Veterans recoil at Trump plan to end Afghans' deportation protection

Boston Globe

25-05-2025

'If they attempt to deport the Afghans, you're going to see actual physical conflict between veterans and ICE,' predicted Matt Zeller, an Army veteran who became a prominent advocate for America's Afghan allies after his interpreter saved his life.
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Advocacy groups estimate that about 10,000 Afghans in the United States have been dependent on TPS while they navigate the lengthy and complex process for obtaining permanent residency, a process made all the more difficult, they say, by the absolute chaos that defined Afghanistan's collapse - and by the guidance they received from the U.S. government while trying to escape.
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By declaring his intent to end these protections, President Donald Trump risks alienating a key demographic - veterans of the war - at the same time he seeks to court them politically. His administration has intensified its scrutiny of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and demanded accountability for 13 U.S. troops and an estimated 170 Afghans killed in a suicide bombing at Kabul's airport as the evacuation, hastily orchestrated by the Biden administration, raced to a tragic end.
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The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Since returning to office, Trump has moved with speed and severity to eliminate legal immigration pathways, particularly humanitarian protections for those who fled crises abroad. In announcing an end to Afghans' TPS, the administration said there have been 'notable improvements' in Afghanistan under the Taliban's authoritarian rule - a claim the Afghans' advocates call fundamentally wrong.
'To me as a veteran, that's incredibly offensive,' said Andrew Sullivan, a former infantry company commander in Afghanistan who works with No One Left Behind, a veterans nonprofit that helps resettle Afghans and Iraqis who risked their lives to serve the U.S. government during its post-9/11 wars.
Sullivan, who last year addressed a Republican-led congressional hearing focused on Taliban reprisals, said he has met with Afghans who were attacked or tortured because of their U.S. affiliation - including one who is now a paraplegic. The Trump administration's assessment of the safety conditions in Afghanistan, he said, is 'laughable.'
'If there was ever a country that deserves TPS,' Sullivan insisted, 'it is Afghanistan.'
An international watchdog, Human Rights Watch, wrote in its 2025 report on Afghanistan that the situation there has 'worsened' over the past year as 'Taliban authorities intensified their crackdown on human rights, particularly against women and girls.' More than half the population needed urgent humanitarian assistance last year, the group found, including nearly 3 million people who faced 'emergency levels of hunger.'
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CASA, Inc., a national immigrant rights organization, has sued the Trump administration over its decision to end Afghans' TPS, arguing that Noem, as homeland security secretary, failed to follow 'statutorily mandated notice procedures' and callously endangered thousands of people 'living and working lawfully in this country.' The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, where the case will be heard, has set an expedited schedule.
The war's deadly endgame has been fiercely politicized. Trump tirelessly attacked President Joe Biden over the scenes of violence and despair that marked the two-week retreat from Kabul. In turn, Biden and his aides faulted Trump, who in his first term as president struck an exit deal with the Taliban that Biden maintained he was forced to carry out. Various investigations have determined that both administrations - and the two that came before them - each made costly mistakes.
Many Republicans who took part in the frantic effort to rescue Afghan allies now echo Trump's skepticism about the evacuees.
Since the FBI arrested an Afghan evacuee last year on charges he was planning an Islamic State-inspired Election Day attack, Trump's backers and fellow
immigration hard-liners have argued, without evidence, that a broader swath of the evacuee population poses a threat to U.S. national security.
Rep. Brian Mast (R-Florida), an Army veteran who lost both legs in an explosion while serving in Afghanistan and who convened last year's House hearing on Taliban reprisals, said he sees a stark contrast between Afghans who worked directly with U.S. forces - who he said would not be affected by the TPS termination - and those who did not.
'They're not one in the same,' Mast said in an interview. 'There's people that maybe worked on a base, maybe they worked at [TGI] Fridays on a base as a waiter or something like that. That doesn't mean that they were out on missions with me, rolling people up, right?'
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The congressman said he was not immediately concerned that the Taliban might seek to execute or punish such people if they returned to Afghanistan. 'I'll think about how I feel about that,' he said.
Shawn VanDiver, president and board chairman of #AfghanEvac, a coalition of groups that have worked to extricate and protect vulnerable Afghans, said he was appalled by what he called the 'political amnesia' of those such as Mast. It was only last year that the congressman 'sounded the alarm' about what might happen to America's Afghan allies if the U.S. government
failed to keep its promises to protect them.
'These are real lives, not talking points. And the idea that a cook, a janitor or a mechanic at Bagram [air base] deserves less protection than a combat interpreter is both morally bankrupt and strategically foolish,' said VanDiver, a Navy veteran. 'The Taliban doesn't do performance reviews. They don't check résumés. They kill people for being associated with us.'
'These are people whose only 'crime' is having lived, learned or worked in the United States. And now, with TPS terminated and no viable pathway forward, they face an impossible choice: return to persecution or risk deportation from the very country they trusted,' he said.
Many of those who escaped Afghanistan were simply lucky enough to make it through the panicked crowds thronging Kabul's airport as the Taliban closed in and began meting out violent retribution to those suspected of working with the United States, or with the Afghan government that Washington had supported.
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Tens of thousands of other Afghans, who advocacy groups said were eligible for the Special Immigrant Visas reserved for those who served the U.S. mission, were left behind. Others who made it onto evacuation planes were separated from young children, their spouses or their parents, and have sought to bring them to the United States in the years since.
For veterans of the war who say their survival depended on the relationships they built with Afghan partners, Trump's abrupt cancellation of deportation protections is a deeply, bitterly shameful slight. Some devoted considerable time and personal expense to help evacuate and resettled their former Afghan partners during Kabul's collapse.
Advocacy groups such as No One Left Behind say they continue to urge members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, to intervene. But the GOP, which holds majorities in the House and Senate, has yet to demonstrate an appetite to challenge a president who is so determined to lock down U.S. borders and ramp up deportations, no matter the means - and no matter the potential cost.
The Afghans' plight gained some attention during a recent Senate hearing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's top Democrat, appealed for clarity on Trump's plans. America's Afghan allies, she said, 'have been stranded in Qatar and Albania, and Pakistan and Afghanistan,' she said. 'Is this administration going to allow them to come to the United States as promised?'
Rubio was vague in his response, citing an ongoing review. 'We are determining,' he said, 'whether we are properly vetting people.'
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Advocates say the Afghans dependent on TPS include women's rights activists, journalists, humanitarian workers, and former members of the Afghan military and government who are ineligible for Special Immigrant Visas because they did not work directly for the United States. But even for those who are eligible, obtaining them has been extraordinarily difficult because many - at the urging of the Biden administration - sought to evade Taliban detection as they fled and destroyed documents showing their U.S. affiliation.
'Some of these are our closest partners, people that actually worked with us and for us, that are simply using the TPS program because that was the only option,' said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado), a former Army Ranger who fought in Afghanistan and was among the U.S. lawmakers who rallied to help when the evacuation was declared.
'If they're sent back to Afghanistan,' Crow said, 'it would be a death sentence for them.'