Afghans in Pakistan awaiting US resettlement abandoned once again

In January 2025, Seema received an email from the International Organization for Migration saying that her flight from Pakistan to the United States, which she and her family were booked on after months of extensive interviewing and background checks by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, had been canceled.

“We had sold our TV and refrigerator,” her husband, Samir, told me during an interview for my dissertation project on Afghan migration to America after the 2021 US military withdrawal from Afghanistan. “We had told our landlord that we were vacating our apartment. Then it was all canceled.”

The US withdrawal in August 2021 triggered a rapid political collapse that left millions of Afghan civilians in limbo. As the Taliban swept across the country and reclaimed power, Afghans who had worked alongside US forces and international NGOs faced immediate danger.

Women, minorities and human rights advocates feared the loss of basic freedoms and possible Taliban reprisals. With evacuation pathways unclear and protections unevenly applied, panic spread as families tried to escape before they were cut off entirely.

Seema, Samir – pseudonyms to protect their identity – and their children are among tens of thousands of Afghan refugee families who immediately fled to neighboring Pakistan in late 2021 on the US government’s recommendation for Afghans to process their immigration cases in third countries. However, many Afghans soon encountered Pakistan’s mass deportation campaign, underway since 2023,...

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