Afghans who fled the Taliban, including some who helped the U.S. military during America’s 20-year war there, are facing the risk of deportation as the Trump administration moves to end legal protections for them.
One program called temporary protected status, or TPS, that Afghans have used to reside in the U.S. and escape Taliban threats to their lives will expire next month, while the Trump administration already ended another program called “parole” and sent out mass notices telling those with parole to self-deport.
While Afghans who came to the U.S. during the official military evacuation are supposed to be exempt from the parole termination, at least a couple accidentally got termination notices. Furthermore, many came after the evacuation and so are not exempt.
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The twin developments with TPS and parole have stoked fear, confusion and anger among both the Afghans who risked their lives to help the military and the veterans who have scrambled to protect Afghans since the ignominious end of the war in 2021.
“We’re breaking our promises,” said Zia Ghafoori, a former Afghan interpreter who worked with Army Special Forces before coming to the U.S. in 2014 and now runs a nonprofit that aids other former interpreters. “We promised these people that if you stood with me, we will stand with you. But where are those promises today?”
The moves come amid the Trump administration’s broad immigration crackdown that includes militarizing the southern border, shipping migrants to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, and cutting off legal immigration pathways.
Despite President Donald Trump campaigning heavily on criticizing former President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Afghans have been caught in Trump’s anti-immigration policies since his first day in office in January when he suspended refugee admissions.
After the Taliban overran Kabul in 2021 amid the withdrawal, the military evacuated tens of thousands of Afghans who feared for their safety under Taliban rule. But tens of thousands more whose lives the Taliban has threatened were left behind, including Afghan allies who supported the U.S. war effort.
While Afghans who worked with the military are eligible to come to the U.S. through the Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, program, a yearslong backlog in that program prompted many Afghans to use other avenues to stay in the country while their SIV or asylum applications are being processed.
One of those avenues was TPS, which the Biden administration announced in 2022 it was offering to Afghans because their home country was experiencing “a collapsing public sector, a worsening economic crisis, drought, food and water insecurity, lack of access to health care, internal displacement, human rights abuses and repression by the Taliban, destruction of infrastructure, and increasing criminality.”
TPS protects migrants from deportation and provides them work authorization if they cannot return to their home country because of armed conflict, natural disaster or other dangerous conditions.
About 9,600 Afghans were covered by TPS as of September, according to the Congressional Research Service.
But the Trump administration is allowing TPS to expire for Afghans on May 20, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed this month after the decision was first reported by The New York Times.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “determined that Afghanistan no longer continues to meet the statutory requirements for its TPS designation and so she terminated TPS for Afghanistan,” department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
The statement provided no further explanation about what’s changed in Afghanistan that makes it ineligible for TPS.
“Afghanistan today is still reeling from Taliban rule, economic collapse and humanitarian disaster. Nothing about that reality has changed,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, said in a statement earlier this month. “Terminating protections for Afghans is a morally indefensible betrayal of allies who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us to advance American interests throughout our country’s longest war.”
A similar move by the Trump administration to end TPS for Venezuelans has been temporarily halted by a federal court.
Meanwhile, some other Afghans who grew frustrated with the bureaucratic delays tried to claim asylum by coming through the U.S. southern border. The Biden administration allowed them to enter the country while their asylum claims were being processed by granting them parole. It’s unclear exactly how many Afghans entered that way, but more than 900,000 migrants in total were paroled into the country through the Biden-era CBP One app.
But, a couple of weeks ago, the Trump administration started sending mass emails to those who used the CBP One app telling them their parole was being revoked and they needed to self-deport.
The emails went far and wide, seemingly with little verification that they were going to their intended recipients or migrants whose parole was actually revoked. For example, several U.S. citizens have reported getting the emails, apparently because they are immigration attorneys whose clients listed their lawyers’ email addresses on contact forms.
The DHS, in an unsigned statement, confirmed “some” migrants “received formal email notifications from the Department of Homeland Security.” Still, it added, Afghans who were paroled during Operation Allies Welcome, the official name of the 2021 evacuation, “are not subject to this termination at this time.”
But at least two Afghans who were part of Operation Allies Welcome received the termination notices, the Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing last week. The administration has sent “retraction” notices to them, it added in the filing.
Mistakes like that, though, have sowed widespread, paralyzing distrust and fear about the notices.
“How are people supposed to know if it really applies to them?” said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who leads #AfghanEvac, which has helped resettled Afghans since the evacuation. “It’s so confusing. It’s so confusing.”
“I absolutely think the confusion is part of the point,” he added.
Ghafoori said he has fielded numerous calls from Afghans panicked about the end of their parole or TPS designation in his capacity as the head of the Interpreting Freedom Foundation. In one call, Ghafoori said, a former Afghan commando’s children and wife were crying in the background as the man, who came through the southern border and received a parole termination email, pleaded for help.
“They kept begging me, like, ‘Where can we go? Please. Somebody needs to save us,'” Ghafoori said.
The only advice Ghafoori said he has been able to offer is to consult a lawyer, but for many Afghans, that is easier said than done.
“They left everything behind. They have no penny to pay for their legal fees,” Ghafoori said.
Advocates have been appealing to the Trump administration to reverse course.
This week, #AfghanEvac sent a letter to the DHS, the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House in part calling on the administration to provide formal guidance for Afghans in the U.S. to “prevent wrongful deportation or denial of services,” rescind the parole termination notices, and make clear that those with pending asylum claims do not need to leave.
Christian leaders have also been pushing specifically for protections against deportation for Afghan Christians.
Administration officials have so far brushed off those appeals.
“We didn’t end [TPS] proactively. It expired,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters this week when asked whether Trump was considering any exemptions for Afghans who face death or torture if they return to Afghanistan.
Leavitt also said Afghans can apply for asylum — which is what the CBP One app that the Trump administration scuttled was meant to help facilitate.
Coupled with impending cuts at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Trump administration’s disregard for Afghans has left veterans reeling, VanDiver said.
“If they’re cutting all these jobs at the VA, how are we supposed to get our care, especially in a time where there’s heightened tensions, a lot more stress and serious moral injury associated with how we’re treating our Afghan allies?” VanDiver said. “The overarching message that I’m getting as a veteran is that they like to use us for political points, but they don’t really care what we have to say.”
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