partner who died in ICE custody in March, at their USCIS appointment in Farmers Branch, Texas. Other deployments this week went the same way: a veteran in the room, a family that did not face the government alone. The no-detention record where a Battle Buddy is present still stands.

October is already filling up. Hearings and appointments are on the calendar in Virginia, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco, San Diego, and Annandale. We need more volunteers. If you are a veteran, frontline civilian, or evacuation volunteer, please sign up at afghanevac.org/battle-buddies.

NINE MONTHS IN

Here is what this community has done together since January. You sent 10,771 messages to Congress and federal agencies through nine campaigns, reaching all 100 senators and 389 House offices, split almost evenly between the parties: 245 Republicans, 241 Democrats, 3 independents. You filed 1,026 public comments against rules that would strip work permits from Afghan allies and decide asylum cases on paper. Nearly 750 of you registered for our town halls, and more than 1,500 came through the doors, at fifteen events on three continents, in English, Dari, and Pashto. More than 3,800 of you wrote to us directly about your cases, and we answered. And together we kept Afghan allies in the news more than 300 times this year. None of it is finished, and none of it happens without you. That is what afghanevac.org/donate pays for.

A ROOM FULL OF THE FUTURE

On Saturday night, Daphne and I were at UCLA for the banquet closing the 11th Annual Afghan-American Conference, hosted by the Afghan-American Community Organization. Three days of Afghan-American students, professionals, artists, and organizers talking about what comes next for their community, in a week when the rest of the news was about people being kept out of it. Thank you to Spojmie Nasiri and the whole AACO team for having us. Rooms like that one are why we do this.

ABROAD

TWO DAYS, 1,039 PEOPLE, AND NOT ONE SENTENCE

Camp As Sayliyah is supposed to close Wednesday with 1,039 Afghan allies and family members still inside, 72 percent of them women and children, including 150 immediate family members of active-duty or recently separated U.S. service members. Every one of them was vetted by U.S. officials before they traveled, after they arrived, or both. We fully expect the deadline to be extended; the contractors who run the camp have been asked to plan for a longer timeframe with roughly the same population.

The residents have not been told. Not that an extension is coming, not what happens if it does not, not where they would go. People inside the camp are afraid they will be taken in the night and sent back to Afghanistan. Whether or not that fear is founded, the government has done nothing to put it to rest. And this week, in the refugee consultation with Congress, Secretary Markwayne Mullin and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow made clear they have no intention of admitting these allies to the United States. The residents know that too.

Mental health and wellness in the camp are decidedly in decline. Senior camp staff describe widespread depression and psychological distress among residents, including children, after years of limbo with no information. Last week was a hard one inside the camp and residents reached out to ask us to speak about what they are living through and how desperate they are for information, so we did. The remedy is information and a decision, and both sit with the State Department and the White House.

On Friday, RFE/RL told the story of Sean Jamshidi, a former Marine who flew to Doha and was refused access to his own brother, who is a former security officer at the U.S. consulate in Herat and survived the 2013 truck bombing that killed eight Afghan guards. Sean’s brother is inside the camp. The State Department told RFE/RL it “continues to work toward a positive resolution.” It has said that for twenty months.

Why it matters America made a promise and then moved every single person there to a U.S. base in Qatar. Now they want to abandon them there. We cannot let this happen in silence.

TUESDAY THEY SAID YES. WEDNESDAY THEY SAID NO.

On Tuesday morning, September 22, two Afghans landed in Virginia as refugees, admitted under an exception the administration granted on its own authority. We told that story in a special edition. They are the fourth and fifth Afghans admitted as refugees this fiscal year. The first three were unaccompanied children from Camp As Sayliyah. We thanked the President, Secretary Rubio, Secretary Mullin, and Assistant Secretary Andrew Veprek by name, and we meant it.

Some people have asked why we made that public instead of keeping it quiet so the door might stay open. We want to be clear about this. We did not break the story; Afghans did. By the time we published, families in Islamabad, Doha, and Sacramento were already talking about it, because it was surprising and because it looked unfair. Staying quiet would not have kept a secret. It would have left the community with a rumor and no answer. And AfghanEvac began in August 2021 as an effort to bring fairness to a relocation that had none, when who got out depended on who you knew. We are bound by honor to do everything we can to make sure any system this country runs for our allies is fair, and you cannot make a system fair by hiding how it works. A quiet exception is a favor, and favors are not a policy. A public one is a precedent, and a precedent is something we can hold the government to for the next family, and the ten thousand after them. Sunshine is how a promise stops being personal and starts being enforceable.

Since then, my inbox has filled with one question: why them? Families who have waited years, with cases every bit as deserving, want to know why their loved ones are still behind. Here is the honest answer. This family got in on a political hookup. That is not fair, and they did nothing wrong. They followed the rules, waited, and got lucky. Treat them with dignity and respect. The frustration belongs with a system that proved this week it can open the door when it chooses to. To my Afghan friends, you are not wrong to be mad. I am mad too. We are so happy for this family, and we are watching everyone who has the power to make it happen again.

To everyone who cares about this, and especially to those of you who align with this President on most other things: you have the relationships. Use them. Push hard, publicly and behind the scenes, for every eligible Afghan ally to get the same yes. Be willing to blow up a friendship in this government over it. That is what I did with the Biden administration, and it is what honor and integrity demand of us now. To do less, knowing what you know, is an abdication of both.

On Wednesday, the same officials sat down with Congress for the consultation the law requires before the President sets next year’s refugee ceiling. Mullin, Edlow, and Veprek represented the administration. Senators Chuck Grassley, Dick Durbin, Alex Padilla, and John Cornyn were in the room, along with Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Darrell Issa, sitting in for Chairman Jim Jordan. The proposal on the table is a ceiling of 17,500, “primarily” Afrikaners from South Africa, at an estimated cost of $500 million. It does not name Afghan allies. Afghans were discussed at length anyway, including the families at Camp As Sayliyah, because members raised them. When they did, administration officials said repeatedly that they do not trust the vetting done under the previous administration.

That claim does not survive contact with the record. In July 2024 the State Department’s own inspector general found that State “followed its established policies, process, and procedures to screen and vet the Afghan SIV applicants.” In June 2025, under this administration, the Justice Department’s inspector general found the FBI’s screening and vetting of Afghan evacuees generally effective and recommended no changes. And the administration trusted that vetting enough on Tuesday to put two Afghans on a plane. You cannot admit two Afghans on Tuesday and tell Congress on Wednesday that you do not trust the vetting. If there is a specific concern with a case, re-vet the case and decide it. Refusing to trust any of it is not a security policy. It is a reason to say no. One family is an exception, and exceptions do not keep promises. Policies do.

We are grateful to Senator Padilla, Senator Durbin, and Representative Raskin, and to their staffs, for making sure the people who served alongside American troops were part of that conversation. We will thank every member of Congress, in either party, who does the same. The President is expected to sign the final determination by Wednesday, the last day of the fiscal year. When he does, we will hold a press conference on what it means for Afghan allies and U.S. military families.

Rep. Scott Peters is circulating a bicameral letter asking Rubio and Mullin to do again what they did on Tuesday, this time for U.S. military families and for Afghans with immediate family already lawfully here, with a national-interest finding to cover them. Sign-on closes today. If your member has not signed, call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 now and ask why not, and copy me on the email to their office so we can link them up.

Why it matters This administration has made it plain that it has no desire to help Afghans. Congress can force their hand. The way to make Tuesday fair is not to wish it had not happened. It is to make it happen ten thousand more times. That is what the Peters letter and the more than 3,000 Count Them In letters are for.

THIRD-COUNTRY REMOVALS GO TO THE SUPREME COURT

On September 18 the First Circuit affirmed the district court in D.V.D. v. DHS, leaving in place the finding that people cannot be removed to a third country without notice and a real chance to raise a credible fear claim. The stay in this case dissolved Wednesday night. DHS cancelled a flight carrying 70 people. On Thursday the Solicitor General filed an emergency application at the Supreme Court. Afghans are on those flights. Reason told the story of Farzana, removed to the Central African Republic on August 28 on a flight we believe carried roughly 20 Afghans. We call it what it is: refoulement with a layover.

The machinery behind those flights is the one The Washington Post exposed on September 21, a 15-person Office of Remigration inside the State Department’s refugee bureau, run by Andrew Veprek under Stephen Miller’s direction, with at least $410 million committed to 31 countries and a quarter of a billion of it taken from refugee assistance. We asked Veprek, Christian Ehrhardt, and Tommy Pigott for meetings on September 12. We wrote to Veprek and Ehrhardt again the morning the Post story ran. Nobody has answered.

Why it matters U.S. law and treaty obligations bar returning people to persecution. Sending them to a country where they have no status and no future, knowing they will be pushed home to the Taliban, gets to the same place. The Court now decides whether notice and a hearing are required first.

THE REGION

Nine UN experts, including Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett, reported that 127,344 Afghans crossed back from Pakistan between July 10 and August 27, 14,186 of them forcibly removed. Then the border turned into a battlefield: Pakistani airstrikes hit Kandahar, Paktia, and Khost on Wednesday, and fighting continued into Friday. In Iran, UNHCR counts more than 439,000 Afghans deported this year. The P-1 and P-2 families who write to us every week are living inside those numbers.

In New York, the Taliban were once again denied Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

Why it matters Every Afghan pushed out of Pakistan or Iran, and every Afghan the Taliban receives at a border crossing, is someone a resettlement pipeline, ours or an ally’s, was built to reach first.

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

Camp As Sayliyah

• As Deadline Looms, Ex-US Marine Desperately Seeks Brother At Afghan Refugee Camp In Qatar -- RFE/RL

Two Afghans arrive

• Two Afghans Enter US Under Narrow Immigration Exception, AfghanEvac Says -- Khaama Press

• Two Afghan nationals enter U.S. under limited immigration exception, AfghanEvac says -- Atlas Press

• Scripps News On The Scene: the TPS Act and #CountThemIn -- Scripps News

The refugee number

• Trump administration to welcome up to 17,500 more White South Africans as refugees -- CBS News

• Trump administration says most refugees accepted in 2027 will be White South Africans -- CNN

• Trump administration tells Congress it will admit 17,500 white South African refugees in 2027 -- Associated Press

• Trump pushes to admit 17,500 White Afrikaners from South Africa in 2027 refugee cap -- The Hill

• Trump administration again omits refugees fleeing religious persecution from US program -- Religion News Service

• HIAS Appalled by Proposed Exclusion of Vulnerable Refugees -- HIAS

• Refugee Council USA Denounces Trump Administration’s Racial Animus and Persistent Discriminatory Pattern of Unlawful Actions That Harm Refugees -- Refugee Council USA

Third-country removals

• Trump administration appeals to Supreme Court as 3rd-country deportations are thrown into question -- Associated Press

• Trump administration urges Supreme Court to revive third-country deportation policy -- CBS News

• Stephen Miller’s MAGA Terror Campaign Exposed by Damning New Leaks -- The New Republic

• Asylum seekers thought they had a haven in the U.S. Then Trump returned. -- The Washington Post

• AP Exclusive: ICE hides locations of thousands of detainees with final removal orders -- Associated Press

Benefits

• Medicaid Policy Explainer: Implications for Refugee and Immigrant Communities -- USCRI

• SNAP and Medicaid Will Change Dramatically in October: What to Know -- Newsweek

The region

• Pakistan must stop removals of Afghans at risk of torture and other serious human rights violations: UN experts -- OHCHR

• Afghanistan vows to respond after Pakistani air strikes kill four -- Al Jazeera

• UNHCR: More than 439,000 Afghans deported from Iran in 2026 -- Amu TV

UNGA week

• Superpowers cannot solve world’s problems, UN chief says in final general assembly address -- The Guardian

• As World Leaders Gather at the U.N., the Push to Recognize Gender Apartheid Gains Ground -- Ms. Magazine

On Thursday, Afghan families across this country lose their health coverage because the government will not decide cases it has been sitting on for two years. In Doha, 1,039 people are waiting for one sentence from the State Department telling them what happens next. Same problem, two places: the government knows what to do and is choosing not to do it.

We know that because on Tuesday it did. Two Afghans got on a plane and landed here as refugees. That is what it looks like when this administration decides to keep America’s promise. Every other family is one decision away from the same thing, and Congress can force that decision if it hears from enough of us.

So make some noise this week, here and abroad. Give what you can. And set down whatever petty baggage you are carrying that gets in the way of working together for our Afghan friends and allies.

Why a special edition? Since news broke that two Afghans arrived in the United States this week, many of you have written with questions. How did this happen? Who else can come? What does it mean for your family's case? We wanted to answer as much as we can in one place, right away, instead of waiting for Monday. Here is what we know, what we are asking for, and how you can help.

On Tuesday morning, something that almost never happens anymore happened.

Two Afghans landed safely in the United States through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), on an exception to current policy.

They are only the fourth and fifth Afghans admitted as refugees this fiscal year (2026).

Refugee admissions are largely frozen, and the travel ban blocks nearly every Afghan at the door, but someone looked at this family and said yes.

The next day (yesterday), House and Senate Judiciary Committee staff were briefed on next year’s refugee admissions. Afghan allies aren’t named in that plan. The timing could not matter more.

What You Need to Know

• The arrival, and who we are thanking for it

• Why this family belongs here

• What it proves, and who is still waiting

• The briefing, and what we’re asking Congress to do

• A new resource for families already here

Start with the ways you can take action, then read on.

ACTION YOU CAN TAKE

• Write your members of Congress through #CountThemIn. 2,769 letters have already gone in. Ask them to secure named admissions for Afghan allies in the FY2027 refugee determination. It takes two minutes: afghanevac.org/count-them-in

• Call your Representative and both Senators through the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Ask the operator to connect you, then ask your members to press the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to extend the same decision to every eligible Afghan referred to USRAP through the Priority 1 and Priority 2 programs, including the families of U.S. service members and family reunification cases.

• Say thank you in public. Post with #CountThemIn and thank the officials who made Tuesday possible. Positive reinforcement matters, and they should hear that Americans noticed.

• Share our statement (below) with your network, your faith community, and your local newspaper.

• For those already here, being able to live with dignity matters. Share our new benefits guide at afghanevac.org/obbb, which helps Afghan families understand the food and health benefit changes and what they can do about them.

• Military families, tell us your story. If your spouse, child, or parent is stranded overseas, we want to help your story reach Congress and the press. https://afghanevac.org/your-story

• Reporters: we can connect you with service members whose families are stranded and with veterans who served alongside Afghan allies. Email press@afghanevac.org.

TWO AFGHANS CAME HOME

On Tuesday, September 22, two Afghans arrived in the United States through USRAP under an approved exception to current policy. Since January 1, 2026, Proclamation 10998 has barred entry to nearly all Afghan nationals. Under those rules, and under Executive Order 14163, an Afghan can reach the United States as a refugee only when senior officials decide that the person’s admission serves the national interest. This week, they made that decision.

This family is only the second Afghan arrival of its kind since January 2025. The first three were unaccompanied minor children from Camp As Sayliyah, who were admitted before last November’s shooting in Washington. That makes five Afghans admitted as refugees in 20 months.

It happened because specific people chose to make it happen, and they deserve to be named:

• Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, pushed it from the White House.

• Andrew Veprek, Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, made it happen at the State Department.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin signed off, as Executive Order 14163 and Presidential Proclamation 10998 require.

We thank each of them, and we thank President Trump, whose administration made this call. We have disagreed with some of these officials on a great deal. On this, they were right.

We have spent a lot of this year telling you when decisions were wrong. This one was right, and we want to say so plainly.

OUR STATEMENT

Read and share our full statement on the arrival and the congressional briefing.

See our press page

THIS FAMILY BELONGS HERE

We want to be clear about something. This family is as deserving as anyone who has ever come to this country through the refugee program. They were vetted by the U.S. government. Senior officials reviewed their case and decided their admission served the national interest. They did everything that was asked of them, and they waited through a process that had all but stopped.

No one should target this family, attack them, or question whether they deserve to be here. They do. If you see anyone doing that online or anywhere else, we ask you to stand up for them, the same way Americans have stood up for Afghan allies for five years.

This family is so lucky. We are grateful for them, and we’re glad they’re home. But luck should not decide who America keeps its word to.

WHAT IT PROVES, AND WHO IS STILL WAITING

For a year and a half, families have been told the door was shut. Tuesday proved it isn’t. It opens when leaders choose to open it. This is a choice. It can be made again.

Nearly 3,000 immediate family members of U.S. service members are still stranded overseas. They are the spouses, children, and parents of Americans who wear this country’s uniform. Roughly 150 of them are at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, alongside more than 1,000 Afghan allies and family members who were vetted by the U.S. government and flown there on U.S. government aircraft. The camp is scheduled to close September 30. Beyond Qatar, tens of thousands of Afghan mission partners already referred to USRAP are waiting in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and in countries around the world. Many are separated from spouses and children who are already here.

Why it matters Five admissions in 20 months is not a policy. It’s a proof of concept. The same decision that brought this family home is available for every one of them. What’s missing is not the authority. It’s the will to use it at scale.

THE BRIEFING

On Wednesday, September 23, the administration briefed House and Senate Judiciary Committee staff on its proposed FY2027 Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions. That consultation is Congress’s formal say before the determination is signed. The proposal sets a ceiling of 17,500 admissions and does not name Afghan allies.

Ahead of the briefing, we sent every congressional office on Capitol Hill a memo making the case for Afghan allies, along with questions for the administration. We are asking Congress to secure two things in the determination: named admissions for Afghan allies, with at least 5,000 places in FY2027 and FY2028, and a national-interest finding that covers them. Without both, every family is stuck waiting on a one-off exception.

Why it matters Tuesday showed the exception works. The determination is how you turn an exception into a policy.

EVERY ELIGIBLE FAMILY

We are also working with congressional offices on a bipartisan letter to Secretaries Rubio and Mullin. The letter thanks them for Tuesday’s decision and asks how it happened. It also asks them to use the same process for every eligible Afghan referred to USRAP through P-1 and P-2. That includes the families of U.S. service members and Afghans seeking to reunite with immediate family already lawfully in the United States. No family on that list is more deserving than another. Every one of them has already been referred, and every one of them is waiting on the same decision this family received.

Why it matters If your member of Congress wants to do something concrete this week, this is it. Ask them to sign.

AMERICANS ARE WITH US

A July 2026 bipartisan national poll by Lake Research Partners and The Tarrance Group found that 84 percent of likely voters want the United States to commit to protecting Afghan allies and their families. That support crosses party lines. So should the response.

See the polling

KEEPING THE PROMISE MEANS PROTECTING THE FAMILIES WHO ALREADY MADE IT HERE

Not only the ones still waiting. The 2025 reconciliation law, often called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), restricted food and health benefits for many Afghan allies already living in the United States. Families who did everything right are now trying to figure out what they can still count on.

So we built something that didn’t exist. Our new guide at afghanevac.org/obbb explains, in plain language, what changed, who is affected, and what families can do now. It includes ten regional guides covering California, Texas, the D.C. metro area, Arizona, Georgia, New York, the Carolinas, Colorado and Utah, the Pacific Northwest, and New England, so families can find what applies where they live. It’s also available as a carousel in English, Dari, and Pashto, and partners can download the graphics free at go.afghanevac.org/obbb-graphics.

One point matters most. Applying for a green card does not restore benefits eligibility. Only an approved green card clears that hurdle. If a family has been cut off, they should contact their local benefits office to confirm the cut was lawful and to ask about free clinics nearby.

If you work with Afghan families, at a resettlement agency, a clinic, a mosque, a church, or a school, please share it. AfghanEvac is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. Talk to a qualified immigration attorney about your own case.

See the guide

We have written a lot of hard updates this year, and we’ll write more. This one is different.

For one family, the promise held.

We want to stay in that feeling for a minute, because it reminds us what all this work is for.

Then we’re going back to work, because there are thousands more families just as deserving, and nearly 3,000 of them belong to people who have served this country. Tuesday showed that America still knows how to keep its word.

Our job now is to make sure it keeps it for everyone who stood with us. Let’s make the exception the rule.

AfghanEvac is powered by people like you. Support the work.

Refugee consultations Wednesday, a Supreme Court brief already on file, and Camp As Sayliyah is nine days from its stated closing date with no communication to residents about what comes next.

ACTION THIS WEEK

• Write to Congress on the refugee admissions number before Wednesday, at afghanevac.org/count-them-in. Consultations are scheduled for Wednesday, September 23, which gives us two days. 1,415 letters have gone to congressional offices so far. Send yours, then forward the link to five people. The ask is simple: a dedicated allocation of at least 5,000 Afghans in fiscal 2027 and at least 5,000 in fiscal 2028.

• Ask your representative and senators to cosponsor the Afghanistan TPS Act at afghanevac.org/tps. 2,263 of you have written Congress on this bill. It is Republican-led in both chambers, and the cosponsor list is what gets us to a discharge petition, so every name counts.

• Read and share The Washington Post's investigation of the Office of Remigration, published today. David Nakamura and Adam Taylor document $410 million pledged across 31 countries to take deportees who are not their citizens. Send it to your member of Congress before Wednesday's consultations, and ask them to raise it in the room.

• Share our Supreme Court brief in A.A. and F.A. v. Mast, an important case on what it means to keep promises to vulnerable people, at afghanevac.org/amicus. Post the statement and the brief, cite the public record rather than characterizing anyone in your own voice, and send any reporter who asks our way.

• FOR OUR ALLIES: Check your Medicaid status before October 1, and your form edition before September 30. Afghan and Iraqi SIV holders remain eligible for Medicaid with no five-year wait. If you hold an SIV and get a termination notice, appeal it before coverage ends and call your resettlement agency. The prior editions of the Affidavit of Support forms, I-864, I-864A, and I-864EZ, are accepted only through September 30.

• Chip in at afghanevac.org/donate. August and September were some of the biggest months for AfghanEvac. These efforts are all paid for by private funding and our supporters. Your support is how we keep going.

LAST WEEK IN BRIEF

• Sept 14. We briefed Hill staff on three deadlines: Camp As Sayliyah’s September 30 closure, refugee consultations, and TPS cosponsors.

• Sept 16. AfghanEvac filed an amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court in A.A. and F.A. v. Mast, alongside The Chamberlain Network and Professor Daniel Maurer.

• Sept 17. Reason published Farzana’s story of removal to the Central African Republic, with AfghanEvac on third-country removals.

• Sept 18. DHS’s expanded public charge rule was scheduled to take effect, with 22 states suing to block it. Humanitarian arrivals, including refugees and asylees, are not subject to it. Form I-485 changed the same day, with no grace period.

• Sept 18. Our deadline for the State Department to correct the record on Camp As Sayliyah passed without a response.

• Sept 19. Raleigh community town hall followed by Battle Buddies happy hour and karaoke at the local VFW.

• Sept 21. The Washington Post published its investigation of the Office of Remigration inside the State Department's refugee bureau.

THE WEEK AHEAD

This week is a big one. Four things that matter critically to our work happen within the next nine days.

• Tuesday, Sept 22. Battle Buddies deployment in the Dallas area.

• Tuesday, Sept 22. Two speaking engagements at William & Mary.

• Wednesday, Sept 23. Administration consultations with Congress on the fiscal 2027 refugee admissions ceiling.

• Wednesday, Sept 30. Camp As Sayliyah is scheduled to close. The fiscal year ends, and it is the last day for prior editions of the I-864 Affidavit of Support forms.

• Thursday, Oct 1. Deadline for the Presidential Determination on refugee admissions. Medicaid eligibility changes take effect under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

WHAT WE HEARD IN RALEIGH

On Saturday, AfghanEvac held a community town hall at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in North Raleigh. Over 65 people came, some of them driving several hours, with children in tow. We chose Raleigh on purpose, because it sits within reach of the Afghan communities in Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham, and the Triangle, and because North Carolina’s veterans and Afghan allies have a lot to say to each other.

We ran the afternoon in English, Dari, and Pashto, and we spent more time listening than talking.

What people asked about most were the two questions we hear every single day, in every city, in every language. When will my case be approved? The green card, the work permit, the asylum decision. And when will I be allowed to reunify with my family? Those are not policy abstractions. They are the whole of a person’s life held in someone else’s inbox.

October 1 and Medicaid came up a lot too, and it is worth answering here. Afghan and Iraqi SIV holders remain eligible for Medicaid, and they are exempt from the five-year waiting period that most lawful permanent residents must complete before they can enroll. If you hold an SIV and a termination notice arrives, that notice may be wrong. Appeal before coverage ends, and call your resettlement agency to ask about deadlines and any state waiver options.

There was good news in that room too. One man stood up to say his work permit was finally approved, after fifteen months of waiting. That approval was not luck and it was not generosity. It came because Democracy Forward took USCIS to court and won in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS, where a federal judge struck down the policies freezing and delaying benefits for Afghans and nationals of dozens of other countries. Litigation is slow, unglamorous, and expensive, and it is the reason a man in North Carolina can work legally this month.

Then a father came up with a folder. Inside was the paperwork for his three children, all under twenty-one, all fully approved to join their mother and father in the United States. Approved. Vetted. Done. They cannot come, because the travel ban stands between them and a plane. That is what this system does right now. It approves a family, then refuses to let them live together as one.

It was also a reminder of how big this community has become. Team members from across the AfghanEvac family filled that room, including Megan from Team America Relief, Allison from the World Hazara Council, and more who drove in for the afternoon.

Why it matters Policy gets made by people who have never sat in a room like that one. Three approved children who cannot board a plane is not a paperwork problem, it is a policy choice, and it is exactly what we carry into Wednesday. If your community wants a town hall, tell us at contact@afghanevac.org.

WE FILED AT THE SUPREME COURT

On September 16, AfghanEvac filed an amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court in A.A. and F.A. v. Mast, alongside The Chamberlain Network and Professor Daniel Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate. We do not do this often, and we did not do it lightly.

The case

• An Afghan child was orphaned during the war, in a joint operation between the U.S. and Afghan militaries.

• The United States transferred her to the Afghan government for family reunification, and she was placed with her extended family, who raised her.

• Joshua and Stephanie Mast later obtained a Virginia adoption order through proceedings in which that family received no notice and no opportunity to be heard.

• By the time they learned what had happened, Virginia’s deadline to challenge the order had run, and the Supreme Court of Virginia held that this ended the matter.

• The U.S. government’s own filings describe what happened as an abduction.

We joined for two reasons. The first is that the standards at issue are the ones that protect Americans serving overseas. Judge advocates are trained to respect host-nation sovereignty and to deal honestly with courts, and those rules are not etiquette. They are what lets an American in uniform operate in someone else’s country and be trusted there. Our brief lays out those standards and what the public record shows happened in this case.

The second reason is closer to home. Our entire model runs on trust. Every day we tell Afghan families that if they follow the lawful process, register the case, submit the documents, sit for the interview, wait their turn, American institutions will deal with them fairly. That is a hard sell in a year like this one. It gets harder every time American authority is used against someone who relied on it. A family that was never told a court was deciding their child’s future is the sharpest version of that problem, and every Afghan family watching this case understands it immediately.

We take no position on who should raise this child. We are not litigating custody and we are not asking anyone else to. Our argument is about notice and an opportunity to be heard, which is the floor of due process, not the ceiling. Everything in the brief comes from the public record, including the government’s own filings and the courts’ own findings.

Our sincere thanks to the legal team who pulled this together.

Why it matters What the Court does here reaches well beyond one family. It tells every Afghan who trusted an American process whether that trust was earned.

Our explainer, the statement, and the brief are all available on our website.

Learn More

THEY TOLD US WHAT THEY DID TO THE REFUGEE BUREAU

This morning The Washington Post published an investigation by David Nakamura and Adam Taylor, part of a six-month project with Forbidden Stories and 26 news organizations in 15 countries. Read it. Working from internal government records, it documents what has been done to the office that is supposed to run refugee admissions. Inside the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration sits a roughly 15-person shop called the Office of Remigration, a word popularized by white nationalists in Europe who want racial minorities expelled. As of the end of June, the administration had pledged at least $410 million to get 31 countries to accept people the United States deports who are not their citizens, including $81 million in direct payments to 13 foreign governments, under contracts written to bypass human rights safeguards. The State Department also took $250 million from refugee aid programs to help fund a DHS push to get migrants to leave on their own.

You do not have to infer the intent, because the man in charge said it out loud. Andrew Veprek, speaking in April at an anti-immigration think tank, said the bureau “had been a humanitarian assistance office” that “focused on bringing people to the United States.” Then: “Now, we are focused on implementing the president’s immigration agenda.” And: “We have changed the orientation of the bureau completely.” Veprek has since been promoted to oversee all U.S. foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs. His deputy, Christian Ehrhardt, a former embassy security officer, now travels Africa as what one U.S. official called a White House envoy, closing these deals.

Those two names should be familiar to readers of this newsletter, because we have been saying them for months. Veprek and Ehrhardt are the officials behind the decisions that have kept 1,039 Afghan allies sitting in a camp in Qatar with no destination plan, and they are the officials we have asked, repeatedly and in writing, to explain themselves. When we went to Washington on September 12 we requested meetings with both of them, along with Tommy Pigott. Nobody said no. Nobody said anything. The Post’s reporting now gives us a much clearer picture of what those offices have been prioritizing.

Why it matters The bureau sitting down with Congress on Wednesday to brief their plan for next year’s refugee number is the same bureau that spent this year building a deportation network, partly with money taken from refugee aid. When we say the Afghan allocation is zero by choice, these are the people making the choice, and now it is on the record.

Read the investigation

COUNT THEM IN BY SEPTEMBER 23

By law, the President must set the fiscal year 2027 refugee admissions ceiling by October 1, after an “appropriate consultation” with Congress. That consultation is Wednesday, September 23. We expect a ceiling of 17,500, allocated to Afrikaners from South Africa, and an Afghan allocation of zero. The record explains why. The fiscal 2026 ceiling opened at a record-low 7,500, and when the administration raised it to 17,500 in May, the Federal Register notice allocated every slot to “Afrikaners from South Africa.” More than 12,000 South Africans have been resettled this fiscal year. Not one Afghan refugee has been admitted since January 20, 2025.

We are asking members on Judiciary, Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, and the relevant appropriations subcommittees to say plainly, in that room, that Afghan mission partners and U.S. military families belong in the fiscal 2027 determination, with a dedicated allocation of at least 5,000 in fiscal 2027 and at least 5,000 in fiscal 2028, naming Camp As Sayliyah, Afghans in Pakistan, the partnered units Secretary Mullin’s team says it wants prioritized, and family reunification. One more thing, because it decides whether you keep pushing after October 1. A signed number is not the end of it. The administration raised this past year’s ceiling mid-year with an emergency determination and gave every new slot to Afrikaners. The same tool is available for Afghan allies any day of the year. The precedent is theirs.

Why it matters Wednesday is the only moment in the year when Congress has a formal seat at this table. What members hear from home between now and then shapes what they say when they sit down. Write at afghanevac.org/count-them-in, and point offices to the bipartisan polling at afghanevac.org/polling.

Take action today

THIRTEEN DAYS AND NO ANSWER

On September 8 we asked the State Department to correct, from the podium, its spokesman’s claim on national television that the people at Camp As Sayliyah are “primarily a group of people that were either unvetted, brought there by other contractors, not based off of promises made from the United States.” We set a deadline of September 18. It passed. Thirteen days after we sent the letter, the Department has not responded.

Why it matters A correction takes eleven seconds at a podium. Refusing to issue one, in the same week the Department consults Congress on next year’s refugee number, tells you how it intends to talk about these families when it matters.

See the full record

NINE DAYS

Camp As Sayliyah is scheduled to close on September 30. As of our last count, 1,039 Afghan allies and family members are inside. More than 700 are women and children. Roughly 150 are the immediate family of American service members and recently separated veterans. Every person there was vetted before the United States government put them on a plane to Qatar. With nine days to go, there is still no published destination plan, no stated legal status on arrival anywhere else, and no confirmation that a transfer would preserve the American cases these families were promised.

We still expect the date to slip. An extension would be welcome, though it would not be a resolution. It moves the same unanswered questions to a later date and leaves the same children in the same containers.

Why it matters Congressional offices can meet residents directly through our virtual congressional delegations. If your member has not done one, tell them to get in touch with us and we will get them on the calendar.

See our fact sheet

INTERNATIONAL: REFOULEMENT BY A DIFFERENT NAME

Reason this week told the story of Farzana, a 32-year-old Afghan woman removed on August 28 to the Central African Republic along with roughly 40 to 50 men, the same day her lawyers filed for an emergency restraining order. Her fiancé applied for a Special Immigrant Visa after assisting the U.S. mission. She now lives in Bangui with no identity documents, no job, three months of resettlement support, and a recent malaria diagnosis. I told Reason we have heard of 20 Afghans removed on her flight alone. “The countries will essentially tell these Afghans, ‘OK, I guess you can go home.’ And that’s refoulement by a different name.”

In Pakistan, authorities say 2.76 million Afghans have been sent back since late 2023, and Punjab province is running 39 holding centers as arrests accelerate. The P-1 and P-2 families who write to us every week are inside those numbers.

Read the story

Why it matters U.S. law and international obligations prohibit returning people to countries where applicable legal protections bar their removal because of persecution or torture. Sending someone to a third country does not eliminate those obligations. Removing them to a country where they have no status, no documents, and no future, knowing they will be pushed home to the Taliban, accomplishes the same thing with an extra stop.

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

Third-country removals

• How Trump turned a refugee bureau into a $410 million deportation operation -- The Washington Post

• ‘They kept us like animals’: Afghan woman deported to Africa by Trump speaks out -- Reason

• ‘They Kept Us Like Animals’: Afghan Woman Deported to Africa by Government Officials Speaks Out -- International Business Times UK

• Latin American migrants deported by ICE to West Africa describe being stranded “on the other side of the world” -- CBS News

The refugee program

• “I believed the hype”: The white South Africans denied refugee status in the US -- The Guardian

• Thousands of refugees in Arizona likely to lose healthcare in October -- KJZZ

• Afrikaner refugee family reportedly denied US re-entry -- Cape Town Etc. A family that flew home to South Africa for cheaper medical care found out what refugee status actually means.

Status and enforcement

• Trump has ended TPS for 13 countries. Salvadorans are still waiting for an answer. -- Politico

• Immigrants’ Lawyers Say U.S. Is Redacting Documents Proving Legal Status -- The New York Times

Pakistan

• Pakistan steps up arrests of Afghans, says 2.76 million have been sent home -- Arab News

Promises made

• I Still Have Hundreds of Texts From the Fall of Kabul. They Remind Me of the Promises We Broke -- The War Horse

A father in Raleigh carries a folder with three approved children in it and no plane to put them on.

A man in the same room got his work permit after fifteen months, because lawyers went to court and won.

This morning we learned, in the government's own records, that the bureau built to bring people like them to safety has spent the year and $410 million building the opposite.

None of that is weather.

It is a set of decisions, made by people with names, and decisions can be remade.

On Wednesday, Congress gets its formal opportunity to challenge the administration’s refugee plan before the next determination is made.

Write the letter. Share the investigation. Show up to a courtroom.

We are not going anywhere.

We committed last week to publishing the August Chief of Mission decisions number. That number was supposed to be 3000 but the Department said they took a summer vacation and only processed 752.

Read to the end to make sure you catch our correction from last week.

• The August Chief of Mission figure landed, and it is the worst month since the court started counting

• The fiscal year 2027 refugee number is coming, consultations with Congress start next week, and Afghans are not included in the draft

• The Afghanistan TPS Act has a path, but it’s narrow and we need you to act today

• We went to Washington and asked State for a correction in person, and got silence

• USCIS reversed itself on a form deadline, and Medicaid changes hit October 1

• An incredible town hall in Sterling, VA

• Sixteen days until Camp As Sayliyah is supposed to close, with 1,039 people inside and no destination plan

ACTION THIS WEEK

• IF YOU DO ONE THING THIS WEEK: COUNT THEM IN.
  This is the single most time-sensitive thing on this list. Consultations between the administration and Congress begin this week, and staff need the information in hand before they walk into the room, not after. 1,183 letters have gone to congressional offices since we opened this campaign. That is a start. It is not enough to move a number. If you are in the United States, take three minutes and send one. Then send the link to five people who will.

• Ask your representative to cosponsor the Afghanistan TPS Act. H.R. 9899 has nine cosponsors, four of them Republicans. S. 5308 has three. 2,077 of you have written Congress on this bill.

• Check your Medicaid status before October 1. Refugees, asylees, and humanitarian parolees without green cards may lose eligibility that day. Afghan and Iraqi SIV holders remain eligible and do not face the five-year wait. If you get a termination notice and you hold an SIV, that notice may be wrong. Appeal before coverage ends, and call your resettlement agency to ask about deadlines and waiver options. Not all states have these options, but some may, and local resettlement offices are your best connection to those resources.

• Share our letter to the State Department at afghanevac.org/correct-the-record. We are still waiting on an answer and we know that Tommy and his team are VERY sensitive about this topic.

752

The State Department filed its August report with Judge Tanya Chutkan on September 8. It issued Chief of Mission decisions in 752 cases for the entire month. But the court ordered 3,000.

Note the trend, because the trend is the story. The court set escalating monthly benchmarks in May, rising from 1,000 in June to 4,000 in October. State delivered 916, then 811, then 752, three consecutive months of decline in the exact period a federal judge ordered the number to rise. Here is the comparison that matters. Before this administration cut the staff who did this work, the Department was issuing more than 1,000 of these decisions a week. It is now issuing fewer than 200 a week. Nobody inherited this. The capacity existed, and it was purposely dismantled.

The Department told the court that August fell off because of “seasonal fluctuations in staffing during August, in which many staff took summer vacation and Foreign Service Officers routinely transfer between positions.” Its legal position in the same case is that “failure to meet the numerical interim benchmarks is not, in itself, noncompliance,” because the order said “endeavor.” So the government’s argument is that a court’s numbers are aspirational, and that the reason it missed them by 75 percent is that people were on vacation. Plaintiffs answered that in the August 28 filing. State has “failed the Court’s benchmarks in each of the months since they were ordered,” and its performance “deteriorated over the same time period the Court has ordered Defendants’ performance to improve.” More than 13,000 class member cases are already sitting past the 120-day standard in the government’s own plan.

Here is the part that should worry anyone waiting. State’s fix is a hiring and training pipeline that runs 12 to 13 months, which by the Department’s own account will reduce processing capacity for at least the next year. As of September 4, only 3 of the 20 officers it needs to do this had onboarded. And the Department told the court that at 150 fully trained staff it could issue 1,000 cases per week. Read that again. The number State is promising a federal judge it might reach after a year of hiring is the number it was already producing before it cut the staff. Every month this continues, the gap gets structurally worse, because roughly 178,000 people held already Chief of Mission approval over a year ago and fewer than 6,000 principal SIVs remain in the congressional allocation.

We hope Judge Chutkan will treat three straight months of decline as what it is. We are asking Congress to ask the Department, in writing, why a court order produced a slowdown. And we are asking you to read The Unfinished Mission, which documents how this pipeline was built and how it was shut off, and to send it to the people who represent you. This is no longer simply a backlog. It is a policy-created choke point. And it can be undone.

Read our report

COUNT THEM IN

Before October 1, the President must set the fiscal year 2027 refugee admissions ceiling. Consultations with Congress begin next week. The number we expect is 17,500. The number we anticipate to be allocated to Afghans is zero.

That is not an accident of drafting. Last year’s ceiling was 7,500, the lowest in the history of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. When the administration raised it mid-year to 17,500, the Federal Register notice allocated every additional admission to “Afrikaners from South Africa.” That is the document’s own language. The United States has not admitted Afghan refugees since the program was suspended on January 20, 2025. Families the United States government itself referred, journalists, human rights workers, women’s rights defenders, and the relatives of American service members, have now been waiting four years in Qatar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and in places where a referral from the American government is itself a death sentence if the wrong person finds it.

Another refugee determination with no Afghans is a statement that this country has decided the war it fought for twenty years produced no one worth protecting. We are asking for a dedicated allocation of at least 5,000 in fiscal 2027 and at least 5,000 in fiscal 2028, and we are asking members of Congress to say so out loud during consultations, by name and by category: Afghans at Camp As Sayliyah, P-1 and P-2 cases in Pakistan, the partnered units that Secretary Mullin’s own team has said it wants prioritized, and family reunification for American citizens and service members.

Why it matters Consultations happen in a room, and what is said in that room is shaped by what staff hear from home in the days before it. We have 1,183 letters. We need thousands.

Write Congress Now

The Afghanistan TPS Act still has a path

I am going to speak very plainly about how the Afghanistan TPS Act gets done, because the answer is narrower than it was in July. Between the calendar and the committee of jurisdiction, this bill is not moving the ordinary way. House Judiciary is not going to mark it up, and there is not enough runway left to wait for that to change. That leaves one route. A discharge petition forces a bill to the floor over a committee’s objection once 218 members sign it, and under House rules a bill has to sit in committee for 30 legislative days before a petition can be filed against it. That clock has not run out yet.

So the work between now and then is the list. H.R. 9899 has nine cosponsors, four of them Republicans. S. 5308 has three. 2,089 of you have already written Congress about this bill, and that number needs to go far higher before the clock runs out. When the bill becomes eligible, the number of cosponsors we walk in with is the best predictor of how fast we get to 218, and we should be counting signatures that week instead of starting from zero. Here is the part we did not expect. In office after office, we are finding that members of Congress do not know this bill exists. Not opposed to it. Unaware of it.

Why it matters A bill nobody has heard of does not get 218 signatures. Every office that hears from a constituent between now and the day that clock runs out is an office that knows the bill by name when it matters. We made this easy. Go to afghanevac.org/tps, enter your address, and the tool routes your message to your representative and both of your senators. It takes two minutes, the letter is already written, and you can edit it to say whatever you want.

Take action today

SHOWING UP IN STERLING

Sunday afternoon, I went out to Sterling for a community dialogue with Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, convened by the Afghan community of Loudoun County and organized by Rafiullah Samim. Loudoun is home to one of the largest Afghan communities in the country, and the questions in that room were the ones we hear every day. Where is my brother’s case? Why did processing stop? What do I tell my mother?

The difference was the answers. Subramanyam worked through Afghanistan TPS, the Enduring Welcome Act, and a long list of other issues without hedging and without needing the file explained to him. He knew what H.R. 4995 would actually do, which is codify the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts and stand up the case-tracking system that should have existed from the beginning. He knew where the bills sit and what moving them would take. I have been in a lot of these rooms. A member of Congress who can speak about Afghan policy with that kind of clarity and command of the detail is rare, and the people in that room could tell.

Why it matters If your representative cannot tell you what the Enduring Welcome Act does or where Afghanistan TPS stands, that is a fixable problem, and you are the person who fixes it. Ask them. Then ask them to cosponsor.

Take Action

WE WENT TO WASHINGTON AND ASKED IN PERSON

On September 8 we sent the State Department a letter asking for a correction from the podium, and published it in full. A Department spokesman had told ABC News on camera that the people at Camp As Sayliyah are “primarily a group of people that were either unvetted, brought there by other contractors, not based off of promises made from the United States,” and that whether this country owes those people anything is “not the right question.” We asked for four things: correct the Camp As Sayliyah characterization, answer the obligation question, stop attributing the November 2025 shutdown of Afghan processing to a prior administration’s vetting, and disclose whether the Department has quietly changed who counts as the family of an American service member.

We have received no response. Not a call, not a statement, not a correction. The letter went to the spokesman, to five senior Department officials, and to a press list that includes most of the reporters who cover this beat.

So this week, after the Villanova panel, I went to Washington and asked in person. I requested a meeting with Tommy Pigott to correct the record directly. I also tried to get on the calendars of Andrew Veprek, the Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, and Christian Ehrhardt. None of the three meetings happened. No one said no. No one said anything.

Why it matters The Department’s own contract records and the Defense Department Inspector General contradict what its spokesman said on national television. A correction costs nothing and takes eleven seconds at a podium. Refusing to issue one is a choice. And note who was on that list. Veprek runs the bureau that administers the refugee admissions program, in the week before the administration consults Congress on next year’s number. An organization representing Afghan wartime allies asked him for a meeting and got silence. That is the posture. The letter and the full record are at afghanevac.org/correct-the-record.

Secretary Rubio’s Prison Camp for Women and Children

Camp As Sayliyah is scheduled to close on September 30. As of our count on August 31 there were 1,039 Afghan allies and family members inside. 752 are women and children. Nineteen are pregnant. Roughly 150 are the immediate family of American service members and recently separated veterans. More than 400 children have been out of school for years. Every person there has been vetted, the vast majority well-before the United States government put them on a plane to Qatar, and there is still no published destination plan with sixteen days to go.

Watch for two things this month. A quiet extension, which is a small relief but only means more months in a camp. Or a third-country announcement, which has a record: 27 Afghans transferred from Abu Dhabi to Rwanda in August 2025 were promised onward relocation within three months, and eight months later not one had moved.

ANSWERING A COURT ORDER WITH MORE RED TAPE

The government filed its court-ordered status report in CLINIC v. Rubio on September 8, and it is worth reading closely. The Department disclosed that more than 43,000 immigrant visa applications were refused solely under the vacated 75-country pause and are therefore subject to Judge Jeannette Vargas’s vacatur and remand order. It then told the court it has rescheduled immigrant visa appointments globally through the end of September, having already rescheduled them through August 31. On timing, the filing states there is “no fixed date by which reconsideration of all affected applications will be completed.”

There is more. The Department deployed a new public charge worksheet to consular officers globally on August 15, and on September 1 it formally deployed four new training requirements including expanded managerial review of consular officer adjudications. Both apply to every immigrant visa adjudication worldwide, not just the remanded cases. So a court struck down one categorical barrier, and the Department responded by extending a global pause and installing a new discretionary screen that each of those 43,000 applicants must now pass individually.

Why it matters Afghans remain separately barred by Proclamation 10998, so the direct hit here lands on family reunification, on approved petitions filed by American citizens and lawful permanent residents for Afghan spouses, parents, and children. Those families won in court three weeks ago and have less access to an appointment today than they did before the ruling. Winning a case is not the same as getting relief, and compliance is always the next question.

USCIS CASE PROCESSING IN THE UNITED STATES

The government met its deadline in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS, filing its opening brief in the First Circuit on September 10 along with an appendix and an assented-to motion to supplement the record. This is the appeal of the ruling that struck down three USCIS policies, including the Comprehensive Re-Review Policy directing the agency to re-review already approved benefit requests for people from certain countries who entered on or after January 20, 2021. In August the First Circuit stayed the district court’s ruling only as to that re-review policy, finding that the government “has not met its burden to demonstrate entitlement to a stay” on the other two.

Why it matters This is the case that decides whether an approval from USCIS means anything durable. If the government prevails, a green card, EAD, asylum or another benefit granted years ago can be reopened because of where you were born and when you arrived. Every Afghan who came through Operation Allies Welcome and Enduring Welcome is inside that category.

STANDING SHOULDER TO SHOULDER WHEN IT MATTERS

Villanova University marked the 25th anniversary with a full day: a moment of silence and the reading of the names of Villanovans killed on September 11, 2001, a flag planting by the Ryan Center and the Student Veteran Club, a memorial Mass, and an afternoon panel called The Global Legacy and Enduring Impact of 9/11, convened by the Center for the Common Good with the Center for Peace and Justice Education. I joined four other panelists with perspectives from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States, including Asem Shukoori, Dr. Muhammad Farooq of Seton Hall University, and Nigina Abdul Moqim of HIAS. Joe Evans organized it and Farhad Wedee of Villanova hosted. Most of the students in the room were born after the attacks.

My remarks were short and they were not a policy brief. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was seventeen years old and already in the Navy. In the weeks after, I was temporarily assigned as a Navy police officer. They gave me a squad car, a badge, and a gun. I did not have a driver’s license. I spent the rest of my naval career, and most of the career that followed it, in the field that day created. The argument I made to those students is the one I wrote down the same morning: that an honest accounting of the last 25 years is not disloyalty, that fear is a legitimate emotion and a terrible operating system for a republic, and that safety, security, prosperity, and honor were never the trade-off we were told they were. Those reflections are mine, not an AfghanEvac position, and if you want them they are here: Never Forget Means All of It.

THEY HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11 AND THEY HAVE PAID THE MOST

No Afghan was among the nineteen hijackers. Not one. Afghanistan was where the plotting happened and where the Taliban sheltered the men who did it, and the Afghans who then spent twenty years working alongside Americans were fighting the same enemy we were, in their own country, at closer range and at higher cost. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers and police were killed. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians were killed. And the people who stood with us are the ones now sitting in a camp in Qatar, in a detention center in Texas, in a rented room in Islamabad waiting on a referral, or in front of an immigration judge in Van Nuys.

Why it matters At AfghanEvac we mark two dates in 2001: September 11, and October 7, the day the United States went to war in Afghanistan. The second date is the one that made promises. A country that keeps the first anniversary and forgets the second is not remembering, it is curating. Never forget means all of it.

A LETTER WE WERE ASKED TO CARRY

A letter arrived in our inbox this weekend from an Afghan mother. She sent it to our contact address and to our press address, and she asked us to help it reach people who need to hear it. She was careful to say what it was not. “I am not writing about my personal immigration case, and I am not asking for special treatment.” She signed it “An Afghan Mother,” and we are not naming her. It is addressed to the President of the United States.

Here is some of what she wrote.

“I believe people should be judged by their actions and character, not simply by their nationality. Every Afghan child has dreams, hopes, talents, and the desire to build a better future. My daughter dreams of becoming a doctor so she can receive a good education and help other people.”

“I would ask you to put yourself in our shoes. If you were born in another country and wanted to go somewhere to build a safer and better future, but someone stopped you simply because of where you came from, how would you feel?”

“So please look at us as human beings, not simply as migrants or as people of another nationality.”

“We are not all criminals. We are not all dangerous. We are human beings who want safety, education, peace, and a chance to contribute to the world. Please listen to the voices of Afghan mothers and the dreams of Afghan children.”

Why it matters She is asking for something smaller than what this country already promised her neighbors, and she is asking for it because the promise is the part nobody will say out loud anymore. The refugee admissions number that gets signed before October 1 is the government’s answer to her letter. Right now the answer is zero. You can help her and those like her by asking government to #CountThemIn

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

Detention and due process

• Some Afghans are being detained by the same country that gave them new lives -- ABC News

• This Afghan man helped Americans fight the Taliban. He’s suing the U.S. to protect his family -- KCUR

• Immigration courts in unusual locations raise due process concerns -- NPR

Twenty-five years on

• 25 Years in Afghanistan in 25 Photos -- The New York Times.

• That cloudless day -- GlobeTrot

• Never Forget Means All of It -- Shawn VanDiver

Removals and enforcement

• Deportation flight delays, ICE’s last-minute adds leave Haitian officials scrambling -- Miami Herald

• She’s Helping Dems Take Back Congress. Trump Is Forcing Her to Self-Deport. -- The Bulwark

One correction worth making

Last Tuesday we told you there was no grace period on the new Affidavit of Support forms, and we said to ignore the claim that one existed. USCIS has since reversed course. The prior edition of Forms I-864, I-864A, and I-864EZ is accepted through September 30. We were reporting the agency’s position accurately when we published it, and the agency changed it. The rest of the form deadlines stand, and I-485 still changes on September 18 with no grace period. Separately, El Salvador’s TPS did not formally end on September 9. DHS posted an alert saying protections and work permits remain valid pending an announcement.

Two separate promises came due this week, and this country broke both of them.

The visas Afghan allies earned by their service are moving backward under a federal court order, three thousand ordered and seven hundred fifty-two delivered, with summer vacation offered as the reason.

The refugee program that would protect the families still stranded is about to get a number with no room for them.

Different programs, different laws, same answer. Neither is fate. Both are choices being made by people with names, offices, and authority. And those people can be reached.

Write the letter. Send the link. Show up to a courtroom.

We are not going anywhere.

HERE’S WHAT’S IMPORTANT THIS WEEK

• We are demanding a correction from the podium, and publishing the letter in full

• Immigration judges were trained to deny more requests for additional time, known as continuances, and to grant shorter delays when they do

• The State Department paused immigrant visa appointments globally after a court told it to restart processing, and two court-ordered filings land today, including the Department’s August processing numbers

• 1,039 people are still at Camp As Sayliyah, with 22 days until the camp is supposed to close

• USCIS is switching to new editions of several common forms with no grace period. File an outdated version of the form, and USCIS will reject your application

• A pastor in San Antonio sat in a courtroom this week so an interpreter would not have to sit there alone

Start with the ways you can take action, then read the rest.

ACTION THIS WEEK

• Read our letter to the State Department and share the clip. We are demanding a correction from the podium on four counts. Letter at afghanevac.org/correct-the-record, video here. Send both to your representative and both senators with one line: your constituents have answered this question.

• Enroll as a Battle Buddy at afghanevac.org/battle-buddies. Immigration hearings resumed today under the new continuance standards, and accompaniment matters more this month than it did last month. We have over a thousand people signed up. We need more.

• Write your members of Congress about the refugee admissions determination before October 1. The President is required by statute to set the fiscal year 2027 refugee ceiling before the fiscal year begins. Nothing has been announced with 24 days left. Ask that Afghans be included and that the number reflect the promise, not last year’s 17,500 floor. Visit afghanevac.org/count-them-in and let’s #CountThemIn

• Contact Congress about Camp As Sayliyah before September 30. Demand resumed processing and a published destination plan before the camp closes. Facts and scripts at afghanevac.org/cas.

“NOT THE RIGHT QUESTION”

Watch this one. A State Department official is asked, on camera, whether the United States has an obligation to people who were willing to fight and die for it. He answers, “But that is not the question before us currently.” Pressed, he says, “But it’s not the right question.” Then he explains what he takes the right question to be. The people at Camp As Sayliyah, he says, are “primarily a group of people that were either unvetted, brought there by other contractors, not based off of promises made from the United States.”

Every element of that is wrong, and the government’s own records prove it. The State Department built Camp As Sayliyah, standing up CARE Doha there in October 2022 to support Enduring Welcome, and it has run the camp since October 2023. The site operates on a U.S. Army contract now worth roughly $411 million. Those are not our figures. They are the Defense Department Inspector General’s. And the Lead Inspector General told Congress these Afghans were “relocated by the U.S. Government to U.S.-managed platforms.” The contractors that official pointed at were executing an American government contract, because the American government wrote it, awarded it, and paid for it.

On vetting, the record is not complicated.

• The camp exists to vet people. The Lead Inspector General called Camp As Sayliyah the place “where thousands of Afghans were processed en route to the United States.”

• Most of them did not come out in the August 2021 airlift. They came later, through Enduring Welcome, which did not launch until October 2022. Anyone invoking the chaos of the withdrawal to describe this population is describing different people, in a different year, under a different process.

• They were screened before they boarded. Vetting, biometrics, and medical screening were completed in Kabul, on the ground, before anyone got on a plane. The full process is laid out at afghanevac.org/vetting.

• The screening worked. An Inspector General audit found a watchlist match rate of six hundredths of one percent among evacuees.

And residents of that camp have received denials. A denial is an adjudication. It is the finished product of a review this Department ran, in a file this Department opened. You cannot deny an application you never examined. Every denial issued there is proof the screening happened, which means the Department is either wrong about the vetting or it has been issuing determinations on people it never screened. There is no third option.

So today we are sending the Department a letter demanding a correction from the podium, and publishing it in full. We are asking for four things. Correct the Camp As Sayliyah characterization. Answer the obligation question the official refused. Stop blaming the November 2025 shutdown of Afghan processing on a prior administration’s vetting, when this administration approved that shooter’s asylum in April 2025. And disclose whether the Department has changed who counts as the family of an American service member. Parents and siblings were approved through a Defense Department program because their relationship to an American in uniform put them in danger. That danger did not change when the internal guidance did.

None of this is abstract. The same broadcast tells the story of Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, who served alongside U.S. Army Special Forces for nine years. ICE took him from outside his Dallas apartment in March as he was putting his children in the car for school. He was dead in American custody in under 24 hours, and six months on, no government agency has called his family.

Instead of asking the government what it thinks, we asked the country.

See the poll

• 84% say the United States should keep its commitments to Afghan allies and their families

• 73% say Afghan mission partners should be allowed to remain here while their cases are processed

• 72% want a permanent wartime allies program rather than improvisation after the fact

• 63% oppose deporting them or shipping them to third countries

• 83% agree that no American in uniform should have to leave family behind, and among military households, 73% hold that view strongly

Why it matters A spokesperson’s job is to state the government’s position accurately. It is our job to remind them when they are doing the opposite.

See the letter

THEY TOLD THE JUDGES TO RUN THE CLOCK

On September 2, the Executive Office for Immigration Review convened hundreds of immigration judges for a mandatory virtual training titled “Motions to Continue: Efficiently Advancing Cases to Completion.” The Guardian reported it on September 4. The American Immigration Lawyers Association obtained the slides, which the Department of Justice has not posted publicly. The instruction was straightforward. Grant fewer continuances, and grant them for less time.

Read what the slides actually say. Judges were told that “assertion alone that more preparation time is needed does not establish good cause,” and to be skeptical when someone asks for more time because another government application is still pending. They were also told that a lawyer who takes on more cases than she can responsibly handle may be referred to EOIR disciplinary counsel for possible sanction. One person familiar with the training described its message to The Guardian this way. “There is no room to be kind; there is only urgency to make them leave, one way or the other.”

Here is why that lands on Afghan allies. Thousands are in removal proceedings while the government sits on the very applications that would resolve their cases. USCIS froze adjudications. State stopped issuing visas. Chief of Mission decisions are running at a fraction of what a federal judge ordered. The continuance is the only tool a person has to say to an immigration judge, my case is pending, please do not deport me while the government finishes the work it promised to do. The administration froze the paperwork with one hand and is closing the escape hatch with the other. That is not a backlog. It is a vise, built on purpose.

The government’s own training says what this costs. Between 2019 and 2024, 25% of immigrants with a lawyer were ordered removed. More than 60% of those without one were. Judges have already begun applying the new standards, and the hearing calendar restarted today. We are asking Congress to demand the slides be made public, practitioners to preserve the record on every denial, and every one of you who can sit in a courtroom to sign up for Battle Buddies this week.

STATE ANSWERED A COURT ORDER BY PAUSING VISAS WORLDWIDE

Since August 21, the State Department and a federal court have been in a fast-moving back-and-forth over whether the Department is complying with an order to restart immigrant visa processing.

That day, Judge Jeannette Vargas of the Southern District of New York set aside the Department’s blanket suspension of immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries as contrary to law, and judgment was entered August 24. The Department’s response was a new worldwide pause on immigrant visa appointments, which it attributed to consular officer training. Plaintiffs moved to enforce on August 26, and on August 31 Judge Vargas granted that motion in part and ordered the government to file a status report by today.

As of the end of last week, appointments were still paused. State told the Associated Press the pause was expected to be temporary and not to extend beyond early to mid-September. We have heard that kind of assurance before, from the same building, about the March 31 camp deadline that came and went.

Why it matters Afghans remain barred by the separate 39-country proclamation, which this ruling did not touch, so the effect here falls on family reunification. These are approved I-130 petitions filed by American citizens and lawful permanent residents for Afghan spouses, parents, and children. Those families won a court ruling and got a global pause instead.

Track litigation

TWENTY-TWO DAYS

September 30, 2026 is a Wednesday, and may just be one of the most important Wednesdays of the year. Camp As Sayliyah is scheduled to close. The fiscal year ends. And the President is required to have issued the fiscal year 2027 Presidential Determination on refugee admissions before October 1.

Inside the camp, per our own count as of August 31, there are 1,039 Afghan allies and family members. Of those, 752 are women and children. Nineteen are pregnant. Roughly 150 are the immediate family of American service members and recently separated veterans. Every one of them was vetted before the United States government put them on a plane to Qatar. There is still no published destination plan. Transparency and safety are what is owed to the men, women, and children who live there with no clear answers about the future many of them were promised.

Last year’s refugee admissions ceiling was 7,500, the lowest in the history of the program. In May 2026 the administration raised it to 17,500, with every additional slot allocated to white South Africans. The administration is poised to allocate all or nearly all to the same population this year. Congressional consultations start September 23rd and we all need to engage to make sure Afghans are added into the FY2027 determination. To do that, we all need to raise our voices.

Why it matters None of these three deadlines requires new legislation, new money, or a new policy. Each requires a person to sign something. If September 30 arrives with the camp closing, no destination plan, and no determination that includes Afghans, that will not be a system failure. It will be a set of decisions made by a small number of named people, and we will name them.

THE NUMBERS THAT SHOULD LAND TODAY

Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the State Department to report, one week after each month ends, how many Chief of Mission cases it processed. June’s report arrived July 7, July’s on August 7. August’s is due now, and as of last night it had not hit the docket.

Here is the context for that number. The court set escalating monthly benchmarks in May, rising from 1,000 cases in June to 4,000 in October. State processed 916 in June, then 811 in July, fewer than the month before, in the month a federal judge ordered the figure to go up. More than 13,000 class member cases are already past the 120-day deadline the government’s own plan sets. We laid out how this pipeline was built and how it was shut off in The Unfinished Mission.

We are not going to render a verdict on a number we have not seen. Next Monday we will publish the August figure and the full trend line, whatever it says. Two other filings land alongside it. Judge Vargas’s status report in the visa case is due today, and the government’s opening brief in Dorcas International Institute v. USCIS, its appeal of the ruling that struck down USCIS benefit freezes, is due in the First Circuit on Thursday.

Why it matters Every one of these deadlines exists because a court had to compel this government to do something it would not do on its own. That is the actual state of play, and it is worth saying plainly. Watch what gets filed this week. Watch just as closely what does not.

USCIS CHANGED THE FORMS. THERE’S NO GRACE PERIOD.

The Affidavit of Support forms, I-864, I-864A, and I-864EZ, changed on August 31. Form I-765 and Form I-539 change on September 15. Form I-485 changes on September 18. None of them carry a grace period. File on the wrong edition and it comes back rejected, which for anyone with a filing deadline can be the whole case. One more thing worth knowing. The new I-864 lets USCIS pull a sponsor’s credit report directly from the bureaus, so sponsors with a credit freeze may need to lift it.

Why it matters A rejected filing is not a delay, it is a lost date. When an agency changes four forms in three weeks with no grace period and no outreach, the burden falls hardest on people filing without a lawyer, which describes most of the community we serve.

A FOURTH REPUBLICAN ON THE TPS ACT

Rep. Morgan Luttrell of Texas, a former Navy SEAL, signed on to the Afghanistan TPS Act of 2026. H.R. 9899, led by Rep. Jason Crow, now carries nine cosponsors. Four are Republicans, Reps. Salazar, Bacon, Wilson, and now Luttrell, and Rep. Kevin Kiley of California is listed as an independent. In the Senate, S. 5308, led by Sen. Chris Coons, has three cosponsors, including Sens. Murkowski and Cassidy. Neither bill has moved out of Judiciary and won’t unless we all ensure Congress views this as a priority.

Since we opened the campaign, 1,786 of you have contacted Congress about this bill, from 49 states and the District of Columbia. North Dakota is the only state that has not sent one yet. California leads with 231, then Virginia with 184 and New York with 132. Texas, North Carolina, and Florida all sit in the top ten, which tells you something about who is asking.

Why it matters 73% percent of Americans support letting Afghan mission partners remain here while their cases are processed. The bill is bipartisan. It has 1,786 constituent messages behind it from nearly every state in the country. It has not moved out of Judiciary since July. So what is Congress waiting for? Ask them at afghanevac.org/tps.

Contact Congress

SPRINGFIELD

Pierre Damas Bel was 20, a Wright State freshman studying neuroscience, a Marine Corps JROTC cadet and varsity soccer player who graduated from Springfield City Schools in May. His Temporary Protected Status expired in late July, and ICE fitted him with an ankle monitor, as it did to hundreds of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. He wrote online that he was “walking through the streets with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation.” He died on August 31. Haitian leaders there are now demanding an end to the monitors.

Why it matters Afghan allies are not the only people whose families, futures, and dignity have been torn apart by policy decisions. The same enforcement machinery that put a GPS monitor on Pierre Damas Bel’s leg is being used against communities across the country, including Afghans. Different histories, same human cost. El Salvador’s TPS ends tomorrow for more than 200,000 people who have held it for 25 years. Sudan and Ukraine follow on October 19.

INTERNATIONAL: THE P-1 AND P-2 FAMILIES IN PAKISTAN

All week, Afghan families in the P-1 and P-2 refugee referral categories wrote to us from Pakistan with the same disciplined ask, repeated almost word for word by dozens of accounts. Restart the cases. They are right to be impatient. The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has been suspended since January 20, 2025, which means people the United States government itself referred, journalists, human rights workers, and others targeted for their association with America, have now been waiting four years.

Their situation on the ground is getting harder on a separate track. UNHCR reports that more than 307,000 Afghans returned from Pakistan between January and July of this year, and roughly 1.6 million remain. Families in the U.S. pipeline are losing lawful status in Pakistan, and some have been detained while holding valid Pakistani documents. That is a Pakistani enforcement problem rather than a U.S. refugee-processing problem, and it is what makes the American delay dangerous.

Why it matters The ask is straightforward. Restart refugee admissions for people who have already been waiting in the U.S. pipeline, including P-1 and P-2 families. When you call Congress this week, say P-1 and P-2 out loud.

BATTLE BUDDIES: SAN ANTONIO

Chad is an Army veteran who deployed to Iraq twice as a human intelligence interrogator and now pastors Arsenal Church in San Antonio. This week he accompanied an Afghan interpreter for U.S. and coalition forces to immigration court. The man had followed every step the government asked of him and was in removal proceedings anyway, because he is still waiting on durable status the government stopped granting.

“Having a buddy that can navigate that was helpful,” Chad said, “since I don’t have the same stakes to lose, and can be more upfront in asking court staff questions.” On why he goes, he was blunter. “We have people coming over with promises of safety and security, promises that got pulled from them. This should piss all of us off. They put their lives on the line for us. I need to see that they are being fought for.”

The no-detention record where a Battle Buddy is present still stands.

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NEEDHAM IS LIVE

We launched NEEDHAM, the News and Evidence Engine Documenting Historical AfghanEvac Media. It is a free research tool that searches the full text of every AfghanEvac publication, which means reporters, congressional staff, and advocates can now find what we said, when we said it, and what happened next.

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IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

The courts and the calendar

• US immigration judges told to slash time given to people awaiting visas or green cards before being deported -- The Guardian

• Immigration judges face tighter limits on case delays -- Elite

Enforcement at scale

• ICE arrested 50,000 people in August, continuing record pace -- NBC News

• ICE’s August Arrests Break Record for Number of Illegal Aliens Arrested -- U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Springfield

• Remembering Pierre Damas Bel, an Ohio college student with great promise -- NPR

• Pierre Damas Bel died in an apparent suicide. His family says he felt ‘humiliated’ by his ICE ankle monitor -- CNN

• Trump Took His Status. ICE Took His Dignity. He Took His Life. -- The Bulwark

• Springfield advocates demand end to ankle monitors after Haitian student’s suicide -- Journal-News

Five years on

• Five years after Kabul’s fall, two Prince William Afghans recall their frantic escape, and the ensuing limbo -- InsideNoVa

• Five Years After the Fall of Kabul -- Connection Newspapers

• Los afganos que Estados Unidos ha dejado atrás -- RTVE

Third-country removals, still developing

• ICE deports Afghans and others to Africa, expanding “third country” deportations -- CBS News

• Relative of Afghans who aided US military deported to Africa -- Al Jazeera

Pakistan

• Over 300,000 Afghans return from Pakistan this year amid repatriation drive, UNHCR -- Arab News Pakistan

One correction worth making An aggregator recirculated a June 2025 Military Times story this weekend under the headline “Trump issues travel ban, bars Afghans from entry into US,” and it moved through inboxes as if it were new. It is fifteen months old. No new travel ban proclamation was signed this month. The operative instrument is still Proclamation 10998, effective January 1, 2026. The real news is quieter and worse, and it is in the sections above.

They can call these people unvetted. They cannot make it true.

The screening happened, the American government paid for it, and its own inspectors wrote it down.

A definition changed quietly only works if nobody checks it, and checking is the whole job now.

Read the letter.

Watch the four minutes.

Send both to the people who represent you.

And if you can get to a courtroom this month, get to a courtroom. Show up. Bring a buddy.

We are not going anywhere.

On Friday, a deportation plane left Dallas for the Central African Republic. Among those aboard was a young Afghan whom a U.S. immigration judge had protected from return to Afghanistan. Thirty days from today, Camp As Sayliyah is scheduled to close with more than a thousand Afghans still inside and no announced destination plan.

This week, three things matter most. Start there, then read on.

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THREE THINGS TO DO THIS WEEK

1. Share the polling, tag us, and use the hashtag. Post afghanevac.org/polling wherever you are online, tag @AfghanEvac, and use #StillWithUS. The most useful thing you can do this week is make it impossible for any office in Washington to keep calling this politically risky. Copy and paste if it helps:

Eighty-four percent of Americans say we should keep our promise to the Afghans who served alongside our troops. Support jumps twenty points once people simply learn who they are. New bipartisan polling from @AfghanEvac and HIAS. #StillWithUS afghanevac.org/polling

2. Contact Congress before September 30, and bring the numbers with you. Demand resumed processing and a safe, public destination plan for Camp As Sayliyah, and a fiscal year 2027 refugee admissions determination that includes Afghans. Send your representative and both senators the polling, then ask what they intend to do with a bipartisan mandate this clear. Facts and a script at afghanevac.org/cas. Take action at action.afghanevac.org.

3. Push the Afghanistan TPS Act. Ask your representative to cosponsor H.R. 9899 and your senators to cosponsor S. 5308. The House bill still needs more cosponsors. Tools at afghanevac.org/tps.

THEY SENT HIM TO A COUNTRY AT WAR

On Friday, a deportation plane left the Dallas area for the Central African Republic, with stops in Senegal and Sierra Leone. Roughly seventy people were aboard. CBS News identified at least twelve Afghans on the flight; The New York Times reported roughly twenty. There were Iranians, Nepalis, and Nicaraguans as well. None were sent to their own countries.

One of them is a twenty-four-year-old identified publicly only as Khalil, at his attorney’s request, because his full name could get him killed. An immigration judge granted him withholding of removal last year after finding that he faced a credible risk of persecution in Afghanistan. His father, his brother, and his sister worked alongside American forces. Another brother, a pilot trained by the United States, was killed fighting the Taliban in 2020. After Kabul fell, the Taliban raided the family’s house looking for them.

Colonel Zachary Schmidt, an active-duty Marine who supervised Khalil’s brother during the war, testified at his hearing. “It is my belief that if Khalil gets sent back to Afghanistan, that he will be killed,” he told CBS News. His attorney, Alma David, put the pattern plainly: “The goal is to obliterate the global refugee protection system, and his case should serve as a warning.”

The Central African Republic is in the middle of a civil war and has been for decades, and it sits on the State Department's own list of countries Americans are told not to visit. CBS News reports that over the course of ten days, three ICE flights carried more than a hundred people to eight African countries. No publicly disclosed framework guarantees the people sent to the Central African Republic legal status, work authorization, or continuing legal support.

Why it matters When an administration cannot return a person to Afghanistan because a judge found he would face persecution, and instead sends him to a third country in active conflict, the order is honored on paper and emptied in practice. That is not ordinary enforcement. It is a circumvention of the protection a court granted, and it runs against the principle of non-refoulement, the rule that a state does not deliver people into danger, whether directly or by routing them through somewhere else. It is becoming part of the operating model.

Read it and send it on. The New York Times broke the story on Friday with AfghanEvac as a named source, and that is a gift link, so it opens for everyone.

THIRTY DAYS TO SEPTEMBER 30

Friday’s flight is the reason the next thirty days matter so much. Three deadlines land on the same Wednesday. Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar is scheduled to close, with more than a thousand Afghans still inside and no announced destination for them. The fiscal year 2027 Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions is statutorily due. And the fiscal year ends, taking the appropriations and visa allocation posture with it.

The camp population is not abstract. Roughly 150 of the people inside are the immediate family of American service members and veterans. More than four hundred are children who have not been in a classroom in years. The people inside have undergone extensive vetting. Many have completed interviews, and the consular cohort includes people with Chief of Mission approval. What is missing is a policy decision to resume and finish processing, and it is one this administration has repeatedly refused to make.

We have made this ask before. Thirty-five members of Congress led by Representative Scott Peters and Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote to Secretaries Rubio, Mullin, and Hegseth on August 7. Eighty-three House members led by Representatives Jason Crow and Don Bacon wrote in June. Twenty-nine senators wrote in the spring opposing the third-country transfer scheme. More than a thousand people signed our open letter, hand-delivered to fifty offices. There is no version of this where the government can claim it did not know.

What we want is narrow and achievable. Restart processing for camp residents whose cases are ready. Publish a destination plan before the closure date rather than after it. Do not let a closure date become a transfer deadline. And do not move a single family to a third country the State Department itself tells Americans not to visit. If the camp closes on September 30 with no plan, that will not be a logistical failure. It will be a decision, made by named people, and we will name them.

Read our CAS Explainer

Our honest read is that September 30 will slip. The Department has no published destination plan, and it has been here before. Its self-imposed March 31 closure deadline passed without an announcement, an accounting, or a single family moved. A deadline with no plan behind it is not a deadline, it is a date on a slide. We expect an extension, and we would rather say so plainly than let a thousand people spend the month believing they are about to be put on a plane to nowhere.

That is not reassurance. An extension is not a solution. It is more months in a camp for four hundred children who have not been in a classroom in years, and it hands the Department more time it has not used well so far.

We are also hearing that Rwanda has moved to the top of the Department’s third-country list. We have not confirmed it, nobody has announced it, and we are working to pin it down. We are saying it out loud anyway, because the Democratic Republic of the Congo plan taught us that these arrangements move fastest when nobody outside the building knows they exist.

WHAT THE COUNTRY ACTUALLY WANTS

On Thursday we released, in partnership with HIAS, a national bipartisan poll conducted by Lake Research Partners, a Democratic firm, and The Tarrance Group, a Republican firm, among 1,000 likely 2026 voters fielded July 23 to 30. We commissioned it because five years of this fight have run on an assumption nobody had bothered to test, which is that the American public moved on. That assumption is wrong.

• 84 percent say the United States should keep its commitment to the Afghans who worked alongside American troops, and to their families.

• 52 to 72 percent. Support for admitting Afghan allies jumps twenty points once voters simply learn who these people are, and more than doubles among Republicans, landing at 54 percent.

• 80 percent say we can protect national security and honor our commitments at the same time.

• 78 percent support reuniting the families of American citizens and service members.

• 76 percent support restoring protections for people who were already approved.

• 72 percent support a permanent program for wartime allies rather than another improvised fix after the next withdrawal.

• 70 percent want protection extended to everyone who risked their lives alongside Americans, not only the narrower group the current statute happens to cover.

• 63 percent oppose deporting or transferring Afghans to third countries.

• 83 percent of voters agree that no American in uniform should have to leave family behind; 73 percent of military households strongly agree.

Two findings deserve far more attention than they have gotten. Seventy-two percent support a permanent wartime allies program rather than another improvised response after the next withdrawal, and 70 percent want protection extended beyond the narrow group covered by the current Special Immigrant Visa statute. The SIV was built around a documented employment relationship with the United States. It was never built for the local staff two layers down a subcontract, or the drivers and fixers, or the women who kept clinics and schools open because Americans asked them to. The public is ahead of the law.

None of that came from loose question wording. We built the instrument to test the recommendations in The Unfinished Mission, because we wanted to know whether the fixes we are proposing could hold politically before asking any member of Congress to carry them. They can. We are working with congressional offices right now on long-term, conflict-agnostic mission partner legislation, a standing framework that applies to whoever stands with Americans in the next place we go.

Why it matters Every ask in this newsletter has been treated in Washington as politically costly. It is not. It is politically popular, in both parties, and it is now documented by a bipartisan pollster pairing. If a congressional office tells you there is no appetite for this, they are describing the building, not the country.

Learn more

THE COMPLIANCE NUMBERS ARE GOING THE WRONG WAY

The court in Afghan and Iraqi Allies v. Rubio ordered the State Department to complete 1,000 Chief of Mission adjudications in June, 2,000 in July, and 3,000 in August. State reported 916 in June and only 811 in July. In Thursday’s joint status report, plaintiffs asked for a concrete staffing plan, clearer reporting broken out by case type, an explanation of the late-June systems outage, and immediate steps to catch up.

Why it matters The trend line is not a plateau. It is a decline. The August filing lands in early September, and the number will tell us plainly whether this administration intends to accelerate processing or keep crippling it.

69 HOUSE MEMBERS CHALLENGE THE ASYLUM INTERVIEW RULE

Representatives Morgan McGarvey and Pramila Jayapal led sixty-nine House members in a letter urging U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to rescind the interim final rule, effective July 28, that lets asylum officers refer affirmative asylum cases straight to immigration court without an interview. The government’s own estimate is that up to 31 percent of roughly 1.4 million pending affirmative asylum cases could be affected. Litigation is already moving in Immigration Equality v. Mullin, filed August 19.

Why it matters The affirmative asylum interview is the first dedicated opportunity for an applicant to present the claim directly to a decision-maker. Eliminating it may move cases off USCIS’s docket, but it does not resolve them. It shifts them to immigration court, where applicants are far more likely to be unrepresented.

IN THE COURTS

The First Circuit appeal in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS is moving, with appellee appearances entered August 25 and the government’s opening brief due September 10. Two of the four vacated USCIS policies remain vacated after the August 14 panel ruling. In CLINIC v. Rubio, the State Department’s temporary immigrant visa appointment rescheduling was described as running through August 31, so the question this week is whether appointments actually resume on September 1. Our explainer on that ruling and its limits stays at afghanevac.org/clinic.

Why it matters September will test whether agencies follow through on what they told the courts they would do.

INSIDE THE SECRET SCHOOLS

On Friday the New York Times published a report from inside Afghanistan’s underground schools for girls, the classrooms that exist only because the Taliban has barred girls from education past the sixth grade. It is worth your ten minutes, and it is a gift link, so you can send it to anyone. UN Women’s five-year assessment, published this month, describes the exclusion of Afghan women and girls from education, work, movement, and public life as normalized rather than contested, while funding for the programs that serve them collapses.

Why it matters Every argument for winding down the pipeline rests on an unstated assumption that conditions inside Afghanistan are tolerable enough to leave people there. They are not. Join our women and girls list at afghanevac.org/women-and-girls.

INTERNATIONAL

A Pakistani court questioned the legal basis of a visa extension plea brought by eighty-seven Afghan students, with a reported remark from the bench that “we are at war with Afghans.” Separately, UN-Habitat reported that more than six million Afghan migrants have returned to Afghanistan over three years, while shelter assistance is funded at roughly seven million dollars against a stated need of a hundred and sixty million. Turkey, for example, detained thirty-six Afghan migrants and one Iranian attempting to reach Greece.

Why it matters American processing does not happen in a vacuum. Every month it remains frozen or severely constrained, the third countries our allies are waiting in grow more hostile and less able to hold them, and the pressure to return to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan gets harder to resist.

THE LOWELL TOWN HALL

We spent the fifth anniversary of the last flight out of Kabul in a room in Lowell, Massachusetts. More than eighty people came.

Two subjects dominated that room, and neither one was the anniversary. The first was family reunification. People trying to get a spouse, a parent, or a child out, finding every door either closed or silent, and asking what is left. The second was the benefits caught in the USCIS pause, the work permits, green cards, and adjustments that stopped moving and took people’s ability to work, travel, and plan with them.

That is what five years looks like from the inside. Not a retrospective, but specific unanswered questions from people who have waited far too long. Nobody in that room needed to be told what happened in 2021. They needed to know what happens to a pending I-730 in 2026.

Our thanks to Jeff and Caroline from the International Institute of New England, for hosting us and for running the kind of operation that makes an unfamiliar room feel safe to speak in. Thank you as well to Bahara at AAPI and to John Moses of the Mass Afghan Alliance, who helped pack the room. That work is nearly invisible and nearly the whole reason anyone walks through the door. These events belong to the local organizations that build the trust long before we show up.

If your community wants a town hall, request one at afghanevac.org/town-hall.

THE LETTERS FROM PAKISTAN

Over the weekend our inbox filled with near-identical messages from Priority 1 and Priority 2 applicants stranded in Pakistan, many of them addressed to several organizations at once, all asking for action before September 1. They are coordinated, and that is not a criticism. It is what people do when the ordinary channels have stopped answering.

We are reading every one. We cannot promise casework, and we will not pretend the September 1 date carries a decision behind it. What we can promise is that these letters go where letters go, which is to Congress, into the record, and into the next thing we publish.

FIVE YEARS, AND A SPECIAL EDITION

Yesterday’s special edition put the year’s work on the record, with a full accounting of what this coalition produced between January and August, our new polling, and notes written directly to Afghan allies and the diaspora, to volunteers and advocates, and to the American public.

Wednesday’s Abbey Gate anniversary brought proclamations and official statements. We would trade every proclamation for one flight manifest.

Read the special edition

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

The poll

• Most Americans Support Visa Protections for Afghan Allies, Poll Finds -- Politico Pro

• Poll Shows 72% of Americans Support Admitting Afghan Allies -- KabulNow

• Majority Of US Voters Back Afghan Allies’ Resettlement, Shows New Poll -- Afghanistan International

• Most Americans Support Protecting Afghan Allies Who Assisted US Military, Poll Finds -- Khaama Press

Third-country deportations

• U.S. Deports Afghans, Including Relatives of Wartime Allies, to Central African Republic -- The New York Times (gift link)

• ICE deports Afghans and others to Africa, expanding “third country” deportations -- CBS News

• US deports relative of Afghans who aided military to Africa -- Al Jazeera

• Trump administration deports relative of Afghans who helped US military to Central African Republic -- NPR

• US deports 12 Afghans to Central African Republic -- Pajhwok Afghan News

• US deports relative of Afghans who helped US military to Africa -- Ariana News

Women and girls

• Inside Afghanistan’s Secret Schools for Girls -- The New York Times (gift link)

Five years on

• 5 years after withdrawal, a grave picture for Afghans inside and outside the US — The Hill

• Why the United States Can’t Quit Its Wars -- The New York Times (gift link)

International

• ‘We Are at War with Afghans’: Pakistan Court Questions Visa Plea by 87 Students -- Khaama Press

• More Than 6 Million Afghan Migrants Have Returned Home in Three Years, UN-Habitat Says -- Khaama Press

• Turkey Detains 36 Afghan Migrants and One Iranian En Route to Greece -- Khaama Press

Congress

• Reps. McGarvey, Jayapal Demand Trump Administration Reverse Rule to Fast-Track ICE Detention and Deportation Proceedings for Asylum Seekers -- Office of Rep. Morgan McGarvey

Khalil won protection in court. A federal immigration judge heard the evidence, heard an active-duty Marine colonel testify that this young man would be killed, and ruled in his favor. On Friday he was put on a plane anyway. Keep that in mind for the next thirty days, because it is the clearest answer available to anyone who tells you the system is working as designed. It is working exactly as designed. The design is the problem.

September will not be gentle. A camp is scheduled to close, a refugee ceiling gets set, a fiscal year ends, and a court finds out whether an agency meant what it told a judge. Every one of those outcomes will be decided by a small number of people who could pick up a pen this week and probably will not unless someone makes them. That is not a reason to look away. It is the entire reason to call, because the polling we released on Thursday settles the question this fight has been arguing with itself about for five years. The country is not the obstacle. The country is with us.

Support this work at afghanevac.org/donate. Take action at action.afghanevac.org. Find resources at afghanevac.org/resources.

Then the world went quiet.

That is the part people who were not in it still do not understand.

For two weeks there had been nothing but noise. Phones going off at three in the morning. Gate codes, manifests, photographs of passports held up in a crowd, group chats stacked on group chats moving faster than anyone could read them, thousands of Americans and Afghans typing at once because typing was the only thing left to do.

Then the ramp closed, and the noise stopped all at once.

What was left was the kind of silence that only accompanies bad news, and the messages that kept arriving into it, hour after hour, from people who did not yet know that no one was coming for them.

Some of those messages never stopped. Five years later they still arrive on ordinary Tuesdays, from Kabul and Islamabad and Doha, from people waiting on a promise that was made in public and abandoned in the dark.

AfghanEvac started in that noise, in about forty group chats that did not know the others existed. There was no plan. There was a phone, a list, and a refusal to let it end there. Then we continued in the quiet, after building a partnership between government and civil society.

We are still here.

This is a special edition, and it is longer than usual. It is a year of work put on the record, and then four direct messages to the people who have carried this. The regular Monday Morning Update returns tomorrow.

Before anything else, an ask. If this work matters to you, become a monthly sustainer.

Donate Today

Monthly giving is what lets us staff a strategy instead of a crisis. It funds Battle Buddies, the research, the explainers that keep families from making irreversible mistakes, and the plain fact of showing up in courtrooms and hearing rooms where nobody else will. Sustained funding like this is worth more to us than a single larger gift, because it lets us plan past the next emergency.

THE FIRST FOUR YEARS

Most of what we are fighting for right now, we helped build.

After the airlift ended, the work became turning a two-week emergency into a functioning system. That meant standing up coordination between a federal government that had never done this at scale and hundreds of volunteer groups that had never worked with each other. It meant a memorandum of understanding with the State Department, signed with Secretary Blinken. It meant more than a hundred visits to processing sites, dozens of standing interagency meetings, and 145 distinct working relationships inside State alone. It meant building the data infrastructure that let anyone say, for the first time and with precision, how many Afghans were in the pipeline and exactly where they were stuck.

What came out of that was Enduring Welcome, and Enduring Welcome worked. Not perfectly, and never fast enough, but it moved more than 200,000 people to safety through legal, vetted pathways. Thirty-nine of our policy recommendations were adopted across eight federal agencies.

That is the part the current argument keeps leaving out. The system was not theoretical and it was not broken. It was built, it was staffed, it was screening people to a standard higher than almost any other traveler admitted to this country, and it was moving families onto airplanes. Then it was taken apart. Not by circumstance, not by a court, and not by any fact that changed about the people waiting in it. By decisions, made by people with names.

So when we say this is a choice, we are not speculating about whether a functioning system is possible. We watched one get built. We helped build it. And we watched the same country switch it off.

JANUARY THROUGH AUGUST 2026

We stopped a transfer to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In April, we learned about the plan to move Afghans out of Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar to the DRC, placed it in national press, and moved Congress. Twenty-nine senators led by Senator Richard Blumenthal called it what it was. It is because of our relentless advocacy that this plan became untenable, and was cancelled in May. The World Health Organization declared an Ebola public health emergency in the DRC on May 17. The sequence matters. The plan died before the outbreak was declared, because people made it die.

We built the evidence base. This year we published the Five Years On series, and it is the most substantial body of research this coalition has ever produced.

• Protection Promised (July 15), built on more than 316 primary-source government documents, written so it can be filed in a courtroom.

• A Practitioner’s Companion (July 20), by our senior adviser Jeremiah Johnson, a former immigration judge, mapping relief and legal standards for attorneys with active Afghan cases.

• The Unfinished Mission (August 5), the first full accounting of seventeen years of the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, with ten recommendations.

• The Allied Ledger (August 12), produced with Local Staff International and Professor Sara de Jong, comparing how eight nations kept or broke their commitments to wartime allies, released alongside Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff.

The Ledger now holds more than 470 government source documents, 45 quarterly SIV reports, dozens of case-law decisions, and a live litigation tracker. We built it because records disappear, and because an argument without documents is just a feeling.

Check out the Ledger

We asked the country what it actually thinks. On Thursday we released Still With Us, a national bipartisan poll conducted in partnership with HIAS by Lake Research Partners and The Tarrance Group, fielded July 23 to 30 among 1,000 likely 2026 voters.

• 84 percent say the United States should keep its commitment to the Afghans who worked alongside American troops, and to their families.

• 52 to 72 percent. Support for admitting Afghan allies jumps twenty points once voters simply learn who these people are, and more than doubles among Republicans, landing at 54 percent.

• 80 percent say we can protect national security and honor our commitments at the same time.

• 78 percent support reuniting the families of American citizens and service members.

• 76 percent support restoring protections for people who were already approved.

• 72 percent support a permanent program for wartime allies rather than another improvised fix after the next withdrawal.

• 70 percent want protection extended to everyone who risked their lives alongside Americans, not only the narrower group the current statute happens to cover.

• 63 percent oppose deporting or transferring Afghans to third countries.

• 83 percent of voters agree that no American in uniform should have to leave family behind; 73 percent of military households strongly agree.

The 72 and the 70 are the numbers we have been waiting years to see. The Special Immigrant Visa was built around a documented employment relationship with the United States. It was never built for the people who took exactly the same risk without one, the local staff two layers down a subcontract, the fixers, the drivers, the women who kept clinics and schools running because Americans asked them to. The public is well ahead of the law here.

Check out the Polling

None of that was an accident of question wording. We tested the recommendations from The Unfinished Mission directly, because we wanted to know whether the fixes we are proposing could actually hold before we asked anyone in Congress to carry them. They can. And we are working with congressional offices right now on long-term, conflict-agnostic mission partner legislation, a standing framework that applies to whoever stands with Americans in the next place we go, so that nobody has to build this machinery from scratch again while people are being hunted.

That is not a divided country. That is a government out of step with its own people.

View our policy page

We kept this story in the news, and we want to help you tell yours. 289 press stories so far this year, and 818 since we started. We do not track that number for vanity. The poll is the reason it matters. Support for Afghan allies jumps twenty points the moment people learn who these families actually are, which means every story is worth roughly that much ground. Five years in, we have gotten good at knowing which reporters cover which stories, what makes an editor say yes, and how to protect people who take a real risk by speaking publicly. That capacity is not ours to hoard. If you are an Afghan ally, a veteran, a resettlement worker, or a partner organization sitting on a story that belongs in the press, send it to us.

Tell your story

We kept Afghans front of mind for Congress

ongress. More than a thousand statements for the record ahead of the January Senate Judiciary hearing. A shadow hearing in February convened by Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove. Some virtual congressional delegations into Camp As Sayliyah, in April and July, where members of Congress heard directly from families living under intercepted missiles. An open letter with more than a thousand signatures, hand-delivered to fifty offices. Letters from 83 House members in June, led by Representatives Jason Crow and Don Bacon, and from 35 members in August, led by Representative Scott Peters and Senator Blumenthal. The bipartisan Afghanistan Temporary Protected Status Act was introduced in July as H.R. 9899 and in August as S. 5308. The ARCH Act followed, to preserve the service records that prove who these people are.

Read our letters

We have not let a single court ruling go unanswered. AfghanEvac is not a party to these cases, and we do not pretend to be. What we do is make sure that when a court moves, Afghans are not the last people to learn what it means for them.

In May, Judge Tanya Chutkan found that the State Department had woefully failed its obligations in Afghan and Iraqi Allies v. Rubio and imposed binding monthly benchmarks. We have tracked every compliance filing since and published what they show, which is 916 cases in June against a benchmark of 1,000, and 811 in July against a benchmark of 2,000. The August filing, benchmark 3,000, is due in early September, and we will publish it either way.

See our litigation tracker

When the Dorcas decision vacated four USCIS policies in June, we had an explainer out the same week so families and their attorneys knew what had actually changed and what had not. When CLINIC v. Rubio struck down the 75-country visa suspension on August 21, we said within hours that the win was real but narrow, because the entry proclamation still stands, and a family that sells a house on a misread headline cannot get that house back. Wins and losses get the same treatment here, which is a fast, plain explanation of what a ruling actually means for an Afghan case.

See our explainers

We built tools the community can actually use, and did not just make this about words. V-PRIC, our Visa Pathways and Relocation Information Center at pathways.afghanevac.org, covering 124 visa classifications across 197 countries with a guided assistant in more than 40 languages. A rebuilt action center that generated more than a thousand individual actions across 40 states in its first week. Explainers on Chief of Mission withdrawals, the asylum interview rule, public charge, the defense bill, and H.R. 9773. A COM help intake. A lawyers list. A women and girls list. A story submission channel at afghanevac.org/your-story for allies abroad who wanted a way to be heard safely.

Get help on our resources page

We showed up, and we listened. Town halls and listening sessions in Sacramento, Fort Worth, Dallas, Rochester, Riverside, Pleasanton, San Diego, and today in Lowell. We did the same work abroad, with a town hall in São Paulo alongside HIAS, convenings in London and Berlin with international partners and Afghan-led organizations, and the Global Alliance built with Local Staff International. A Global Update in February drew nearly 1,900 people from 31 countries, 48 states, and 49 congressional offices. A Global Alliance Update in August drew partners from more than 16 countries, over half of them joining from Afghanistan and Pakistan. We did more listening in those rooms than talking, and most of what is in this newsletter started in one of them.

We refused to let a death go quiet. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal served alongside U.S. Army Special Forces in Paktika. He was a father of six in Richardson, Texas. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him on March 13, and he was dead in under twenty-four hours. We spent this year on the death certificate, the records fight, the press conferences, and the congressional demands, and in July we obtained the autopsy report. The photographs are still outstanding. We are not finished.

AND THEN THERE IS YESTERDAY

On Friday, a deportation plane carrying roughly seventy people left the Dallas area for the Central African Republic, with stops in Senegal and Sierra Leone along the way. We understand about twenty of the people on board were Afghan.

One of them is a twenty-four-year-old the New York Times identified only as Khalil, at his attorney’s request, because using his full name could get him killed. An immigration judge granted him withholding of removal last year after finding his fear of persecution credible. His father, his brother, and his sister worked alongside American forces. Another brother was a pilot trained by the United States, and he was killed fighting the Taliban in 2020. After Kabul fell, the Taliban raided the family’s house looking for them.

Marine Colonel Zachary Schmidt supervised Khalil’s brother during the war and testified at Khalil’s hearing. “I firmly believe that if this young man is forced to return to Afghanistan he will be killed,” he told the Times. “The United States made a commitment to protect the people who helped us, and that includes their families.”

The Central African Republic is in a civil war. It appears on the State Department’s own list of places Americans are told not to go. People sent there on these flights receive no legal status, no work authorization, and no legal support. Friday’s was the third such flight since June.

That plane took off the day before the fifth anniversary of the last flight out of Kabul. AfghanEvac is a named source in that story, and we are still pushing it, because sending a man who won protection in an American courtroom to a country at war is not a loophole and it is not an oversight. It is a policy. Policies can be ended.

Read it here: “Relative of Afghans Who Helped U.S. Military Is Deported to Africa,” by Miriam Jordan and Hamed Aleaziz, The New York Times, August 29.

TO AFGHAN ALLIES AND TO THE DIASPORA

You do not need us to tell you what these five years have cost. You have lived every day of it, in Kabul and Islamabad and Doha and Sacramento, in apartments where the phone is checked before anything else in the morning.

Here is what we owe you, said directly.

We will not lie to you to make a headline feel better. When a court ruling is narrow, we will say it is narrow, even when a clearer story would generate more feelings. When there is no pathway, we will tell you there is no pathway, and we will tell you why, and we will tell you who decided it. The August 21 ruling was real. It did not open the door. We said so within hours because a family that sells a house on a misread headline cannot get that house back.

We will keep putting your words in front of power rather than speaking over them. The letters that arrived this summer from Priority 1 and Priority 2 families in Pakistan, from an SIV applicant four years into waiting, from a young woman inside Afghanistan asking only whether any safe and realistic path exists, are the most important documents we handled this year. They went to Congress. They will keep going.

We know what we cannot do. AfghanEvac does not run casework and does not provide legal representation. Pretending otherwise would waste the hours you do not have. What we can do is change the conditions your case sits inside, keep the records that prove your service, and make sure that when a decision gets made, someone in that room has read the file.

And this. Your case is not a favor being considered. It is a debt being paid late.

TO VOLUNTEERS AND ADVOCATES

Five years is a long time to stay angry at something and keep being useful about it. Most movements do not manage it. You have.

The Battle Buddies program has more than a thousand registered veteran volunteers. The training takes about forty minutes. The record still stands: where a Battle Buddy is present, nobody has been detained or deported. That is not a slogan, it is an outcome, and it belongs to Steve in Texas, Monica and Leisel outside Washington, the volunteer in Philadelphia, the one in Eugene who read about a family’s rebuilt business and asked how to join their circle instead of just sharing the article.

What you are doing is unglamorous on purpose. It is a biometrics appointment with snacks for six kids. It is a hearing where you say nothing and your presence is the entire point. It is a car ride. It is a name read aloud on a Wednesday. There is no version of the last five years where the government kept this promise on its own, and there is no version of the next five years where it does either. It gets kept because people keep showing up in single rooms on ordinary Tuesdays.

If you have been meaning to sign up, do it now. September is going to be heavy. Camp As Sayliyah is scheduled to close on September 30 with more than a thousand people still inside, over half of them women and children, roughly 150 of them the immediate family of American service members and veterans. The fiscal year 2027 refugee admissions determination is due the same day. We are going to need every hand.

Sign up

TO THE AMERICAN PUBLIC

If you have followed this only loosely, here is the whole thing in four sentences.

The United States asked Afghans to work beside American troops for twenty years. Congress wrote that promise into law and built a vetting system so demanding that the people who cleared it are among the most thoroughly screened travelers ever admitted to this country. Since January 1, 2026, exactly one Special Immigrant Visa has been issued. Roughly 178,000 people hold Chief of Mission approval and are waiting.

This is not a backlog. Backlogs are what happen when a system is overwhelmed. This is what happens when a system is switched off, and every part of it that was switched off can be switched back on.

We are not asking you to take our word for it. Take the numbers you produced. Eighty-four percent of likely voters say keep the promise. Eighty percent say security and honor are not in conflict. Once people learn who these Afghans actually are, support jumps twenty points and more than doubles among Republicans. There is no meaningful constituency in this country for abandoning the people who kept Americans alive. There is only a policy, and policies are choices, and choices can be unmade.

The ask is simple. Learn one story well enough to tell it at a dinner table. Call your representative and your senators about the Afghanistan TPS Act. Share the research at reports.afghanevac.org with someone who assumes this was settled in 2021. And when someone tells you the country has moved on, tell them the country was polled, and it has not.

Take action today

TO OUR PARTNERS

This team has never been a building. It is more than 250 organizations that agreed to work in the same direction. It’s an entire ecosystem that, even though we sometimes disagree, we know we are at our best when our eyes are on our shared goal of helping our Afghan friends and colleagues.

To the legal organizations who took the cases and wrote the briefs, to the resettlement agencies who caught families the federal government dropped, to the veteran service organizations who understood immediately why this was a veterans issue, to the Afghan-led and Afghan-American organizations who did the hardest and least credited work of all, and to the researchers and data people who made sure our arguments came with footnotes, thank you.

A few collaborations deserve to be named because they were formal and public. HIAS partnered with us on the Still With Us poll, and they have been a genuine partner in every sense of the word. Local Staff International and Professor Sara de Jong built The Allied Ledger with us and made it an international argument instead of an American one. Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America built Battle Buddies alongside us. And this year we were joined at a hundred local events by community organizations who fed people, translated, drove, and opened their spaces without asking what they would get for it.

ON DOING THIS WORK DIFFERENTLY

Not everyone in this space works the way we do, and some of the disagreements are real ones.

Some are more cautious. Some believe in working quietly inside the building, and some believe the building only responds to noise. Some do direct casework we deliberately (usually) do not do. Some have taken positions we think are wrong, and some have taken positions we thought were wrong and turned out to be right.

Here is what five years taught me. This crisis is far too large for one theory of change, and the people waiting do not care which of us is correct about tactics. A family that gets out because a quiet channel worked is just as out as a family that gets out because someone made it a national story. Every organization in this fight has moved someone the rest of us could not reach.

So we will keep our disagreements where they belong, which is between us and not in front of the families. If your organization is working this problem in good faith, you have our respect, and you have a partner in us whether or not we ever agree on method. There is more than enough work.

WE ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE

The quiet that fell when that ramp closed was never an ending. It was the sound of the cameras leaving. The work did not stop that night. It just stopped being televised, and a lot of people decided to keep doing it anyway with nobody watching.

Five years ago, this was forty group chats and a bad feeling. Today it is a coalition with a research arm, a litigation tracker, a volunteer corps, a bipartisan poll, and a documented record that will outlive every official currently refusing to answer our letters.

None of that was the goal. The goal is that they all come home. We have not reached it. Roughly 250,000 people are still waiting across more than 90 countries, and more than a thousand of them are sitting in a camp in Qatar with a closure date and no announced destination.

But an organization built for a two-week emergency is entering its sixth year with more capacity than it has ever had, and that is not an accident. It is what happens when a lot of people decide, over and over, that they are not going to be the ones who look away.

As this goes out, I am walking into the International Institute of New England's office in Lowell, Massachusetts for an Afghan community town hall. There is no better way I could spend today than in a room with Afghan families and the volunteers who show up for them, trading information, answering the questions nobody else will answer, and building the thing that holds when governments do not. That room is the whole organization in miniature. It has been the answer for five years.

So plan on us. Plan on us in September when the camp is supposed to close. Plan on us in the next Congress, and the one after that, and in whatever administration comes next, asking the same question with the same documents. This ends when the promise is kept, and not one day before.

One more time, because it is the thing that keeps this going. Become a monthly sustainer today.

Donate monthly

Five years in, the work is not slowing down, and steady support is what turns a movement into an institution that outlasts the news cycle. If you cannot give, give an hour instead at afghanevac.org/battle-buddies. Both count. Both are needed.

Thank you for five years. Let’s finish it.

With deepest respect and solidarity,

Shawn VanDiver
President and Founder, #AfghanEvac
U.S. Navy veteran

The regular Monday Morning Update returns tomorrow, August 31.

So we are staying there this week.

August is hard from start to finish. And for those who do the work, this coming Wednesday is a hard date to sit with.

There is real news this morning, including a federal court ruling that far too many people are misreading. We are going to explain it.

Two urgent things. Then Wednesday. Then the people.

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, TWO THINGS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW

One. A federal judge struck down the visa ban on Friday, and it does not open the door. On August 21, Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the Southern District of New York vacated the State Department policy that suspended immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries, including Afghanistan.

That is a real win. We will take it.

It is not the win we need, and it does not reopen the door.

A separate order, the entry proclamation signed on December 16, 2025, still bars Afghans from entering the United States. That proclamation was not before the court. If your visa was refused under section 212(f), the authority behind the entry ban, Friday’s ruling does not fix your case.

Please do not book travel, quit a job, or give up a lease on the strength of a headline. Read afghanevac.org/clinic, watch the explainer video on our Facebook page, and talk to a licensed immigration attorney about your specific case.

Two. If you are in the United States of America and got a letter withdrawing your Chief of Mission approval, you have 120 days to respond, and you should not answer it alone. Afghan allies who came to the United States on Special Immigrant Visas and now hold green cards are receiving emails from the National Visa Center withdrawing the Chief of Mission approval that made their visas possible.

This is not routine paperwork.

It can lead to a Notice of Intent to Revoke and, from there, removal proceedings. The clock begins on the date of the email.

Include a copy of your green card or other proof that you are in the United States, because without it we cannot move your case forward. A member of our staff will help route you to a lawyer.

Many lawyers are working on cases just like yours. It may take some time to match an attorney with your case, and we cannot guarantee availability. We are here as a resource to do the best we can with the resources available, with partners we can stand behind and alongside to help where they can.

Submit your case now

This is what is happening now, but it isn’t everything. Keep reading.

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday, August 26, 2026, marks five years to the day since the attack at Abbey Gate on August 26, 2021.

Say their names.

Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover. Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo. Sgt. Nicole Gee. Cpl. Hunter Lopez. Cpl. Daegan William-Tyeler Page. Cpl. Humberto Sanchez. Lance Cpl. David Lee Espinoza. Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz. Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum. Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola. Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui. Hospitalman Maxton Soviak. Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss.

Eleven Marines. One sailor. One soldier.

Most of them were barely into their twenties. They stood in a crowd, in the heat, pulling strangers through a gate, and they did not stop.

At least 170 Afghans died in that same crowd. Mothers holding paperwork. Fathers who had gotten their families that far and no farther. Children.

Their names are not read aloud at ceremonies in this country. They should be. We remember them in the same breath.

Abbey Gate is not the entire story.

More than 2,400 American service members died in Afghanistan across twenty years, alongside troops from dozens of allied nations and tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers, police officers, and civilians who fought and fell on our side of that war.

Interpreters walked point. Drivers took the road first. Entire families were lost.

Here is what that sacrifice bought.

Thousands of Americans came home because Afghans stood between them and the people trying to kill them. Thousands of Afghans are alive in our communities because Americans held a gate and would not move.

That exchange is the moral foundation of this work.

America made a promise. It was not aspirational. It was a debt.

To the Gold Star families, five years into carrying this publicly, on a schedule you did not choose, in front of people who were not there: We see you.

To the Afghans who were in that crowd and survived: We see you, too.

There is a memorial card at the bottom of this post for anyone who wants something to share on Wednesday.

THE PEOPLE WHO SHOWED UP THIS WEEK

While all of that was happening, ordinary people kept getting in cars and going to appointments with strangers. Battle Buddies continued its record of no detentions for Afghan allies, with accompaniments across the country.

In Texas, an Afghan family who recently lost their father had a biometrics appointment at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. They were met there by their Battle Buddy, Steve, a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan as part of a military training team in Kabul. Six kids in that family. Steve came with snacks. He stayed with them the whole way through.

My kid is about the same age as their oldest daughter, and I was able to connect with her and the younger kids about their common experiences.

In the DC area, Monica and Leisel sat in on the asylum hearing of an Afghan ally who had served in the Afghan National Police, who carries wounds from a Taliban attack, and who has built a good life here since. Their presence was a message to him, and it was also a message to the immigration judge. He was granted asylum. Monica’s note afterward was six words longer than it needed to be, in the best way, calling him “a wonderful addition to United States and [I’m] so thankful for the great outcome.”

On Tuesday we go to Philadelphia to stand with someone who served in the Afghan National Mine Removal Group (NMRG), his military’s premier unit for route clearance, mine reduction, and counter-IED work, and he was in firefights alongside American forces. He and his family got onto one of the flights out of Kabul airport five years ago almost to the day. His two youngest were born here. Wednesday’s anniversary and his green card interview are separated by about eighteen hours.

And then there was a Battle Buddy in Eugene. She read a story in the Eugene Weekly this week about an Afghan family who had rebuilt their business in Oregon, and she did not forward it to anyone or post about it. She found the woman in the story, reached out to contribute to her circle of Afghan women in need, and asked whether the family needed a hand with anything. Her email to us ended with one line.

I’m proud to be a Battle Buddy!

That is the whole model. Somebody reads something, and instead of feeling bad about it, they go find the person and ask what they need. If you want to be that person, the training is about forty minutes.

Become a Battle Buddy today

THE VOICES OF OUR ALLIES

Last week we said we would start sharing the letters that fill our inbox every week, always without names or anything that could identify anyone. Here is this week’s, and there is a pattern in it.

They organized.

Starting last Sunday and continuing all week, Afghan Priority 1 and Priority 2 families stranded in Pakistan wrote to us collectively. Dozens of letters, many of them word for word identical, sent separately by people who coordinated across cities and camps so that the same request would land the same way. Years of waiting. Cases that stopped moving. Expired visas, expired documents, children who cannot go to school, and a deportation regime that has forced more than 213,000 Afghans back across that border since April 2025. They are not asking for sympathy. They are asking to be put in front of Congress in one voice rather than ten thousand separate emails.

We do not want our voices to stop at an office desk.

And they’re asking for us to meet with President Trump. We will ask for the meeting but we don’t have high hopes he will take us up on it.

An Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicant in Peshawar, four years into waiting for an interview that has never been scheduled, wrote to ask a question we cannot answer.

I am requesting an update regarding my interview scheduling.

A young Afghan woman still inside the country wrote about fearing for her safety, about trying to keep studying under a government that has closed the doors to her, and about wanting a future she can use to help other people. She had clearly read everything we have published about how narrow the pathways are right now. She wrote this anyway.

I am not asking for preferential treatment; I am simply trying to understand whether there is any safe and realistic pathway available to me.

Read that line twice. Then consider that the honest answer, this week, in the fifth year, is almost none. That is not a natural condition. It is the result of decisions, made by people with names, and it can be reversed by those same people.

We are not going to dress any of this up.

WHERE THINGS STAND

• The visa ruling, in full. CLINIC v. Rubio, No. 1:26-cv-00858 (S.D.N.Y.), decided August 21. Judge Vargas found the 75-country suspension exceeded the Secretary of State’s authority and violated the Immigration and Nationality Act’s ban on nationality discrimination in issuing immigrant visas. “In many ways, this is not a challenging case,” she wrote. Case-by-case adjudication is restored and denials resting on the pause alone are set aside. The entry proclamation is untouched, carries no broad categorical exemption for Afghan Special Immigrant Visa holders, and is the wall that actually keeps our allies out. We expect an appeal and a stay request. There are three ways the proclamation ends. Congress legislates around it, a court finds it unlawful, or the President rescinds it with a signature this afternoon at no cost to anyone. Our breakdown is at afghanevac.org/clinic.

• We are about to enter the last month before Camp As Sayliyah’s publicly stated closure date. What happens after September 30, no one has said. More than a thousand Afghans are still there, overwhelmingly women and children, roughly 150 of them the immediate family of American service members and veterans, with hundreds more military family members caught elsewhere in the same freeze. As of this week nobody inside has been told what happens on October 1. Army Times and Military Times ran it Thursday. On August 7, thirty-five members of Congress led by Rep. Scott Peters and Sen. Richard Blumenthal wrote to Secretaries Rubio, Mullin, and Hegseth demanding these vetted allies be processed first. Read the letter. Their interviews are done. Their Chief of Mission approvals are in hand. What is missing is a decision.

• A lawsuit over the rule that takes away the asylum interview. On Wednesday, August 19, the National Immigrant Justice Center, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, and Human Rights First sued in federal court in Washington over a USCIS interim final rule that took effect July 28. The rule lets asylum officers refer cases straight to immigration court without ever conducting an affirmative asylum interview, deciding on the written application alone. By the government’s own estimate, up to 31 percent of the 1.4 million pending affirmative asylum cases could be affected. The case is Immigration Equality v. Mullin, brought on behalf of Immigration Equality, Oasis Legal Services, HIAS, and the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. Read the plaintiffs’ statement. Afghans with pending affirmative asylum claims are squarely inside this. The interview is where a person gets to explain, in their own words and to a human being, why they cannot go home. Taking it away turns a protection process into a paperwork screen.

• The August 18 press conference made news. With Rep. Don Bacon, Sharif Aly of the International Refugee Assistance Project, Laila Ayub of Project ANAR, Danilo Zak of Church World Service, and Sean Jamshidi, a medically retired Marine gunnery sergeant whose brother is inside that camp. Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, put it plainly. “Most Americans want a decent, I would call it a Christian policy here, and that’s not what we’re getting.” He and Rep. Julie Johnson signaled a discharge petition on the Afghanistan Temporary Protected Status Act is coming soon. It takes 218 signatures and it is the only tool that works when leadership will not schedule a bill.

• We went to the Truman Project to explain how Enduring Welcome was built and how it was taken apart. Jessica Bradley Rushing, former #AfghanEvac Chief of Staff, who ran communications and engagement at the State Department’s Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts before joining us, moderated a discussion with two members of our Executive Advisory Council, Chris Purdy, Founder and CEO of The Chamberlain Network, and Camille Mackler, former Executive Director of Immigrant ARC and me. It was not a debate about whether the promise was made. Thank you to the Truman Project for having us come talk about what we have lived through. We hope we honored the spirit of everyone who built that program and everyone still waiting on it. We want to do more of these, so if your organization is hosting something, send it our way.

• Three quiet changes that can cost someone their case. As of August 13, the Board of Immigration Appeals held that leaving the country on advance parole can trigger the three- and ten-year unlawful presence bars, which it generally did not before. That is a court decision, not an agency memo, which makes it harder to undo. As of August 21, USCIS made it substantially harder to reschedule an affirmative asylum interview or biometrics appointment, stopped issuing the Failure to Appear warning notice, and will now consider terminating a parolee’s status over a missed appointment, with evidence due fourteen calendar days ahead. And on September 18 the new public charge rule takes effect for green card applications, including benefits you applied for and never received. It does not apply to refugees and asylees adjusting status. Church World Service and USAHello track all of it in their weekly State of Play, translated into nine languages including Dari.

• Five years on, the UN says Afghan women have been erased from public life. UN Women’s assessment is that the exclusion of women and girls from education, work, movement, and public space has been normalized rather than contested, while funding for women-serving programs collapses. Every month the pipeline stays frozen is another month an Afghan woman with a pending case cannot work, cannot study, and cannot leave.

• A case at the Supreme Court worth watching. The Court has asked for a response in the petition brought by the Afghan couple challenging the Virginia adoption order that placed their orphaned relative with another family, on Fourteenth Amendment due process grounds. A request for a response is not a grant of review, but it means somebody is reading. Counsel put the response deadline at September 16. The precedent reaches well past one family.

ACTION THIS WEEK

• Read and share the ruling explainer at afghanevac.org/clinic. The most useful thing you can do this week is stop a family from making an irreversible decision on a misread headline.

• Ask your representative and both senators to cosponsor the Afghanistan Temporary Protected Status Act, H.R. 9899 and S. 5308, at afghanevac.org/tps. If they are already on, ask them to sign the discharge petition when it drops.

• Come to the Afghan Community Town Hall in Lowell, Massachusetts, on August 30 at 11:00 a.m. Sign up today at afghanevac.org/bos-town-hall.

• Mark Wednesday. Post a name, or all thirteen, or the Afghans who died in that crowd. The card at the bottom of this post is yours to use.

• Get ready for September. The FY27 presidential determination on refugee admissions lands next month and Camp As Sayliyah closes September 30. Both need volume on short notice.

• Donate at afghanevac.org/donate. Battle Buddies runs on it. So do the explainers that keep families from making bad decisions in weeks like this one.

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

The visa ruling

• Federal judge strikes down Trump visa ban targeting 75 countries -- NPR

• Federal judge blocks Trump administration’s visa pauses for 75 countries -- The Hill

• Federal judge vacates Trump policy that suspended processing of immigration visas from 75 countries -- PBS NewsHour

• Trump administration’s 75-country visa ban was illegal, judge rules -- KPBS

• US judge strikes down Trump visa suspension for 75 countries, including Afghanistan -- Khaama Press

• US judge strikes down Trump visa suspension for 75 countries, including Afghanistan -- Ariana News

Asylum and due process

• Immigrant rights groups sue to protect due process for asylum seekers -- National Immigrant Justice Center

• Lawsuit challenges new rule that could send more asylum seekers straight to immigration court -- KJZZ

Camp As Sayliyah

• Hundreds of US military family members trapped at camp facing closure, group says -- Army Times

Afghans building lives here

• The Afghan refugee who wants to go to space -- The World from PRX

• A business in Kabul, a business in Eugene -- Eugene Weekly

From the five-year mark, still worth putting in front of people

• The Ongoing Betrayal of Our Afghan Allies -- The New Republic

• Five years after Taliban takeover, Afghan women ‘erased from public life’ -- UN News

• Five years after the Taliban takeover: the normalization of the exclusion of women and girls in Afghanistan -- UN Women

• From shelter to repatriation: Pakistan’s policy shift toward Afghan refugees -- The Friday Times

Our reports

• The Allied Ledger -- #AfghanEvac and Local Staff International

• The Unfinished Mission -- #AfghanEvac

One more week of this. August 26 is Wednesday and August 30 is the last flight out, and then it is September and the calendar lets go of us for another year. If you need to sit this week out, sit it out. Free legal help, pathway information, safety guidance, and mental health and crisis support are all at afghanevac.org/resources, for you whether you are in Kabul, Doha, Islamabad, or down the street from us in San Diego.

But if you have anything left, spend it the way Steve and Monica and Leisel and one Battle Buddy in Eugene spent theirs this week, which is on one person, in one room, on one ordinary Tuesday. Five years ago thirteen Americans held a gate open at the cost of their lives so that people they had never met could get through it. Nobody is asking that of you. We are asking for a phone call, a hearing, a car ride, and a name said out loud on Wednesday.

That is how a promise gets kept. Not all at once, and not by the government that made it, but by us, one at a time, until they are all home.

We put out our five-year statement Saturday morning. It was deliberately not a policy document. We write about the government fifty weeks a year, and these two weeks do not belong to the government. It belongs to Afghans, to the people who did not survive the last five years, and to the network that has carried this work from the first night.

Then you started writing back. Not a few of you. A lot of you. And what came in was not commentary. It was testimony. About what we’ve done together and what we’ve got left to do.

So this week’s update is going to be different. The policy is still here, the court news is real and it is good, and the asks are all at the bottom where you can find them. But the top of this one belongs to you.

Read the statement

THANK YOU, SPECIFICALLY

Thank you is easy to say and almost impossible to say well, so let me try to say it in the specific, unglamorous way it deserves.

Thank you for the casework you did after your shift ended. For the calls you took at two in the morning because that is when Kabul is awake. For the affidavits, the FOIA requests, the flight manifests you chased, the congressional offices you would not stop emailing, and the families you have carried for five years without ever meeting them in person.

Thank you to the lawyers who filed for free, and kept filing after the fourth denial. To the veterans who went looking for their own interpreters and then stayed to look for everyone else’s. To the teachers, the truck drivers, the grandmothers, and the college students who learned an immigration system from scratch because nobody else was going to do it.

And thank you to the Afghan Americans in this coalition, who spent five years doing casework for strangers while their own cases sat frozen, translating for families they had never met while their own mothers were still in Kabul. There is no version of this work that happens without you, and there is no honest telling of the last five years that puts you anywhere but at the center of it.

A little girl named Ifat spent years in a transit camp in Qatar, her skin blistering from a disease that makes it tear at the lightest touch. Her parents kept her alive in that heat. A handful of stubborn women with no authority and no budget made sure the rest of us learned her name. She is safe today because of them..

That is what this network is. That is what it has been for five years.

YOUR STORIES, FROM THE FRONTLINES

One reply came in from a woman in Portland. In August 2021 an Afghan friend called her, a young man she had tutored in English years earlier in Austria, and asked whether she could find anyone who had stayed at his in-laws’ guesthouses in Kabul, anyone who might sign an affidavit. She thought it would be like tracking down people for a high school reunion. She found exactly one person willing to talk to her. Every other door closed.

The family went into hiding. She and her husband and a friend in California filed anyway, a twenty-two-inch stack of paper for humanitarian parole, because the family’s SIV paperwork had vanished and nobody believed it had ever existed. They were told, in so many words, that everybody claims that.

It took three years. Someone at the State Department eventually found the file. The family had been telling the truth the entire time. They had held an embassy appointment for the day Kabul fell.

The parents came, with their two youngest. The children over twenty-one could not. That family made the decision to split themselves across three countries and an ocean because they believed in what their youngest two might become here. They are her neighbors now.

She did not write to us to complain. She wrote to say thank you, and then a whole life came out of her while she was typing. Her own closing line was this. “I had no idea this would come out when all I wanted to do was say thank you.”

That is what this anniversary did to people. That is what five years of carrying something does.

Others were shorter and landed just as hard.

A woman wrote to say she is one of the many quiet supporters of this work, and that she knows how hard it is to keep going right now. She was not asking for anything. She wanted us to know she was out there.

Another wrote something I have been turning over ever since.

I do not know one Afghan person but I still feel in my heart that we owe them what we promised. They believed us. We have to make it right.

That is the whole argument, from someone with no personal stake in it at all. No Afghan friend, no deployment, no case she is carrying. Just a promise she watched her country make.

A reader in Ohio sent us the reply he got from his senator after asking him to cosponsor. It was a form letter about Haitian TPS. He had written about Afghans. Nobody read it, and he knew nobody read it, and he told us he plans to keep going anyway and that he will always remember this response. That is not a defeat. That is a man who has correctly identified what he is dealing with.

And a veteran wrote four sentences that cut straight through. These are challenging times, he said, and he wants to know how to fight back, because we all served our country but we also signed up to fight.

He deserves a real answer, so here it is. Fighting back does not look like fury on the internet.

It looks like a cosponsor added to a bill, a reporter who finally understands the difference between a refugee and an SIV holder because you spent forty minutes explaining it, a volunteer sitting in a courtroom so an ICE officer knows someone is watching, and a family that does not get separated because somebody read the docket and made a phone call at the right hour.

It is unglamorous, it is slow, and five years of this record says it works. The action list at the bottom is the current version of it.

FINISH THE MISSION

Wednesday, the 12th of August, was one of the biggest things we did all year. It is a privilege to be able to host a room that told the story of what this coalition really is: people from everywhere, doing their absolute most to finish what we collectively started.

The Global Alliance Update drew nearly 500 registrants from more than sixteen countries. More than half joined from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not advocates talking about allies. The allies themselves, including former military officers, aid workers, and journalists who are still in danger as they listened. Around them sat congressional staff, former senior American officials, resettlement and legal organizations, coalition-country military associations, and press from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Czechia.

Ambassador Tim Davis, former United States Ambassador to Qatar and a Marine, opened it. “Wars do not end because politicians say they are over,” he said. “For those who participate in them, they end when we have taken care of all the work, and all the people, who fought and bled alongside us.” Senator Chris Coons sent video remarks. Ambassador John R. Bass, former United States Ambassador to Afghanistan, closed it, and what he said was about you, not about us. “You ran to the problem. You innovated, you collaborated, and you refused to take no for an answer. Five years later, the results of that determination have been remarkable, well beyond what virtually everyone thought possible.”

The panel was Johnny Mercer, the former British MP and our senior adviser, Major General Denis Thompson of the Canadian Armed Forces, retired, Dr. Beth Oppenheim of HIAS, and Emmanuel Jacob of EUROMIL, moderated by Jon Feltham of Aman Lara. Professor Sara de Jong of the University of York introduced the Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff in International Missions.

And we released The Allied Ledger, written with Professor Sara de Jong, Jon Feltham, and Julia Aitken of Local Staff International. It is the first full accounting of how every nation that fought in Afghanistan kept or broke its promise. The finding is bleak and it is not only about us. By 2026, every coalition nation’s Afghan relocation program had closed, frozen, or been terminated. Only the United States and the United Kingdom rate even a mixed grade. Canada took more than 63,000 and then closed intake entirely. Germany moved 33,000 of 45,000 pledged and froze the rest. The report sets all of it against a century of precedent, from the Assyrian Levies in 1933 to Mali in 2023, and finds the same abandonment recurring by design, with Vietnam and the Kurds as the rare exceptions.

Watch the full event

That is why the event was called Finish The Mission. The name was not decoration. The mission was not completed in August 2021, and it does not end because a fifth anniversary came and went. There are people in Kabul, in Islamabad, and at Camp As Sayliyah whose files are open and whose vetting is finished. Finishing the mission means getting them here.

THIS ANNIVERSARY GOT LOUDER

This year feels different and more visible, because you helped make sure that this moment in time did not go unnoticed.

The coverage this week was not a courtesy. NPR’s story on Afghan allies worried about losing their green cards ran on dozens of member stations from Georgia to Utah to New Hampshire, and was picked up in translation in the Netherlands.

CBC and the Globe and Mail ran hard pieces on how the reckoning is going here compared with allied countries. Scripps News carried it on television. Op-eds from our teams ran in Fox News, and a blunter version syndicated out to the Orlando Sentinel, Las Vegas Weekly, the Santa Maria Times, the Lompoc Record, the Charleston Gazette-Mail, and the DC Journal under a headline that does not leave much room for interpretation: we made a promise to the Afghans, and we are breaking it on purpose.

Five years in, most anniversaries get quieter. This one got louder. That is not luck, and it is not just us. It is five years of a movement being right, on the record, over and over, until reporters knew who to call.

THREE PIECES, AND WHY EACH ONE EXISTS

I wrote three different things for this anniversary, deliberately, because they are aimed at three different rooms. Here is what each one is for.

We Made a Promise to the Afghans; We’re Breaking It on Purpose, which ran in the Orlando Sentinel and then in the Las Vegas Weekly, the Santa Maria Times, the Lompoc Record, the Charleston Gazette-Mail, and the DC Journal. This one is the blunt version, built for regional papers where a member of Congress actually reads the opinion page over coffee. Its whole job is the word “purpose.” Not a backlog, not a bureaucratic snarl. A decision, made by people with names, that can be unmade by those same people.

Read it in the Orlando Sentinel

America’s Promise to Our Afghan Allies Is Still Unfinished Five Years Later in Fox News, written with Myal Greene, the President and CEO of World Relief. This one exists because the audience that most needs to hear this is not the audience that already agrees. It is co-signed by an evangelical humanitarian leader and a Navy veteran, and it makes the case on the ground where it will actually change minds: a promise made, national security, and the character of the country that made it.

Read it in Fox News

The Afghan Betrayal Was a Choice That Happened When You Weren’t Looking, on my own Substack. This is the long one, and it is the fullest accounting I have written of how a working system was taken apart one quiet decision at a time. It is not an op-ed and it is not neutral. It is from my heart, and if you only read one of the three, read this one.

Read the long version

Now write yours. Op-eds do not require a title or a platform. They require a specific story and a clear ask, and local editors are hungrier for them than people realize. If you have carried a case, sat in a courtroom, welcomed a family to your town, or served alongside the people we are talking about, you have the credential that matters and I do not have to tell you what to say.

A few things that help. Keep it to 600 or 750 words. Open with your own connection instead of the policy, because a reader in your county will keep going for a neighbor and stop for a statistic. Make one ask, not five, and name the member of Congress you want to hear it. Send it to your paper’s opinion editor with a two-line note about who you are. Regional dailies, weeklies, veteran outlets, and faith publications all publish this kind of piece, and a letter to the editor works too if 700 words is more than you have in you this week.

Once your words are public tell us, both so we can amplify it and because a wall of these, published in different states in the same month, is a thing Washington notices in a way it does not notice any one of us.

THE VOICES OF OUR ALLIES

Every week my inbox fills with letters from Afghans. We are going to start sharing a few, always without names or anything that could identify anyone, because these are the voices this is actually about and they are almost never in the room.

An Afghan mother, stranded in Pakistan with five young children, wrote on Saturday.

I have been waiting for years for my case to be resolved and have completed the required steps, but I am still living in uncertainty.

An Afghan man still inside Afghanistan, who submitted his ties information to IOM in September 2024 and has heard nothing since, wrote to thank us anyway.

The real Afghans will never ignore your struggles. But still I am stuck in Afghanistan.

An Afghan family who were at the Kabul airport on the day of the Abbey Gate bombing, and who are now in Pakistan, sent five sentences. This is the one we cannot put down.

We are living in Pakistan without a destiny, waiting for the unknown.

A former employee of the United States Embassy in Kabul wrote about what the last five years have cost him.

For nearly five years, I and my family have endured extremely difficult and uncertain circumstances, hardships that I never imagined I would have to experience.

And an Afghan man in the P-2 pipeline, still in Afghanistan, who has completed every stage asked of him, wrote a single line that is really addressed to Washington rather than to us.

We have been waiting for protection and hope that the United States will not abandon us.

Then, starting Sunday morning, they wrote together. Message after message from Afghan P1 and P2 families stranded in Pakistan, arriving separately, carrying the same collective request. They are asking for one page. A single document that speaks for all of them rather than any one family, laying out what they are living through: years of waiting, cases that stopped moving, deportation threats, expired visas and documents, economic collapse, children who cannot go to school. They asked that it be carried to Congress and put into someone’s hands rather than left on a desk.

We do not want our voices to stop at an office desk.

Consider it received. We are building that one-pager, and we are going to lift these voices as far as we can carry them.

REST. CLOSE THE LAPTOP. AND THEN COME BACK, READY TO FINISH THE MISSION.

These two weeks are brutal, every single year. August 15 is when Kabul fell. August 26 is Abbey Gate. August 30 is the last flight out. For a lot of people reading this, that is not a timeline. It is an anniversary of the worst days of their lives, arriving on schedule, whether or not they have the capacity for it this year.

If you are Afghan, this fortnight asks you to relive a country’s collapse while your own case sits open. If you spent your youth in that war, it asks you to sit with names and faces and decisions that were never yours to make, while people who were not there explain what it all meant. If you have spent five years doing casework for strangers, it asks you to do it while carrying everyone whose case you could not move.

None of that is weakness. It is the bill that comes due when you care this much, this long, against this much resistance.

You are allowed to close the laptop. You are allowed to skip the five year milestone coverage entirely.

Free legal help, pathway information, safety guidance, and mental health and crisis support are all at afghanevac.org/resources, and they are there for you whether you are in Kabul, Doha, Islamabad, or down the street from us in San Diego. Use them, and send them to someone who will not ask on their own.

The work will still be here in September. So will we.

WHERE THINGS STAND

• The First Circuit told the government no on most of it. On August 14, Judges Lara Montecalvo, Seth Aframe, and Joshua Dunlap ruled on the administration’s emergency stay motion in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS, No. 26-1703. They granted the stay as to one policy and denied it as to the other two, finding the government “has not met its burden.” Two of the four USCIS policies struck down in June remain vacated, and USCIS is required to adjudicate. The one the administration won back, Comprehensive Re-Review, is the one that reaches backward into cases that were already approved. The government’s opening brief is due September 10.

• Camp As Sayliyah is running out of calendar. Around 1,039 Afghans remain in Qatar, more than half women, more than half children, 150 are the immediate family of American service members stranded in what has become a prison camp. The site is slated to close September 30, forty-four days from today (we do not believe this will happen). On August 7, 35 members of Congress led by Rep. Scott Peters and Sen. Richard Blumenthal wrote to the State Department demanding these vetted allies be processed first. Read the letter. We have raised CAS with senior State officials repeatedly since January 2025. The people there are approved and the vetting is done. What is missing is a decision.

• September is the fight. The presidential determination for fiscal year 2027 is due next month, and what we are hearing is that the administration intends to build it around roughly 22,000 Afrikaners from South Africa. For scale, the entire FY26 ceiling was 17,500, the second lowest ever. We are not going to argue about who should be excluded. Afghans belong in that number, and P1 and P2 cases were stopped at the White House, which means the White House can restart them.

ACTION THIS WEEK

• Write your representative and ask them to cosponsor the Afghanistan TPS Act, H.R. 9899 / S.5308.

• Read and share the Five Years On series at reports.afghanevac.org. Four reports built entirely on primary sources, so nobody has to take anyone’s word for what happened, including ours. You can endorse the recommendations in the Unfinished Mission and arm us to cause the change needed to ensure this never happens again.

• Read and share the Afghan-American Foundation’s Five Years On report. It documents what Afghan American communities actually are, told by Afghan Americans, which is exactly as it should be.

• Stay ready for September. The fiscal year 2027 refugee determination lands next month and we will need volume, fast, at both the White House and Congress. Make sure you are subscribed so you get the alert the day it drops.

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

Five years on

• While Taliban leaders mark 5 years in power in Afghanistan, a UN official warns of a rights crisis -- PBS NewsHour

• Taliban mark five years back in power in Afghanistan as aid groups warn of crisis -- NBC News

• Entrenched, Embattled and Defiant, the Taliban Celebrate 5 Years in Power -- The New York Times

• The Taliban Kicked the U.S. Out of Afghanistan. Now They Want It Back. -- The New York Times

• Five years after Kabul fell, the reckoning over Afghanistan is far from over -- CBC News

The Afghans America made promises to

• They fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan. Now they worry about losing their green cards -- NPR

• Rounds’ bill would recognize service of America’s Afghan allies during war -- Ripon Advance

• Trump has chance to fix fallout from Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal -- The Washington Times

Inside Afghanistan

• What America Owes to Afghan Women -- The New York Times

• A total collapse, women’s rights in Afghanistan under the Taliban -- The Christian Science Monitor

• Concerns grow over increased global ties with Taliban in Afghanistan -- The Guardian

• 25 Years in Afghanistan review, the extraordinary life of an optimist -- The Guardian

How our allies are handling it

• Taliban Regained Power in Afghanistan, UK Afghan Allies Fear Reprisal Over Resettlement Delays -- NewsCord

• Canada, other countries urged to learn from Afghan resettlement experience -- The Globe and Mail

• The world set Afghanistan up to fail, and now it has forgotten its people -- The Globe and Mail

From us

• We Made a Promise to the Afghans; We’re Breaking It on Purpose -- Orlando Sentinel

• America’s promise to our Afghan allies is still unfinished five years later — Fox News

• The Afghan Betrayal Was a Choice That Happened When You Weren’t Looking — Substack

Our reports

• The Allied Ledger -- #AfghanEvac and Local Staff International

• The Unfinished Mission -- #AfghanEvac

• Protection Promised -- #AfghanEvac

Five years ago the world watched Afghans run alongside an airplane and decided that image was the story.

It was not.

The story is the twenty-two-inch stack of paper.

It is the woman who found one person willing to talk and filed anyway.

It is the mother who completed every step and is still waiting, and the SIV applicant who wrote to us asking not for his own case but for all of them.

Most of the people who have held this promise together will never be thanked.

In September a president will sign a piece of paper deciding who this country still makes room for, and Afghans have every right to be on it.

We intend to be very loud about that.

Take the rest you need first. Then find us.

The mission that began in the airlift is not finished and it has been a rough road for the last year and a half, but this was the best week for Afghan legislation in months. In a single forty-eight hour stretch, the Afghanistan TPS Act picked up a Senate companion, a new bipartisan bill, the ARCH Act, was introduced to make sure the record of our allies’ service can never be erased, and 35 members of Congress sent a letter to Secretaries Rubio, Mullin, and Hegseth about Camp As Sayliyah.

Two bills, both chambers, both parties.

ACTION THIS WEEK

• Register for the Global Alliance Update on Wednesday, August 12, a state of the movement at 8:00 AM Pacific and 4:00 PM in London. You will hear from leaders from the U.S., U.K, Canada, and more. Then AfghanEvac, in partnership with Local Staff International, will release The Allied Ledger. Sign up at afghanevac.org/global-alliance-update.

• Tell your members of Congress to cosponsor the Afghanistan TPS Act. The bill now has a House version, H.R. 9899, and a Senate companion introduced August 6. It takes ninety seconds and routes to your Representative and both Senators at afghanevac.org/tps.

• Back the new ARCH Act. The Afghan Ally Records and Credential Heritage Act was introduced in the Senate on August 7. Ask your senators to support it, and organizations can endorse, at afghanevac.org/arch.

• Comment on the rule that killed the asylum interview before September 28. It applies retroactively to cases already pending, so if you or someone you love is in the affirmative asylum backlog, this is your case. File at afghanevac.org/asylum-interview-action.

• Read and share The Unfinished Mission. Our five-year accounting of the Special Immigrant Visa program is at reports.afghanevac.org/unfinished-mission. Post it and tag your members of Congress.

FIVE YEARS ON, THE FIRST GOOD WEEK IN MONTHS

Five years is long enough to learn the difference between motion and progress. This week was progress. The task now is to keep it moving as far down the field before the anniversary coverage fades and the offices go quiet again.

Five years after the fall of Kabul, the honest measure of the mission is not a speech. It is a count. We laid the whole record out this week in a new report, The Unfinished Mission, the first full accounting of seventeen years of the Special Immigrant Visa program, and it broke through to national television with a segment on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper.

And then Congress moved. On August 6, the Afghanistan TPS Act gained a Senate companion, so protection from deportation can now advance on both sides of the Capitol at once. On August 7, a bipartisan quartet of senators, Mike Rounds, Amy Klobuchar, Chris Coons, and Thom Tillis, introduced the ARCH Act, the Afghan Ally Records and Credential Heritage Act, to make sure the government preserves the proof of who these allies are and what they did. Two Republicans and two Democrats on each bill. Members do not put their names on Afghan legislation during a recess by accident. They do it because they have decided it is worth the cost.

We are clear-eyed about what these bills are and are not. Neither bill puts people on a plane tomorrow, and we will not pretend otherwise. What they do is build the legal architecture that outlasts any single administration, protection from removal for those already here, and a permanent, verifiable record of service for those still in danger. That architecture is how a promise stops lurching from crisis to crisis and becomes law. AfghanEvac endorses both, and our ask this week is simple. Turn support into cosponsors, because the cosponsor list is the one thing that forces a hearing.

Our Policy Page

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT AS THE RUMORS SPREAD

SIV issuances have not resumed. All visa interviews, for every type of case, are still being denied. The travel ban that bars Afghan entry is still in force. No bill has passed, no program has restarted in the background, and nothing has quietly reopened.

So where is the confusion coming from? One court ruling, misread. On July 30, a federal court ordered the State Department to process I-730 following-to-join cases for the family members of people already granted asylum in the United States, because the travel ban never applied to those cases in the first place. The ruling is real, and it is welcome, but it is narrow. It moved a single category, the relatives of approved asylees, and it moved nothing else. Somewhere between the courthouse and the group chat, “a court ordered State to issue travel documents in a handful of asylum cases” became “visas are being issued again.” They are not.

We are seeing a flood of bad information as a result, across social media, in WhatsApp groups, and on Facebook, some of it honest confusion and some of it outright scams. If you see a post claiming the doors have reopened, or anyone asking for money to move your case, stop and verify before you act.

Here is what is actually true, and one practical step for families with an appointment in Islamabad.

The one narrow exception, I-730 reunification for people already granted asylum

If you have been granted asylum in the United States, the travel ban never applied to your following-to-join family members, because the proclamation exempts asylees in its own text. A federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia confirmed this on July 30 and ordered the State Department to process travel documents for approved family members it had wrongly held up.

This ruling is narrow. It reaches only the I-730 relatives of people with approved asylum. It does not reopen SIV, refugee, or parole travel, and it does not lift the travel ban for anyone else. If this is your situation, talk to a trusted immigration attorney before you act.

We STILL recommend postponing or rescheduling visa interviews.

Why it matters Hope is not a plan, and a scammer’s promise is not a policy change. Right now the fastest way to protect a family is accurate information, the real status of the ban, the single narrow exception that exists, and the exact steps that actually reach a person.

WHAT THE ARCH ACT ACTUALLY DOES

The ARCH Act answers a quiet emergency. As the pipeline stalls and records scatter, an ally’s single most valuable asset, the documented proof that they served alongside American forces, can disappear. The Afghan Ally Records and Credential Heritage Act directs the Department of Defense to verify and preserve the service records and biometric data of at-risk Afghan allies within 180 days, and to stand up a secure online portal so that an individual, a designee, or a representative can apply from anywhere, including inside Afghanistan, to have that service documented and protected.

It is written for the people the Taliban hunts first. Afghan special operations forces, pilots, intelligence officers, judges, prosecutors, and defense officials who served at least a year between December 22, 2001, and September 1, 2021. The bill was introduced August 7 by Senators Rounds, Klobuchar, Coons, and Tillis, and it stands as a companion to Section 1080 of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act, which gives it two paths forward, on its own or inside the must-pass defense bill.

Why it matters A revoked approval or a lost file can turn a decorated ally into a stranger the system does not recognize. Preserving the record is not a clerical nicety. It is the difference between a case that can be reopened and a person the United States can pretend it never knew.

Learn more and ACT

THE TPS ACT NOW MOVES ON BOTH SIDES OF THE CAPITOL

The Afghanistan TPS Act designates Afghanistan for Temporary Protected Status through July 1, 2029, which for the length of the designation means an Afghan national already here cannot be deported to Afghanistan and can apply to work legally. The House bill, H.R. 9899, was introduced July 23 by Reps. Jason Crow, Don Bacon, Sam Liccardo, and Maria Elvira Salazar. On August 6 it gained a Senate companion, and that matters, because a bill moving in one chamber is a request while a bill moving in both is a plan.

The path from here is a cosponsorship fight, and it is the cheapest, most effective thing any reader can do. Members count the messages from home. A constituent asking their own representative and senators to sign on is what turns a bipartisan introduction into a bill leadership cannot ignore.

Act on TPS now

Why it matters TPS is the emergency brake. It does not grant a green card or replace the SIV these families earned, but it stops a deportation while the larger promise is kept, and for an ally living one policy reversal away from removal, that floor is the ground to stand on.

CONGRESS PRESSES STATE ON CAMP AS SAYLIYAH

Thirty-five members of Congress, led by Rep. Scott Peters and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, told Secretaries Rubio, Mullin, and Hegseth this week to stop stalling on the roughly 1,100 vetted allies stranded at Camp As Sayliyah before it closes September 30. Restart processing, brief Congress, and move no one without their consent.

Read the letter

This letter was signed by Democrats. The one before it, from Jason Crow and Don Bacon, was bipartisan. Both are right, because keeping this promise has never belonged to one party, and every form of oversight and engagement counts. The administration ignored the June 24 briefing that earlier letter demanded. It should not ignore this one. Keep the letters coming.

Why it matters Oversight is how a closing date becomes a plan instead of an abandonment. We want the momentum to keep moving, from both sides of the aisle.

Share our post about the letter

THE GLOBAL ALLIANCE UPDATE: A STATE OF THE MOVEMENT

This Tuesday, August 12, at 8:00 AM Pacific and 4:00 PM in London, we host the Global Alliance Update, and this one is a state of the mission. It is free and virtual, and it brings the fight into one room across two continents.

The speakers are Ambassador Tim Davis (U.S.), MP Johnny Mercer(U.K), EUROMIL President Emmanuel Jacob, Major General (Retired) Denis Thompson (Canada), and HIAS CEO Dr. Beth Oppenheim. Dr. Sara De Jonge and Jon Feltham from Local Staff International will join me to lead the briefing.

We use the hour to take stock and to build. We unveil The Allied Ledger, our accounting of how allied nations have supported their wartime partners and where the gaps remain, alongside new Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff, developed with Local Staff International to set a standard for protecting mission partners in the conflicts still to come. This is the recognition that the United States is not the only government that made promises, and not the only one being measured against them.

Register today

IN PLEASANTON, THE COMMUNITY SHOWED UP

We attended a legal clinic and town hall in Pleasanton, hosted by the Afghan-American Community Organization and CAIR-California. Immigration attorney and AACO board member Spojmie Nasiri and I ran the town hall together, taking questions from families who drove in for straight answers. The clinic did the practical work this moment demands, screenings and know-your-rights guidance delivered in Pashto, Dari, and English by people who do this every day. A huge thanks to AACO and CAIR-California, who keep showing up for this community and made the day happen.

INTERNATIONAL: THE RETURNS HAVE NOT STOPPED

While Congress debated protection, the machinery of forced return kept grinding across the region. Pakistan’s deportation drive continues, with thousands of Afghans pushed back across the border on some single days this year, families among them, under a repatriation plan that has swept up people with valid documents alongside the undocumented. The United Nations has again urged Islamabad to halt the forced returns, and warned that Afghans sent back face a growing risk of trafficking as the crises inside the country deepen.

Why it matters Every week the pipeline stays frozen, the decision is made somewhere else, at a border crossing or on a deportation charter, by governments that will not wait for Washington to finish deciding.

IN THE NEWS

• The Unfinished Mission on CNN, The Lead with Jake Tapper -- CNN

• Report: Hundreds of thousands of Afghans shut out of US resettlement -- KPBS

• The Unfinished Mission on KPBS -- KPBS

• We’re purposefully breaking promise to Afghans -- Charleston Gazette-Mail

• Who Really Abandoned Afghanistan? -- J.D. Marks

• Shawn VanDiver and Beth Bailey on Five Years of Advocacy, The Afghanistan Project Podcast Ep. 150 -- The Afghanistan Project

• Uncertain Future for Afghan Refugees; Qatar Camp to Close -- TOLOnews

• State Department ordered to process travel documents for families of Afghan refugees in lawsuit -- Stars and Stripes

Five years is not an anniversary. It is an indictment, and it is a choice about what the sixth year looks like.

Last week, a bipartisan group of Senators decided the sixth year should include a record that cannot be erased and a protection that cannot be revoked on a whim, and members of Congress put their names to a demand that the people at Camp As Sayliyah not be abandoned.

That is not the finish line. It is the first stretch of open road we have seen in a long time, and open road is only worth anything if we drive it.

So cosponsor the bills, register for Tuesday, make some noise. The allies America vetted are still here, still waiting, and still organizing. So are we.

The first happened in the Federal Register, on a Tuesday, in a rule that became effective the moment it was published. USCIS can now send certain affirmative asylum applicants directly to immigration court based on the paper file alone. No interview first. No notice, no comment, and no chance to object before implementation. And it reaches cases that are already pending.

The second happened in a Virginia courtroom, on a Thursday and it’s HUGE. A federal judge set aside the policy that has been using the travel ban to keep approved family members of Afghan asylees out of the country. Not a waiver for the seven people who sued. The policy itself. It should mean a lot of families finally get to come.

Elsewhere, a secretive removal court created in 1996 held its first hearing, Britain admitted it endangered 18,500 of its own allies and found nobody to blame, and we received hundreds of letters from Afghans awaiting processing around the world.

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ACTION THIS WEEK

• Comment on the Employment Authorization Document rule before Tuesday. This is the last real chance. Comments close August 4, Docket USCIS-2026-0067. More than 3,100 comments are already in.

• Comment on the rule that just abolished the guarantee of an affirmative asylum interview. The interim final rule took effect July 28 and comments close September 28.

• Ask your House member to cosponsor the Afghanistan TPS Act, H.R. 9899. Two members joined on July 30, and there are now six cosponsors from three parties. Over 650 letters from 48 states plus DC have gone to Congress. Two have not sent a single letter: Montana and North Dakota. Send yours in ninety seconds.

• Register for the Global Alliance Update on August 12. We release The Allied Ledger and new Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff with Local Staff International.

TWO WINS IN COURT

On July 30, Judge Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the administration cannot use the travel ban to block family members of people already granted asylum here. The proclamations exempt asylees by their own text, the court found, and the State Department’s contrary policy was unlawful and must be set aside.

The government has fifteen days to issue travel documents to five approved family members and must reconsider two more applications without applying the ban. The plaintiffs are seven Afghan allies granted asylum in the United States. The International Refugee Assistance Project litigated it.

Watch and share our video

The same day, a Ninth Circuit panel ruled 2 to 1 that the administration cannot deny bond hearings to immigrants arrested inside the United States, rejecting an attempt to extend mandatory detention far beyond border arrests. At least four other circuits have now rejected that policy. Two have gone the other way, and the administration has already asked the Supreme Court to take it up.

Why it matters Family reunification for Afghan asylees was quietly strangled by a policy nobody voted on, and a court just undid it. Wins like this hold only if the government complies and only if they survive appeal, so watch the fifteen-day deadline as closely as you watched the ruling.

USCIS ENDED THE GUARANTEED AFFIRMATIVE ASYLUM INTERVIEW

On July 28, the Department of Homeland Security published an interim final rule and made it effective the same day. It lets U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services send an affirmative asylum application to immigration court on the paper file alone. No interview. The rule strips the language indicating applicants have a right to one, drops the requirement that a referral letter assess credibility, and lets an officer deny a discretionary claim without ever determining whether the person is a refugee.

This is retroactive, and that is the part to understand. It is not a rule for people who file from here on. It reaches into the backlog, applying to 444,724 applications already pending, every one filed by someone who was told an interview was coming. For Afghan families who were brought here by the U.S. government but don’t yet have durable status, it is close to a blanket, because parole delays this government created pushed most Afghan affirmative filers past the one-year mark, which is exactly the category the rule targets. If your case is in that queue, this is not a debate about future policy. It already applies to you.

Think about who is in that queue. Allies whose Chief of Mission approval was revoked have been filing affirmatively on the advice of counsel, because it was the door still open. Their strongest evidence is not a document. It is the account they give out loud, to a person, under questioning. That is what an asylum interview is for. Removing it does not streamline these cases. It removes the only place where the facts of them can surface.

The rule can still be changed. An interim final rule can be amended, withdrawn, or vacated, and the record built between now and September 28 is what a court reads when someone challenges it, so file a comment and do not let the timing convince you it is pointless.

File a comment

We have the explainer ready to go and a simple ask for every attorney reading this. If you have an Afghan client with a pending affirmative case, check the file this week. Do not assume an interview is coming.

Read the explainer

Why it matters An asylum claim is won or lost on testimony. Take away the chance to testify and you have not made a process faster; you have decided the outcome and skipped the part where anyone listens. For an Afghan ally whose Chief of Mission approval was already pulled, that is the difference between a defense and a deportation.

THE TPS ACT GREW WHILE CONGRESS WAS OUT OF TOWN

The Afghanistan TPS Act of 2026, H.R. 9899, picked up two more cosponsors on July 30, Reps. Kevin Kiley of California and Lateefah Simon of California. That brings the bill to six cosponsors from three parties, alongside sponsor Rep. Jason Crow and original cosponsors Sam Liccardo, Maria Elvira Salazar, Don Bacon, and Bill Keating.

Members added their names during a recess, which tells you these were not floor-vote decisions made under pressure. They were choices. Our own count puts constituent letters past 650 in less than a week, but two states are still at zero. If you live in Montana or North Dakota, you can personally help us ensure lawmakers have heard from Americans in all 50 states and DC that they want our allies protected.

Help us keep the pressure on

Why it matters A bill that grows during recess has real support underneath it. Every cosponsor makes it harder for congressional leadership to ignore.

EXPECT AN EXTENSION AT CAS, NOT A DECISION

I spent the end of last week in Doha, meeting with people who work on this every day. I am not going to characterize those conversations. What I will tell you is what I came home believing.

Camp As Sayliyah is on the books to close September 30, and that date is soft. The International Organization for Migration’s contract at the site now runs through the end of the year, and the State Department has not worked out what it intends to do with the exactly 1,039 people still there. An extension is what happens when nobody makes a decision, and I would expect one.

The path forward is not complicated and it has not changed. Bring the people who have not been denied to the United States. They were vetted, they were approved, and the only thing between them and a flight is a signature nobody wants to put on paper. For the smaller number who have been denied, find them a safe place to go, deliberately and with their consent, rather than scrambling when a deadline arrives. That is the entire plan. It does not require new law, a new appropriation, or a new agreement with anyone. It requires the State Department to choose.

Why it matters Every extension buys time that nobody is spending. The families at Camp As Sayliyah are not waiting on a process, they are waiting on a decision, and the longer it goes unmade the more it starts to look like the decision itself.

See our CAS Explainer

A DORMANT DEPORTATION COURT IS NOW RUNNING

A removal court created in 1996, but never used, has held its first hearing. We are watching not only because of the respondent, but because a proceeding built to use classified evidence could eventually be pointed at people whose files are thick with wartime intelligence reporting.

That is our community.

On July 30, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court heard the case of Nazira Haji Zada, a 47-year-old Afghan lawful permanent resident in Fort Worth, Texas. The Justice Department accuses her of supporting her family’s Election Day shooting plot. Her son and son-in-law have already pleaded guilty.

We are not defending her and we take no position on her guilt. The allegations are grave, and if the government can prove them it should.

Our concern is the machinery. This court can rely on classified evidence a respondent cannot fully review and uses a lower burden of proof than a criminal trial. Yet the underlying plot was prosecuted in public, and the guilty pleas are on a public docket. Choosing the secretive forum when the open one worked raises questions about why this court is attractive and who might be next.

Afghan allies carry files filled with intelligence fragments, informant reporting, and unverified derogatory information collected in a combat zone. We already see Chief of Mission approvals revoked without an explanation or a record to contest. A removal process designed to use secret evidence fits that population uncomfortably well.

We are flagging it now, before it happens, rather than writing about it afterward.

Why it matters A court unused for thirty years is now active. Exceptional government powers rarely remain confined to the first case used to justify them.

THE LETTERS

Three groups of Afghans wrote to us this week and did not coordinate with one another. SIV applicants in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, who organized their own advocacy and gathered videos, photographs, and signatures. P-1, P-2, and refugee families in Pakistan, asking for an attorney who can look at cases frozen for years. And families refused under Section 212(f), turned away by a proclamation rather than anything in their file. They described the same life. Documents expiring, children out of school, rent unpaid, police at the door despite a pending case. One put it plainly: “We are not asking for special treatment. We are simply asking for protection, dignity, and the opportunity for our pending cases to be processed in a timely manner.”

One letter said they have written for nearly a year without hearing SIV cases raised in our meetings or public remarks, and we would rather give a straight answer than an easy one. We raise these cases every week, in congressional meetings, filings, reports, and the pathways tool we built for this purpose. What we do not do is name every population in every post, because a post that lists everyone says nothing to anyone.

These policies are almost never written for one population. Section 212(f) does not distinguish between an interpreter with an approved visa and a P-2 applicant awaiting a referral, and the travel ban does not check which program you are in. That is why we attack the proclamation, the rule, and the funding decision rather than arguing category by category. When the thing itself falls, it falls for all of you at once. Send your materials, we will use them, and on a week when your program name does not appear, do not read that as absence.

Why it matters The paperwork sorts you into programs. The policy does not. One proclamation reaches an interpreter in Herat, a journalist in Islamabad, and a family already approved, in the same afternoon. That is why we fight the policy and not the category.

See our response on Instagram

THE AGENCY MAKING “WELLNESS” CALLS IS SHARING INFORMATION WITH ICE

On July 28, Reuters reported that the Office of Refugee Resettlement has passed more than 460,000 leads to immigration enforcement since January 2025, contributing to thousands of arrests of children and the sponsors who took them in. Hold that next to what we flagged two weeks ago. The same office is placing what it calls wellbeing calls to roughly 800 Afghan arrivals, asking about identity, household composition, and immigration status, with answers that are not anonymous and may be kept for fifteen years.

Our guidance has not changed, and this week it hardened. You are not required to answer. Not where you live, not your status, not anything about your family or your case. Declining does not affect your benefits. If you have a case pending, talk to a trusted immigration attorney or your resettlement agency before you say a word.

Why it matters A government agency created to help vulnerable immigrants has also been supplying information to immigration enforcement. That is the context for every call an Afghan family receives, and why “just a wellness check” is not a safe assumption.

BRITAIN NAMES ITS FAILURE

On July 30, the House of Commons Defence Committee released “Shifting heaven and earth? The Afghan data breach and resettlement schemes,” its report on the Ministry of Defence breach that compromised more than 18,500 applications and put far more people than that in danger, including families. The committee called it a foreseeable systemic failure, found it was buried under secrecy for far too long, and noted that no individual appears to have been held personally accountable.

Why it matters Every allied government watching this outcome learns the same lesson, that the cost of failing Afghan allies is a report. Accountability that arrives without consequence teaches the next ministry exactly how little is at stake.

See our statement

INTERNATIONAL: WHAT THE UN COUNTED IN THREE MONTHS

On July 28, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan published its quarterly human rights update for April through June, with two annexes. In three months, the Taliban’s vice ministry arbitrarily arrested 389 people. Authorities carried out 137 judicial corporal punishments including public floggings. They arbitrarily arrested 29 former members of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces, and they killed eight. In the same quarter, 120,000 men sat university entrance exams and not one woman or girl did.

The first annex is about one city’s dress code. In Herat, between June 6 and 8, inspectors arrested at least 30 women and girls for not wearing chadors and sent them to the provincial prison. When residents of the Jibreil area, a Shi’a Hazara neighborhood, protested peacefully on June 9, plainclothes security forces beat them, shot at them, killed a boy, and arrested at least 17. In the days after, intelligence officials stopped people at random to search their phones for protest footage, and women stopped going outside.

The second annex counts cross-border civilian casualties, 399 in the quarter, 57 killed and 342 injured, among them 112 children. UNAMA attributes all of them to Pakistani security forces. The worst came on June 28 in Paktya, where an airstrike collapsed a three-storey house and the local mosque called on neighbors to help dig out the survivors. Twenty minutes later, Pakistani forces struck the same house again. Twenty-two killed, at least 185 injured, most of them by the second strike. Separately, on July 28 Germany put 31 Afghan men on a deportation charter to Kabul. One had no criminal record at all.

Read the reports

Why it matters Eight former Afghan security force members killed in ninety days is the answer to anyone who claims returns to Afghanistan are safe. That is the country the United States is sending people back toward, and the one families in Qatar are waiting not to be sent to.

DOMESTIC DETENTIONS RAMPING UP

ICE has recently increased detentions at domestic U.S. airports. Arrests have occurred at departure gates and arrivals, reportedly using passenger information shared through government travel systems.

People without secure immigration status may face detention even on domestic flights. Having a pending application or valid work permit does not necessarily prevent an arrest. Those potentially at heightened risk include:

1. Former TPS holders. Afghanistan’s TPS designation was terminated effective July 14, 2025. Former beneficiaries who do not have another lawful status may be exposed to enforcement.

2. People with pending applications. Filing for asylum, an SIV, adjustment of status, or another form of protection does not necessarily provide lawful status or prevent ICE from making an arrest while the application remains pending.

3. People whose visas or authorized periods of stay have expired. A pending immigration application or valid employment authorization document does not, by itself, guarantee protection from detention.

4. People with prior arrests or criminal records. Criminal convictions, pending charges, and, in some circumstances, prior arrests may increase scrutiny or create additional immigration consequences. Lawful permanent residents can also face detention depending on the nature of their records and travel history.

The legal risks vary significantly by person. Citizenship, lawful permanent residence, parole, a pending application, and employment authorization are not interchangeable, and none of this guidance should substitute for advice about an individual case.

Why it matters The categories of people being detained at airports appear to have widened significantly. Based on the current pattern, we recommend that Afghans without U.S. citizenship or secure lawful status consult a qualified immigration attorney before flying. Lawful permanent residents with any arrest, charge, or conviction should also seek individualized legal advice before traveling.

Learn more about airport detentions

Consult an immigration lawyer for specific advice for your case, and make a safety plan in the event of any detention.

SOMETHING WORTH KNOWING

The federal contract funding legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children expired on July 31, stripping counsel from more than 25,000 children. Immigration arrests hit 1,474 a day through July 11, the fastest pace of this administration.

And the Dorcas fight comes to a head this week. Plaintiffs’ response to the government’s emergency motion to stay is due today (August 3) in the First Circuit, and the government’s opening merits brief is due August 11. Until that stay motion is decided, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services must keep adjudicating Afghan cases. The court could rule any day, so watch this one.

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court

• Secretive terrorist removal court set for first hearing in Afghan woman’s case -- CNN

• Alien Terrorist Removal Court holds its first-ever hearing after 30 years -- NPR

• Afghan woman plans to fight DOJ efforts to deport her over allegation she is an ‘alien terrorist’ -- CBS News

• Administration to use secretive deportation court for the first time -- UPI

• Justice Department files first case in U.S. Alien Terrorist Removal Court -- U.S. Department of Justice

The asylum rule and the courts

• Affirmative Asylum Referrals Without Interview -- Federal Register

• New rule could speed deportation of asylum seekers -- The Hill

• Federal Judge Rejects Travel Ban Use Against Afghan Asylees’ Families -- Global Refuge

• US appeals court rejects Trump expansion of mandatory migrant detention -- Al Jazeera

Enforcement and detention

• Thousands of children, sponsors arrested by ICE after tips from US child migrant agency -- Reuters

• ICE Arrests Surge at Airports, Opening New Front in Deportation Drive -- The New York Times

• More than 25,000 children lose previous legal protections, as federal contract ends -- NPR

• ICE working to open four new detention facilities with space for 5,500 detainees -- NBC News

• Immigrant detention should not be a death sentence -- The Hill

• This Week by the {Immigration} Numbers (July 31, 2026) -- Austin Kocher

Britain’s reckoning

• Shifting heaven and earth? The Afghan data breach -- House of Commons Defence Committee

• UK lawmakers say Afghan allies were put at risk by secrecy, policy failures -- Amu TV

• MoD data breach was a ‘foreseeable’ failure that left Afghans in danger -- Radio NewsHub

Inside Afghanistan and the region

• A hijab inspection, a slap, a warning letter: Inside three months of Taliban rule -- UN News

• Former Afghan security personnel still face killings and torture, says UN -- Afghanistan International

• Over 130 publicly flogged in Afghanistan in three months, U.N. says -- Khaama Press

• Months of fighting between Afghanistan and Pakistan have killed nearly 500 Afghan civilians, UN says -- Associated Press

• MSF urges Pakistan to halt forced returns of Afghan refugees -- Amu TV

• Returning Afghans face growing risk of trafficking as crises deepen -- UN News

• Germany deports 31 Afghans to Kabul on direct flight, including one without criminal record -- KabulNow

• Germany defends deporting non-criminal to Afghanistan -- The Local

The Afghanistan TPS Act

• Crow introduces bill to grant vulnerable Afghans Temporary Protected Status -- Office of Rep. Jason Crow

• New bipartisan bill aims to fulfill America’s promise to Afghan allies -- Office of Rep. Sam Liccardo

In two weeks it will be five years since Kabul fell, and the anniversary coverage is already being assigned.

Reporters will ask what changed.

Here is the honest answer: The machinery got quieter. A promise is not broken with a vote anymore, it is broken with a rule that publishes on a Tuesday and is law by lunch, and with a decision nobody in the State Department wants to sign.

Quiet is the point. It is harder to photograph and easier to deny.

So our mission, together, has got to be to make it loud.

File the comment, send the letter, take the leap, and put your name on the record where it can be counted.

Five years in, the allies America vetted are still here, still waiting, and still organizing.

So are we.

Three things are moving at once, and two are on the clock. Congress has a bipartisan bill that would protect Afghan allies who are already here. At the same time, the administration has advanced two rules that target those same people. One strips their right to work. The other lets the government put asylum seekers in front of a deportation judge without ever hearing them out. You can weigh in on all three from your couch or your desk, and it matters more than you would think, because federal agencies are legally required to read and respond to substantive public comments before a rule becomes final.

Everything below points to sites where we have already set up the emails to Congress and the comment forms for you. Pick at least one. Do it. Then send this to three people who will do the same.

Deadlines at a glance

• Work-authorization rule, comment by August 4. This is the most urgent. It is next week.

• Asylum “no-interview” rule, comment by September 28.

• Afghanistan TPS Act, no deadline, but every day counts. Act now.

1. Pass the bipartisan Afghanistan TPS Act (H.R. 9899)

On July 23, Representatives Jason Crow, Sam Liccardo, Don Bacon, and María Elvira Salazar, two Democrats and two Republicans, introduced the Afghanistan TPS Act of 2026.

It would designate Afghanistan for Temporary Protected Status through July 2029, restoring protection from deportation and the right to work to Afghan allies already living here, the same people this administration stripped of that status even as the Taliban made conditions worse.

TPS is a bridge, not a destination. It protects people who are already here, already vetted, and already working in American communities while their cases catch up. Keeping faith with our allies has never been a partisan position, and the sponsors of this bill just proved it again.

Two ways to act, and we need you to do both.

As an individual, tell your representative to co-sponsor H.R. 9899 and push for a vote.

Write your Representative

As an organization, add your group to the endorsement list and lend your name to the coalition.

Endorse the bill

2. Stop the asylum “no-interview” rule (comment by September 28)

On July 28, DHS put into effect an interim final rule, “Affirmative Asylum Referrals Without Interview” (Docket USCIS-2026-0199). For the first time, it lets USCIS asylum officers send an affirmative asylum case to immigration court without ever interviewing the applicant, deciding it on the paperwork alone.

The asylum interview is often the only chance a person gets to explain, in their own words, why they fled and what waits for them if they are sent back. Take it away and the government can move someone toward deportation without ever hearing their story. Many Afghans who came through Operation Allies Welcome filed affirmative asylum claims. This rule reaches them.

It is already in effect, but the comment window is open, and public comments are how rules like this get challenged and changed.

Read our explainer

Act. Submit a comment opposing the rule before September 28.

Submit your comment

3. Protect Afghan allies’ right to work (comment by August 4, next week)

A DHS proposed rule, “Clarification of Discretionary Employment Authorization for Certain Aliens” (Docket USCIS-2026-0067), would let the government strip work authorization from people paroled into the United States, including the Afghan allies this country evacuated after the fall of Kabul.

These are people the United States flew here, vetted, and welcomed. Taking away their ability to work legally does not make anyone safer. It pushes vetted allies out of their jobs, off their leases, and into crisis, and it shifts the cost onto the communities and employers that depend on them.

This is the most urgent item on the list. The comment window closes August 4.

Act. Individuals or organizations can submit a comment opposing the rule before August 4, and we’ve made it easy.

Comment NOW on EADs

Organizations can also sign on to our organizational comment sign on letter

Sign on to our letter

Wear the ask, and take 25% off for reading this

We want to see Afghanistan TPS shirts everywhere. In Senate hallways, at district offices, and all over your feeds, because a bill moves faster when the people who decide can see how many of us are behind it.

Our new “Promises Aren’t Temporary” tee carries the name of the ask, H.R. 9899, right where people will read it. They look good, they start conversations, and every order puts real money behind this work and keeps us in the fight.

Because you opened this email, the first 50 orders are 25% off. Use code 25ATPS2026 at checkout, and move fast, because once 50 shirts are claimed the code is gone.

Get your shirt today

Wear it to the Hill. Wear it to the grocery store. Post it and tag us.

Do all of that and then do the one thing that multiplies all of it

Forward this to three people. Post it. Text it to the veteran who keeps asking how to help. Two minutes of your time moves the people who decide whether our Afghan wartime allies are protected or abandoned.

Share

They kept their promise to us. Now we must ensure our country keeps ours.

On the way out the door, a bipartisan group of House members moved to protect Afghans from deportation, while the House Judiciary Committee revived the harshest anti-asylum bill of the last decade.

In between, the pathways tool we built went everywhere, from Navy Times to Air Force Times, and the enforcement machine that has already killed two men in two weeks kept right on running.

Here is what moved, and what this week demands.

ACTION THIS WEEK

• Ask your Representative to cosponsor the bipartisan Afghanistan TPS Act. Reps. Crow, Liccardo, Salazar, and Bacon introduced it last week to protect Afghans from deportation through July 1, 2029. Read our full analysis.

• Organizations: Comment on the proposed EAD rule, and add your organization’s name. Use the sign-on and the ready-to-file draft comment. The deadline is August 4

• Register for the Global Alliance Update. Join the August 12 virtual briefing with Local Staff International, where we release The Allied Ledger and new Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff. Sign up today!

• Read and share the pathways tool and Protection Promised. Send V-PRIC, Protection Promised, and its Practitioner’s Companion to any Afghan family or any attorney with an Afghan client.

• Grab the “Promises Aren’t Temporary” shirt and wear your support. We just launched the Afghanistan TPS Act tee, and wearing it turns quiet support into something members of Congress can see.

A BIPARTISAN BILL TO STOP DEPORTING THE ALLIES WE PROMISED TO PROTECT

This week, Representatives Jason Crow, Sam Liccardo, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Don Bacon introduced the Afghanistan TPS Act of 2026, a bill to designate Afghanistan for Temporary Protected Status from the day it becomes law through July 1, 2029. Two Democrats and two Republicans, one plain idea. Afghans who are already here should not be deported to a country run by the Taliban while their cases work through a system that has been deliberately and systematically slowed. AfghanEvac is proud to support it.

The administration terminated Afghanistan’s prior TPS designation. Congress is now moving to restore that protection by statute and place it beyond the reach of another executive reversal.

Afghan allies risked everything for this country. They deserve to rest easy and pursue the American dream while their immigration paperwork catches up, not live with fear hanging over every doctor’s appointment, every lease signing, and every school drop-off.

TPS is not the whole answer, and it is not a substitute for the visas and the pathways these families earned. It is a floor. It says the United States will not deport the people who stood beside its troops while it decides whether to keep the rest of its promise.

Read our Analysis

We will be pushing this hard. A bipartisan bill is only as strong as the coalition behind it, so the ask this week is direct. Write your Representative and tell them to cosponsor the Afghanistan TPS Act. More than 200,000 Afghans came through the vetting pipeline on the strength of America’s promise, and tens of thousands of them are living here now under a status this administration is trying to strip. This bill is a chance for Congress to say no. It is a choice, and this time it is the right one.

Ask your Representative to Cosponsor

We also launched the Promises Aren’t Temporary tee. Wear it to a town hall, a district office, or around your community, and turn quiet support into visible advocacy. Every dollar goes back into this fight.

Grab your shirt today!

Why it matters: Every Afghan family living under threat of deportation is one policy reversal away from being sent back to the people they fought. TPS would take that weapon off the table for the length of the designation, and a bipartisan bill is the strongest signal yet that keeping this promise is not a partisan act.

WE BUILT A TOOL, AND IT BROKE THROUGH

Last month we launched V-PRIC, the Visa Pathways and Relocation Information Center, a sourced and continuously verified guide to visa categories and resettlement options across 197 countries, with a Find My Pathway assistant that answers questions in more than 40 languages. This week, V-PRIC reached one of the audiences most capable of getting it into the right hands. Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times, Marine Corps Times, and Military Times carried the story, along with Ariana News and outlets across the Afghan diaspora.

That reach is operational. Veterans, attorneys, caseworkers, and families cannot use a tool they do not know exists. Every story expands the network connecting an Afghan at risk with credible information about what may still be possible.

Why it matters: Advocacy fails when the people who need help cannot find it. A tool covered from the Army Times to Ariana News is a tool that reaches the veteran, the caseworker, and the family in hiding, which is the entire point of building it.

Check out the V-PRIC today

THE DORCAS FIGHT CONTINUES

The government’s effort to freeze Afghan cases is now in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, where its appeal of the Dorcas ruling is moving, docket 26-1703.

A reminder: On July 15, Chief Judge John McConnell denied the government’s emergency request to pause USCIS adjudications while it appeals, so for now U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services must keep processing green card, work permit, citizenship, and asylum cases for Afghans and for others swept into the travel ban. The credit for that belongs to the litigators at Democracy Forward. The appeal continues, and we are watching the docket.

Last week, they asked the First Circuit for an emergency stay and responses are due August 3rd. We’ll let you know the outcome.

Why it matters: Every application adjudicated is a family moving closer to stability. The appeal continues, but this ruling proves that litigation can keep pathways open while the broader fight proceeds.

Visit our Litigation Tracker

A WARNING FOR FAMILIES: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ROWI “WELLNESS-CHECK” CALLS

The Office of Refugee Resettlement is conducting outreach through what it calls the Refugee Outreach Wellness Initiative, or ROWI. Reporting indicates that these calls may seek personal information about respondents, their households, immigration status, employment, and other circumstances. We are concerned about that.

The government describes the initiative as an effort to identify needs and connect people with support. Afghan families and advocates have raised legitimate questions about how the information will be stored, used, and shared.

Before providing sensitive information, verify the caller’s identity, ask for written information about the program, and consider speaking with a qualified immigration attorney or accredited representative. Do not rely solely on caller ID, and do not assume that participation is required without first getting clear information.

Why it matters: A call framed as a wellness check is still a request for information, made by a government that has spent this year trying to track, detain, and remove the very people it once promised to protect. Knowing you can decline is protection. Say little, confirm who is calling, and get counsel before you share anything.

ANOTHER WARNING: THE USCIS NOTICES THAT QUIETLY CLOSE AFGHAN ASYLUM CASES

Multiple immigration attorneys have reported a concerning problem affecting some Afghans who filed for asylum after their Chief of Mission approval was revoked.

According to those practitioners, USCIS has uploaded an “affirmation notice” to some applicants’ online accounts requiring a signed response within a specified period. The notice may appear without a prominent alert that action is required. Attorneys have also reported cases being closed after the deadline passed, including some cases in which a response had reportedly been submitted.

AfghanEvac has not confirmed that this reflects a nationwide USCIS policy, but we’ve heard about these from multitple sources and the reports are serious enough to warrant immediate caution.

Check your myUSCIS account regularly, including the documents tab. If you see an affirmation notice, closure notice, or unfamiliar document, contact your immigration attorney immediately. Save copies of every notice, submission, and confirmation.

Why it matters: Missing an online notice may put an asylum application at risk. Do not navigate this process without qualified legal help.

This is general information, not individualized legal advice.

HOUSE JUDICIARY REVIVED THE WORST ANTI-ASYLUM BILL IN A DECADE

On July 21, the House Judiciary Committee marked up and advanced H.R. 9773, the “Permanent Trump Secure Border Act,” a revived version of the old HR2.

The bill would make sweeping changes to asylum screening, detention, humanitarian parole, and procedures involving unaccompanied children. It would raise barriers for many asylum seekers and significantly restrict the government’s ability to establish broad humanitarian parole programs.

Supporters argue that the legislation would deter unlawful migration and prevent abuse of the asylum system. Opponents, including our partners at Church World Service and more than 100 organizations, warn that it would block legitimate protection claims, expand detention, and close emergency pathways for people facing persecution.

For future mission partners, the parole restrictions are especially consequential. Parole is imperfect and temporary, but it remains one of the few emergency tools available when ordinary pathways fail.

Read our analysis

Why it matters: This bill has not become law, but it offers a blueprint for dramatically narrowing humanitarian protection across the immigration system.

PAKISTAN’S DEPORTATION MACHINE SPEEDS UP

Pakistan has intensified its deportation drive against Afghans, with more than 4,000 people pushed back across the border in a single day and a new enforcement push underway. Afghans with pending U.S. cases are being swept up alongside the undocumented, and families who fled the Taliban are being returned to it. This is the same pattern we have flagged for months, now running faster.

This is the population caught in the vise. Afghan P-1 and P-2 applicants to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, cleared through much of the process and then stranded when the pipeline stopped, are now sending coordinated appeals to AfghanEvac and our partners, pleading for their cases to be restarted before Pakistan deports them. The contrast with our own government matters. Under the last administration, the State Department pressed Islamabad directly to protect pipeline Afghans. This one has been unwilling to engage the same way, even as Pakistan accelerates. Allies caught between a government deporting them and a government that will not issue their visas are running out of ground to stand on.

Why it matters: A stalled American pipeline is not neutral when people are being returned to Taliban control. The United States still has tools it can use, including direct diplomatic engagement with Pakistan, emergency case prioritization, and renewed processing for those already in the pipeline. Delay is a policy choice. So is action.

ON THE HILL

This week, we briefed Democratic and Republican offices in both chambers on the TPS bill, the Pakistan emergency, and the reported USCIS notices affecting Afghan asylum applicants. Those conversations are helping turn community reports into congressional questions, oversight, and legislation.

Check out our updated policy page

SAVE THE DATE: FREE LEGAL HELP IN THE BAY AREA ON AUGUST 9

On Sunday, August 9, the Bay Area Afghan Legal and Community Resource Clinic runs from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM at the DoubleTree by Hilton Pleasanton at the Club, 7050 Johnson Drive, Pleasanton.

Hosted by CAIR-LA, the Afghan-American Community Organization, and state, local, and national partners, it offers Afghan families free one-on-one legal consultations with immigration attorneys, in language.

I will be there from 12:00 to 2:00 PM for a town hall on where things stand and what comes next, and to hear directly from the community. If you are in the Bay Area, come by, and tell a family who needs it.

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

The wellness-check calls

• Federal agency seeks to interview Afghan immigrants, alarming refugee groups -- The Washington Post

• ‘Nefarious’ Trump plan to interview Afghan immigrants sparks deportation fears -- The Independent

• U.S. government plan to interview Afghan refugees raises deportation concerns -- Ariana News

The Afghanistan TPS Act

• Democrats and Republicans Want To Extend TPS for Afghans -- Newsweek

• Bipartisan House effort would let Afghans stay in the U.S. -- WORLD

The pathways tool

• New AI tool helps Afghan allies at risk find visa pathways -- Military Times

• New AI tool helps Afghan allies at risk find visa pathways -- Navy Times

• New AI tool helps Afghan allies at risk find visa pathways -- Air Force Times

• New AI tool helps Afghans identify visa pathways -- Ariana News

Congress and the border bill

• Markup of H.R. 9773, Permanent Trump Secure Border Act -- House Judiciary Committee

• House Republicans move to make Trump’s border policies permanent -- Fox News

The enforcement machine

• A Perfect ICE Storm: New Recruits, Less Training, and Deadly Shootings -- The Dispatch

• ICE Orders an End to Vehicle Stops After Deadly Shootings by Federal Agents -- The Intercept

Pakistan and the region

• Afghans Under Pressure Again In New Pakistani Deportation Drive -- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

• Over 4,000 Afghans Return from Pakistan in One Day as Deportations Intensify -- KabulNow

Five years after Kabul fell, the lines of this fight are becoming clearer. On one side of the Capitol, four members of Congress from both parties said plainly that America should not deport the people who stood with us. On the other, a committee advanced legislation that would close critical protection pathways.

That is the struggle in a single week. But the introduction of the Afghanistan TPS Act is proof that pressure works, bipartisan action remains possible, and this promise still has defenders. The promise remains unpaid. We intend to collect.

They said that the United States should not deport the Afghans who stood beside its troops. The Afghanistan TPS Act, now filed as H.R. 9899, is that idea written into law, and this is a special edition to explain it, because it is the clearest good news our community has had in months and it will only become law if we make it.

Here is what is inside.

• What the bill does, in plain language, and the one date that matters.

• How Temporary Protected Status actually shields an Afghan family, and what it does not do.

• What comes next, from the House cosponsorship push to a Senate companion in the works.

Start with the action, then read on.

ACTION TODAY

Tell your members of Congress to cosponsor and pass the Afghanistan TPS Act. Go to afghanevac.org/afghanistan-tps. It takes thirty seconds, it routes your message to your Representative and both Senators, and it presses them to move H.R. 9899. Afghans who fought for this country should not live in fear of deportation, and this is the fastest way to say so to the offices that can act.

Act now!

Thank the members of Congress who introduced this bill

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WHAT THE BILL DOES

The Afghanistan TPS Act, H.R. 9899, designates Afghanistan for Temporary Protected Status, known as TPS, from the day it becomes law through July 1, 2029. That is the whole engine of the bill, and its power is in its simplicity. For the length of the designation, an Afghan national already in the United States could not be deported to Afghanistan, and could apply for authorization to work legally while here.

The bill exists because of a choice this administration made. In 2025 the Department of Homeland Security terminated Afghanistan’s TPS, stripping a protection that recognized the obvious, that you cannot safely return people to a regime that hunts former allies and erases women from public life. Layered on top of a travel ban that bars Afghan entry and a relocation pipeline the administration has deliberately slowed, the termination left tens of thousands of Afghans who are lawfully here staring at the exits. Congress is now moving to restore by statute what the executive branch took away by choice, and to set it beyond the reach of the next political whim.

Two Democrats and two Republicans introduced it together. Reps. Jason Crow, Sam Liccardo, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Don Bacon are the lead sponsors, and that bipartisan lineup is not decoration. It is the signal that keeping this promise was never supposed to be a partisan act, and it is the reason the bill can move. AfghanEvac is proud to endorse it.

Read our statement

HOW IT PROTECTS OUR ALLIES

Think about what a designation changes in an ordinary week for an Afghan family. Right now, every doctor’s appointment, every lease signing, and every school drop-off carries a low hum of fear that a status change or a knock at the door could send them back to the Taliban. TPS takes that specific weapon off the table for the length of the designation. It is protection from removal and a lawful way to work, which together are the difference between a family that can plan and a family that cannot.

The human stakes are not abstract. We have documented former Afghan security personnel murdered within days of returning to Afghanistan. These are people who wore a uniform beside American forces, who were promised safety in exchange for that service, and who are now told their protection was temporary in the cruelest sense of the word. TPS says the United States will not be the government that hands them back.

Be clear about what TPS is and what it is not. It is a floor, not a finish line. It does not grant a green card, it does not create a path to citizenship on its own, and it is not a substitute for the Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs, and the permanent pathways these families earned through their service. What it does is stop the bleeding while the larger promise is kept. It buys time, protects work and dignity, and keeps families together and inside the system rather than pushed underground or onto a plane. For an ally living one policy reversal away from deportation, a floor is not a small thing. It is the ground to stand on.

WHAT COMES NEXT

The path is a cosponsorship fight, and it starts in the House. A bill with four bipartisan sponsors becomes a bill that leadership cannot ignore only when the cosponsor list grows long and loud. That is the work in front of us this month. Every added name, from either party, raises the cost of letting this stall and builds the record that carries it to a vote. This is where readers come in, because members count the messages from home, and a constituent asking their own representative to cosponsor is the single most effective thing you can do today.

The effort does not stop at one chamber. There is an effort underway to get a companion bill introduced in the Senate, so that protection can move on both sides of the Capitol at once. We will name the lead office and the timing here as soon as it is public. When that companion drops, the ask widens, and the message tool at afghanevac.org/afghanistan-tps already reaches all three of your offices, so you are ready.

TPS is one piece of a larger fight, and it belongs next to the durable fixes. The Enduring Welcome Act would protect the relocation pipeline itself, so that the promise does not lurch from crisis to crisis. TPS is the emergency brake. That is the road. We are pushing both, because our allies need the protection that stops a deportation tomorrow and the law that ends the uncertainty for good.

Five years after Kabul fell, the argument has not changed, and neither have we. America made a promise to the people who stood with its troops, and this week four members of Congress from both parties said plainly that we should not deport them. That is a choice, and this time it is the right one. Now it needs a coalition big enough to become law.

Go tell your members of Congress to cosponsor the Afghanistan TPS Act. The promise is not broken. It is unpaid, and this is how we pay it. We are focused. We are building. And we are not going anywhere.

Act today

There was ground-level work too, from a San Diego meeting with a state lawmaker and Hazara community leaders to a legal clinic in Riverside.

Here is what moved, and what this week demands.

• Protection Promised is out, the first in our Five Years On series of original reports, and today we pair it with a Practitioner’s Companion built for the courtroom.

• A rebuilt website and a new set of tools put the full record, the pathways, and the litigation in one place.

• The Dorcas win held, and a judge told the government it must keep processing Afghan cases.

• On the ground in San Diego with Assemblymember Chris Ward and Hazara leaders, and in Riverside alongside immigration attorney Spojmie Nasiri.

• Not only building but recognizing the moment. ICE officers killed two men in a week during traffic stops, and after a brief pause, the President ordered the traffic stops to continue.

Start with the ways you can take action, then read on.

ACTION THIS WEEK

• Read and share Protection Promised, and get the Companion to counsel. Send Protection Promised and its new Practitioner’s Companion to any attorney with an Afghan client, and point them to The Ledger, V-PRIC, and the litigation tracker.

• Comment on the proposed EAD rule, and add your organization’s name. We have launched a new effort with a sign-on and a ready-to-file draft organizational comment. Organizations can sign on today! The comment deadline is August 4.

• Register for the AfghanEvac Tools Demonstration. Join us Tuesday, July 21 at 10 a.m. Pacific for a live walkthrough of the rebuilt website and the new tools, including the Ledger, V-PRIC, the litigation tracker, the Enduring Welcome page, and the Practitioner's Companion. Register today.

• Register for the Global Alliance Update. Join the August 12 virtual briefing with Local Staff International, where we will release The Allied Ledger and new Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff. Sign up at afghanevac.org/global-alliance-update.

PROTECTION PROMISED: THE RECORD, BUILT FOR THE COURTROOM

For four years, Afghan allies have been fighting a lie, that they were never properly vetted. Last week, we handed every attorney defending them the receipts. On July 15, we launched Protection Promised, the first in our series of original reports marking the fifth anniversary of the fall of Kabul. Subtitled America’s Afghan Allies, from Welcome to Removal, it documents what the United States promised its wartime allies, what it built to keep that promise, and what it has dismantled since January 2025.

Read it today

This is not a briefing paper. It is a fully sourced evidentiary record, assembled so that counsel and plaintiffs can file it in asylum and immigration proceedings, and in any other litigation where it helps. In one place, it lays out the specific commitments the government made across two administrations, in its own words and documents; how Afghan evacuees and Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) recipients were actually screened and vetted, drawn from the government’s own records rather than the political narrative; and what that record establishes for Afghans defending their status today.

Here is why it matters. When an Afghan father stands in an immigration courtroom in Texas and a judge asks who this man is, the answer should not depend on a headline. It should rest on the government’s own record of the promise it made and the vetting it performed. Protection Promised puts that record in the room.

Today, with this update, we are releasing its companion. The Practitioner’s Companion, subtitled Relief and Legal Standards for Afghan Nationals in U.S. Immigration Court, turns the record into legal argument. Where Protection Promised assembles the evidence, the Companion maps it onto the governing standards for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture, and walks counsel through the procedural traps that decide real cases, including the one-year asylum filing deadline. It was written by Jeremiah Johnson, an AfghanEvac team member with 23 years of experience as an immigration attorney, including 8 years as an immigration judge and time as an asylum officer with the Department of Homeland Security. Read one for the evidence, and the other for how to use it.

Get the Companion

This is the first of several reports coming in the weeks ahead. If you are an attorney, use them. If you know an attorney, send them along. Five years on, the promise is still ours to keep, and now the evidence, along with the roadmap for using it, is in everyone’s hands.

WE REBUILT THE WEBSITE INTO AN ARSENAL

Protection Promised did not arrive alone.

Our website has been completely rebuilt to equip allies and all those who stand with them with the resources, tools, and information they need today, and with a historical record of what got us here, to prepare us for what’s next.

The Ledger is the running record of America’s promise to its Afghan wartime allies, a searchable archive of more than 316 primary-source government documents from the United States and 34 allied nations, plus reports from non-governmental partners, the litigation, and the Afghanistan War Commission record. It is also where the Five Years On special reports live, starting with Protection Promised.

V-PRIC, the Visa Pathways and Relocation Information Center, is a sourced, continuously verified guide to U.S. visa categories and resettlement options across 197 countries, with a Find My Pathway assistant that answers questions in more than 40 languages.

Our new litigation tracker follows the active cases that decide whether the pipeline moves.

Our Enduring Welcome page lays out, in plain terms, where the relocation program stands.

Our updated Resources page pulls the help families, advocates, attorneys, and journalists actually need into one current, navigable hub.

And our refreshed Policy page lays out the full agenda, organized by agency and by bill, from the Enduring Welcome Act to the Afghan Adjustment Act, with section-by-section breakdowns and clear ways to engage.

Check out the updated site

Why it matters: Advocacy fails when the facts are scattered and the tools are hard to find. A rebuilt, searchable home for the record, the pathways, and the litigation means an attorney, a caseworker, or a stranded family can find what they need in one place, on their own time.

JOIN US TUESDAY FOR A LIVE WALKTHROUGH

On Tuesday, July 21 at 10 a.m. Pacific, we are hosting a live tools demonstration for advocates, attorneys, caseworkers, journalists, and anyone who wants to see how the rebuilt afghanevac.org works in practice. We will walk through the Ledger, V-PRIC, the litigation tracker, the Enduring Welcome page, Protection Promised, and the Practitioner’s Companion. Bring your questions.

Sign up now

THE DORCAS WIN HELD, AND THE COURT TOLD THE GOVERNMENT TO KEEP PROCESSING

On July 15, Chief Judge John McConnell of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island denied the government’s emergency request to pause USCIS adjudications while its appeal moves forward, keeping in place a ruling won by the team at Democracy Forward. That means U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) must keep processing applications for Afghans and for nationals of the other countries swept into the travel ban, including pending green card, work permit, citizenship, and asylum cases. Some affected applicants have already started receiving decisions.

This win belongs to Democracy Forward. Congratulations to their litigation team, and our thanks. Their work is the reason USCIS is still deciding these cases today. It does not end the travel ban, it does not restart overseas refugee processing, and the government’s appeal continues. But the administration chose to try to freeze these cases twice, first by policy memo and then by emergency motion, and twice it has been told no. The proposed EAD rule is the next attempt to accomplish by regulation what the courts have blocked by litigation, which is exactly why the comment deadline on August 4 matters.

Visit our explainer

Why it matters: Every week USCIS keeps adjudicating is a week that Afghan families move closer to stability instead of deeper into limbo. Court orders only help if the government complies, so we will be watching.

THE UN CONDEMNS THE PURGE OF IMMIGRATION JUDGES

On July 16, two United Nations human rights experts, the Special Rapporteurs on the independence of judges and lawyers and on the human rights of migrants, condemned the mass removal of U.S. immigration judges and the politicization of the immigration courts. Since January 2025, at least 135 judges have been terminated, including 113 immigration judges, 13 assistant chief immigration judges, and 9 appellate judges, most without cause or individualized explanation. The data cited by the experts show that the removals were far from random. Of 78 removed judges with available data, 65 had higher-than-average asylum grant rates, and judges with backgrounds in immigrant defense or humanitarian work were removed at disproportionate rates. Only one judge appointed by a Democratic administration remains on the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Read this alongside the mass hearing dockets we have documented, where a single judge is handed 100 or more cases in a single morning, and the design is clear. The administration chose to strip out the judges most likely to grant protection, then flood the ones who remain. “Foreign nationals facing deportation to a threat of torture, persecution, or death must be able to present their case in front of an independent and impartial body,” the experts wrote. That is precisely the body being hollowed out.

Why it matters: Afghan allies defending their status do it in these courtrooms. When the government removes the judges most willing to grant asylum and buries the rest under mass dockets, an Afghan family’s day in court becomes a formality. It is why we brought Jeremiah Johnson, a former immigration judge with 23 years practicing immigration law, onto our team, and why Protection Promised exists, to hand counsel a record that a fair judge can act on.

A SECRET COURT, SWITCHED ON FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THIRTY YEARS

On July 16, the federal government activated the Alien Terrorist Removal Court for the first time in its history. Created in 1996 and never once used, this court is built to deport people on classified evidence, shown to the judge in secret, that the accused never sees and cannot contest. Chief Judge Joan Ericksen issued the first order after a closed hearing. We do not know who the target is, what they are accused of, or what the government claims to hold against them, and under the rules of this court, we may never find out.

Why it matters: This is the machinery of secret deportation, switched on at the very moment the administration is branding vetted Afghan allies as security risks. A person cannot defend himself against evidence he is not allowed to see. For allies already smeared as unvetted, a court that runs on secret evidence is not a hypothetical, it is the next courtroom, and it is one more reason the sourced record we just published matters.

ICE KILLED TWO MEN, THEN THE PRESIDENT ORDERED THE STOPS TO CONTINUE

In the span of a week, ICE officers shot and killed two men during vehicle stops. On July 8 in Houston, officers hunting a different suspect stopped a white van and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a longtime homebuilder who had lived in the United States for 35 years, had no criminal record, and by his family’s account was close to obtaining legal status. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says he tried to ram an officer. His family says he was a construction crew owner who may have feared that men in unmarked cars had come to steal his tools. On July 13 in Biddeford, Maine, officers killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of their warrant, and left behind a sedan with four bullet holes in the windshield.

For a moment, the administration blinked. Secretary Mullin suspended most ICE vehicle stops nationwide, pending additional training. Then, on July 15, President Trump reversed the pause and ordered the stops to resume. Restraint lasted 24 hours. The DHS Inspector General and the Harris County District Attorney are now investigating the Houston killing.

Why it matters: This is the same enforcement machine that detained Nazeer Paktiawal, an Afghan Special Forces veteran, and left him dead in custody in under 24 hours. It is the reason Battle Buddies exists. When the government kills a man it was not even looking for, then cancels its own safety pause within 24 hours, it is telling every immigrant community, Afghan allies included, that restraint is optional. That is a choice, and it can be unmade.

IN SAN DIEGO WITH ASSEMBLYMEMBER CHRIS WARD AND HAZARA LEADERS

On July 14, we sat down in San Diego with California Assemblymember Chris Ward and leaders of the local Hazara community. The Hazara people have faced targeted persecution in Afghanistan for generations, and that danger did not end when the cameras left Kabul. The families building lives here carry the weight of relatives still hiding, still waiting, still at risk.

The conversation focused on what state and local leaders can do while the federal pathways stay choked: recognizing the specific threats the Hazara community faces, connecting families to resources, and standing with San Diego’s Afghan community as a matter of public record. Assemblymember Ward listened, made some commitments, and we left with a shared understanding of the path ahead. San Diego has long been one of the country’s most important landing places for Afghan allies, and local partnership is how a national promise gets kept on the ground.

IN RIVERSIDE FOR THE AFGHAN COMMUNITY LEGAL AND RESOURCE CLINIC

On Saturday, I spoke at the Afghan Community Legal and Resource Clinic in Riverside, a regional event hosted by the Afghan-American Community Organization and other partners serving Afghan families. I joined immigration attorney Spojmie Nasiri for a conversation about the shifting political and legal landscape, what families are seeing on the ground, and how the community can advocate for itself. The clinic gave families free access to legal consultations, community resources, and support services in one place.

Spojmie and I both emphasized repeatedly how important it is to ensure people have qualified immigration attorneys, not unlicensed or unqualified “immigration specialists.” helping them navigate their cases.

These events are the connective tissue of this work. Policy is decided in Washington, but it is lived in living rooms in Riverside, Roanoke, and Rochester. Showing up, telling the truth about where things stand, and pointing people to real help is how trust gets built and kept.

CAMP AS SAYLIYAH: STILL WAITING, AND NOW ON A CLOCK

Roughly 1,100 Afghans remain stranded at Camp As Sayliyah (CAS) in Qatar, most of them families, many of them already vetted and approved. Members of Congress recently met directly with residents in a virtual town hall and heard about children without schooling, inadequate medical care, and shelters improvised after missile debris fell near the camp during the year’s regional war. The administration has said the camp will shut down on September 30, but there remains no plan for the people stranded there. The danger is not theoretical or confined to the past: residents tell AfghanEvac that missiles are once again flying overhead, and they have shared video with us documenting the renewed attacks from Iran.

Why it matters: These are not strangers at the gate. They are people the United States already cleared, housed on a State Department platform, and promised safety. Approved families should not be living on a countdown clock in a camp the government is trying to close before it has delivered them anywhere safe. A closure without a destination is not a plan, it is an abandonment, and it can still be undone.

PLEASE STOP TRAVELING BACK TO AFGHANISTAN

The pressure to give up and go home is real, and more Afghans are making that choice. We understand the exhaustion behind it. We are asking you, please, not to. Last week, Nangyalai, a former member of the CIA-backed Khost Protection Force, was shot dead by unknown gunmen in Khost, roughly a week after he returned from the United States. He is not the only one. Human rights monitors and Afghan media have documented continuing killings of former Afghan security personnel across multiple provinces, despite the Taliban’s public promise of amnesty.

That promise is a lie, and it is being used against you. The administration points to the Afghans who go back as evidence that the country is safe enough to return people to. It is not. A man who survived the war and reached America was murdered within days of going home. If you can hold on, hold on. Do not let despair, or a false claim of safety, cost you your life.

BATTLE BUDDIES: SHE WALKED IN BESIDE HIM

Katie Estes did not have to think long about answering the call. A former Navy officer, she learned that an Afghan ally reaching the final stretch of his Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) journey needed a Battle Buddy to walk in beside him. He turned out to be a former airman in the Afghan Air Force, and a fellow Delta Air Lines employee in her own area.

Now a systems operations manager at Delta, Katie stood with him through every step of a USCIS appointment that ran the entire morning. “Having her there and walking in with me really boosted my confidence before the appointment,” he said. He saw the symmetry in their paths, both shaped by military service and both now at Delta, and added, “I truly appreciate the time she spent with me, and I want to thank her for her service as well.” Katie, who spent the morning learning his story and the life he has built here, felt the same. “I want to thank him for everything he’s done for both Afghanistan and America,” she said.

Why it matters: This is what the SIV program was built to do, to keep the promise we made and to give our allies room to put down roots. Katie and our ally crossed paths at exactly the right moment, and her presence turned a bureaucratic morning into reassurance. That is the whole idea behind Battle Buddies, and it is why the no-detention record holds wherever our volunteers show up. There are hundreds more stories waiting for someone to step into.

Sign up for Battle Buddies TODAY

IN THE NEWS

Stories from the past week.

The Dorcas ruling

• U.S. Judge Strikes Down Four USCIS Policies Delaying Afghan Immigration Cases — Khaama Press

• RI federal judge denies Trump’s emergency stay request in asylum application freeze case — Rhode Island Current

The immigration courts

• USA: UN experts condemn arbitrary terminations of more than 100 immigration judges — UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

• Justice Department activates untested court for ‘alien terrorist’ deportations — PBS News

• The Alien Terrorist Removal Court’s First Case — Just Security

The ICE shootings

• ICE shootings in Biddeford, Maine, and Houston spark outcry — CNN

• Trump overturns pause of ICE vehicle stops implemented after Maine, Texas shootings — CBS News

Camp As Sayliyah and Qatar

• Lawmakers meet with Afghans stranded at State Department camp in Qatar — KPBS

The price of a visa

• U.S. Weighs Bond of $100,000 for Some Green-Card Applicants Abroad — The Wall Street Journal

Inside Afghanistan

• Former Afghan security force member killed in Khost days after returning from the US — Afghanistan International

The refugee double standard

• Inside Trump’s scramble to get White South Africans to the US as refugees — CNN

• How Trump’s ‘white preference’ saw 7,727 SA ‘refugees’ enter US while resident immigrants sidelined — Daily Maverick

Nearly five years after Kabul fell, the people who stood with America are still waiting, and last week we chose to arm the fight rather than mourn the anniversary.

• A report a lawyer can file.

• A toolkit anyone can use.

• A court that told the government no.

None of that finishes the mission, but all of it moves it, and every piece of it exists because people refused to accept that the promise was already broken. The promise is not broken. It is unpaid, and a debt can still be paid.

We are building. We are focused. And we are not going anywhere.