45 minutes to pack up a lifetime as Pakistan's foreigner crackdown sends Afghans scrambling
TORKHAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The order was clear and indisputable, the timeline startling. You have 45 minutes to pack up and leave Pakistan forever.
Sher Khan, a 42-year-old Afghan, had returned home from his job in a brick factory. He stared at the plainclothes policeman on the doorstep, his mind reeling. How could he pack up his whole life and leave the country of his birth in under an hour?
In the blink of an eye, the life he had built was taken away from him. He and his wife grabbed a few kitchen items and whatever clothes they could for themselves and their nine children. They left everything else behind at their home in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
Born in Pakistan to parents who fled the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing war, Khan is one of hundreds of thousands of Afghans who have now been expelled.
The nationwide crackdown, launched in October 2023, on foreigners Pakistan says are living in the country illegally has led to the departures of almost 1 million Afghans already.
Pakistan says millions more remain. It wants them gone.
Leaving with nothing to beat a deadline
'All our belongings were left behind,' Khan said as he stood in a dusty, windswept refugee camp just across the Afghan border in Torkham, the first stop for expelled refugees. 'We tried so hard (over the years) to collect the things that we had with honor.'
Pakistan set several deadlines earlier this year for Afghans to leave or face deportation. Afghan Citizen Card holders had to leave the capital Islamabad and Rawalpindi city by March 31, while those with Proof of Registration could stay until June 30. No specific deadlines were set for Afghans living elsewhere in Pakistan.
Khan feared that delaying his departure beyond the deadline might have resulted in his wife and children being hauled off to a police station along with him a blow to his family's dignity.
'We are happy that we came (to Afghanistan) with modesty and honor,' he said. As for his lost belongings, 'God may provide for them here, as He did there.'
A refugee influx in a struggling country
At the Torkham camp, run by Afghanistan's Taliban government, each family receives a SIM card and 10,000 Afghanis ($145) in aid. They can spend up to three days there before having to move on.
The camp's director, Molvi Hashim Maiwandwal, said some 150 families were arriving daily from Pakistan — far fewer than the roughly 1,200 families who were arriving about two months ago. But he said another surge was expected after the three-day Islamic holiday of Eid Al-Adha that started June 7.
Aid organizations inside the camp help with basic needs, including healthcare. Local charity Aseel provides hygiene kits and helps with food. It has also set up a food package delivery system for families once they arrive at their final destination elsewhere in Afghanistan.
Aseel's Najibullah Ghiasi said they expected a surge in arrivals 'by a significant number' after Eid. 'We cannot handle all of them, because the number is so huge,' he said, adding the organization was trying to boost fundraising so it could support more people.
Pakistan blames Afghanistan for militancy
Pakistan accuses Afghans of staging militant attacks inside the country, saying assaults are planned from across the border — a charge Kabul's Taliban government denies.
Pakistan denies targeting Afghans, and maintains that everyone leaving the country is treated humanely and with dignity. But for many, there is little that is humane about being forced to pack up and leave in minutes or hours.
Iran, too, has been expelling Afghans, with the UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency, saying on June 5 that 500,000 Afghans had been forced to leave Iran and Pakistan in the two months since April 1.
Rights groups and aid agencies say authorities are pressuring Afghans into going sooner.
In April, Human Rights Watch said police had raided houses, beaten and arbitrarily detained people, and confiscated refugee documents, including residence permits. Officers demanded bribes to allow Afghans to remain in Pakistan, the group added.
Searching for hope while starting again
Fifty-year-old Yar Mohammad lived in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir for nearly 45 years. The father of 12 built a successful business polishing floors, hiring several workers. Plainclothes policemen knocked on his door too. They gave him six hours to leave.
'No way a person can wrap up so much business in six hours, especially if they spent 45 years in one place,' he said. Friends rushed to his aid to help pack up anything they could: the company's floor-polishing machines, some tables, bed-frames and mattresses, and clothes.
Now all his household belongings are crammed into orange tents in the Torkham refugee camp, his hard-earned floor-polishing machines outside and exposed to the elements. After three days of searching, he managed to find a place to rent in Kabul.
'I have no idea what we will do,' he said, adding that he would try to recreate his floor-polishing business in Afghanistan. 'If this works here, it is the best thing to do.'
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Yahoo
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Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. If the past week has shown us anything, it's that President Donald Trump is desperate. He wants to deport 1 million immigrants from this country by the end of his first year in office, a level no modern U.S. president has ever hit. His administration has made it clear they're more than willing to push the limits of the law to try to make it happen, whether it's through invoking obscure wartime laws, baselessly revoking people's visas, or calling in the National Guard against civilian protestors. These acts of desperation are highly unlikely to result in 1 million deportations in 2025, but there's a bigger reality here: Trump's deportation targets were always extreme, absurd, and impossible to hit. Even as his administration ramps up attacks on civil society, it seems like Trump himself is beginning to realize this. 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That doesn't mean Trump isn't trying with everything in his tool kit. On the very same day Trump took his oath of office, he made it clear that his administration would be taking a hard line on immigration. Through a flurry of executive orders, Trump shut down the U.S.–Mexico land border and suspended the refugee resettlement program. But Trump did not stop at those historically lawful actions. He signed an executive order seeking to limit birthright citizenship, a blatant overreach of executive power that flew in the face of the 14th Amendment and instantly drew lawsuits. But by the time he hit his first 100 days in office, deportations did not drastically increase. Even now, with the high-profile enforcement efforts in Los Angeles, the numbers aren't high enough to top 'Deporter-in-Chief' Barack Obama. Obama's administration deported over 3 million people over the course of his first four-year term, largely driven by administrative returns at the U.S. southern border. Ironically, those returns have plummeted under Trump because of his executive order closing the border for refugees. NBC News calculated that from February through April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported about 40,500 people. At that pace, the Migration Policy Institute estimated Trump would only end up deporting roughly half a million people this year—that's less than former president Joe Biden's top number in 2024. This is all expected—the Trump administration essentially set itself up for failure. But we know the president is not one to take a loss graciously, so if he can't find enough immigrants to deport legally, it seems he'll just ignore the Constitution to try to hit the 1 million mark. We're seeing the natural outcome of those policies: utter chaos followed by pushback from the judiciary. Over the past several months, we've witnessed the Trump administration mistakenly deport at least four immigrants: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, Daniel Lozano-Camargo, and at least one other Guatemalan man. And despite admitting its errors and judges ordering these men be brought back to the U.S. to receive their due process rights, the federal government has often simply refused. 'We just have to look at the front pages of the newspapers today to understand how the administration plans to accomplish its goal,' Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, told me. 'They intend to violate the law and the Constitution, terrorize communities, and mislead the public about instigators of violence. These are all really concerning tactics that obviously are correlated to warning signs of a government that is increasingly authoritarian in nature.' Characteristic of this situation was the report that deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller pressured ICE agents to arrest at least 3,000 immigrants a day, to hell with a warrant or honoring due process. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has shown it is unfazed by cruelty. Despite their stances on immigration, nearly every U.S. president has allowed in a certain number of refugees. Trump, on the other hand, completely gutted the refugee resettlement program so not a single refugee would be legally authorized to enter the country—minus a group of white Afrikaners. That decision left thousands of refugees stranded after going through a rigorous vetting process that often takes years to complete. Then there's the termination of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, a program that the federal government has the legal authority to oversee. Trump directed Homeland Security Secretary Kristin Noem to revoke TPS from migrants by removing their home countries from the program despite ongoing civil wars, political persecution, and other atrocities. These actions, though technically legal, have not been done by previous administrations because they are inexplicably cruel. Families get torn apart, U.S. communities lose integral members, and critical labor is lost. The chaos unfolding in Los Angeles is another predictable result of Trump's delusional deportation goal. As immigration agents raided workplaces, residents of California took to the streets to protest. The Trump administration, unable to withstand any criticism of its agenda, forced National Guard members onto Los Angeles, going against the authority of the city's mayor and governor. 'This is intentional chaos,' Karen Bass, mayor of Los Angeles, said. A district judge recently ruled that it was also an unconstitutional commandeering of forces meant to be under the control of the state's governor, Gavin Newsom. The reality underlying this chaos is that immigration has no correlation with public safety threats. Crime data from 1980 to 2022 found immigrants—including people in the country without legal permission—are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born people, according to a report by the American Immigration Council. Even as the share of immigrants has increased within the U.S. population over the years, national crime rates have trended downwards. And the AIC concluded that 'there's no evidence to suggest that more aggressive immigration enforcement policies lead to less crime.' The Marshall Project came to a similar conclusion after analyzing crime rates between 2007 and 2016, finding that most types of crime, including robberies, murders, burglaries, and larcenies, had a nearly flat trend line even as the population of people without permanent legal status fluctuated. We know that the president rode a wave of xenophobia back into the White House, selling voters on a vision that immigrants are rapists and killers who are causing crime and 'poisoning the blood of our country.' But Trump is proving through his administration's own futile deportation efforts that this imagined threat could never be as dire as the president claimed. On Thursday, Trump himself told supporters in farming and the hospitality business that more 'common sense' was needed in how the Department of Homeland Security approached removals of 'very good workers, they have worked for [American farmers] for 20 years.' Trump further acknowledged that his administration 'can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back.' Given the escalating situation in Los Angeles and Trump's own hostility to immigrants, it's extremely unclear that this promise means anything. Either way, Trump's mass deportation plans will continue to go up in smoke, whether he likes it or not.
