Afghans in Pakistan awaiting U.S. resettlement are in limbo

ISLAMABAD — Around midday one recent Wednesday, in a drab apartment block on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital, neighbors rushed to warn each other they’d seen police nearby. The building is inhabited almost entirely by Afghan families, and the alarm sent children who were playing in the hallway dashing into their apartments. A woman discreetly pulled her door shut, letting a neighbor padlock it from the outside. Another urged visitors to come in and told them to stay quiet.

Several minutes later, word spread that the coast was clear. Doors were unlocked and people reemerged from hiding. But for many Afghans like these, who fled across the border to Pakistan after the Taliban took power in August 2021, now is an especially precarious time. The Trump administration has halted the U.S. refugee program, Pakistan wants them out, and their lives may be at risk if they return to their own country.

Among those at risk of deportation are tens of thousands of Afghans who were waiting in Pakistan for decisions about their U.S. resettlement applications when President Trump issued his executive order in January suspending the U.S. refugee program. The order pauses the resettlement process responsible for vetting Afghans and other refugees who seek to relocate legally to the United States.

The new Pakistani and U.S. orders have converged to make these Afghans’ already uncertain prospects more tenuous than ever. Even before these orders were issued, Amnesty International was criticizing Pakistani authorities for “police night raids, harassment and arbitrary detention of hundreds of Afghan refugees, including women and children, in the capital city.” It says more than 800 Afghans were detained in Islamabad in the first week of January alone.

A slow-moving process and a recent crackdown

Those most in limbo are Afghans who were affiliated with the United States and who fled to Pakistan after the Taliban took over in August 2021. Early on, the Taliban promised amnesty for former Afghan government officials and those who worked with Western forces — but the pledge hasn’t been respected and many Afghans in these groups preferred to take no chances.

They include a 38-year-old former employee of Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry, who requested anonymity for fear of Taliban reprisal after working closely with U.S. colleagues for more than a decade. He relocated to Pakistan with his family in early 2022 so their resettlement application could move forward from a third country, as required.

He expected resettlement to be a speedy process, in part because he was referred to the refugee admissions program by a U.S. government employee. Now, three years later, he has spent all his savings and must borrow money from friends and relatives to get by. He cannot get a Pakistani work permit. “I’m somehow stuck in life. I can’t make a decision about my days, weeks and months,” he said. “These things are ruining me, to be honest.”

U.S. resettlement applicants in Pakistan had already been raising the alarm about a slow-moving process. The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad only began processing Afghan refugee cases in the summer of 2023, and a resettlement support center under the U.N.’s International Organization of Migration became operational in April 2024, according to a U.S. Embassy official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the Afghan resettlement issue with the Pakistani government. The embassy could not provide a figure for the number of Afghan resettlement cases pending in 2025.

After an uptick in terrorist attacks two years ago, Pakistan began cracking down on migrants without legal status. The government announced what it called its Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan to deport migrants lacking documentation in October 2023, and then started deporting Afghans en masse later that same year, vowing to return anyone who did not have the requisite paperwork. The United Nations Refugee Agency reported that 9,000 were deported from Pakistan to Afghanistan in 2024, with 1,200 deportations in December alone. That same year, 10,500 Afghans were arrested or detained.

In all, 813,000 Afghans in Pakistan made a return to Afghanistan between October 2023 and mid-January 2025, according to the agency.

Hundreds of thousands had come to Pakistan after the 2021 Taliban takeover, some with the sole purpose of applying for resettlement elsewhere. This presented a challenge that Pakistani officials say the country was uepared to handle. Although Pakistan has had plenty of experience in the last half-century taking in Afghan refugees, the majority did not arrive for the purpose of a stopover on their way elsewhere.

When it comes to processing resettlement candidates, “We never had any systems in place,” explains Abbas Khan, commissioner for Afghan refugees in Islamabad. “We never had such a big number of refugees who would transit through Pakistan.”  

Pakistan does not have a domestic law to provide a framework for refugee claims and the country has handled Afghan arrivals over the past four decades on an ad hoc basis. Pakistan has held two exercises since 2006 to register Afghan refugees and provide them with temporary residence documents, the most recent ending in 2018. 

Pakistan is specifically ordering Afghans out of Islamabad

Most Afghans see no possibility of a legal future in Pakistan — especially in the capital, Islamabad.

Late last year, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi announced that no Afghans would be allowed to reside in Islamabad without permission from the government.

Before this, the U.S. gave Pakistani authorities the names of around 24,000 Afghans in the United States resettlement pipeline and requested they not be deported, according to Mumtaz Baloch, former spokesperson for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Many Afghans seeking resettlement choose to stay in or near the capital for convenience and proximity to foreign embassies and Pakistani government offices.

Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s new directive calls for resettlement applicants to be moved out of Islamabad and neighboring Rawalpindi by the end of March. It doesn’t specify whether they’ll be allowed to settle elsewhere in Pakistan.

Last month, UNHCR and the IOM in Pakistan issued a joint statement expressing their concern about the relocation of Afghans from Islamabad and seeking clarity from the government about the details of the plan. 

Afghans have navigated a tenuous existence in Pakistan for decades

Pakistan has a long history of accepting Afghan refugees, who began arriving in huge numbers more than 40 years ago. Millions of Afghans crossed the border during the Soviet war in their country, the civil war that followed in the early 1990s and during the first period of Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001. Many have stayed for generations.

But Pakistani authorities also have made it clear for years that they would like the Afghans to leave. In 2000, Pakistan shut its border with Afghanistan altogether to try and stem the flow. Harassment, discrimination and persecution of Afghans is commonplace.

In the neighborhood outside Islamabad, some Afghans awaiting resettlement had cleared all the necessary rounds of U.S. interviews and were only awaiting a flight to the United States when President Trump issued his executive order.
 
Maiwand Alami Afghan, the leader of a local community organization for Afghans, says he has received hundreds of calls and messages from frantic Afghans trying to understand what the order means for their cases. He urges patience and faith.  

“Hopefully President Trump’s mind will be changed,” he says. “We should wait. This is the only way.”

At least one legal challenge is in the works against the new executive order, and some Republican lawmakers have made clear they support an exception for Afghans who helped the U.S. But late last month, speaking to CBS News’ Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan about Afghan refugees awaiting admission to the U.S., Vice President Vance referred to vetting and safety concerns when pressed on Afghan refugee resettlement.

Under former President Joe Biden, the United States vowed to prioritize the protection of Afghan refugees — including those who worked directly with U.S. forces — through the Operation Allies Welcome program. Biden authorized the admission of up to 125,000 refugees from around the world for 2025, with 30,000 to 45,000 from South Asia and the Near East. Through Dec. 31, 2024, the United States also had a quota of 38,500 Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans who worked directly with U.S. forces.

The difficult limbo continues

Trump’s new executive order will likely force some Afghans to choose between staying in Pakistan illegally or returning to Afghanistan, where they fear for their lives with the Taliban in power.  

This was the choice confronting a former employee of a U.S.-supported tribunal that dealt with terrorism and national security cases. He did not want to be named for fear of Taliban reprisal.

His U.S. resettlement case was denied in December. Appealing the decision would have meant hiring a lawyer, which he could not afford. “I never imagined such an issue would arise for me,” he said. “From the time we received the denial, we were in shock.” But he had decided to remain in Pakistan.

Last month, he and his wife and children were arrested from their building on the outskirts of Islamabad and deported back across the Torkham border to Afghanistan, where they are now in hiding. 

Meanwhile, the former Afghan Department Ministry employee and his family have resigned themselves to waiting. He worries about his children and two college-age sisters being out of school — Afghan children awaiting resettlement cannot register to attend Pakistani government-run schools and he can’t afford private school fees. He feels drained by the everyday logistics of his case, including navigating the bureaucracy of Afghan passport and Pakistani visa renewals.

The suspension of the U.S. refugee program feels personal, he says — in large part because he hadn’t imagined living anywhere else.

“I grew up with the American system,” he said. “Even if I don’t go to the U.S., I feel myself an American.”