Afees Monsef has a grave magnetism that makes him easy to find, even in a crowd.¹ We first met in the spring of 2025, at a gathering in the basement of the Hazrati Abu Bakr Siddique mosque in Flushing, two years after he and his family of eight crossed the US–Mexico border fleeing persecution by the Taliban. By the time we reunited this past March, at an iftar dinner hosted in Brooklyn by the grassroots organization Afghans For A Better Tomorrow, Monsef and his family had taken substantive steps toward building a life in the US; with support from a state program, they were about to move from a hotel shelter in the city to a house in Westchester. He and his wife both had jobs. Their two eldest children—both girls—were in college.

And yet the Trump administration kept putting new restrictions in their path. The judge assigned to their case was among the many that the federal government has fired since Trump retook office. Last fall the administration’s leading immigration bureaucrat announced an indefinite pause on approving asylum applications filed with his agency, including that of Monsef’s family, among other petitions in the pipeline for visas and immigration benefits. Then Immigration and Customs Enforcement started detaining Afghans in the city with pending asylum applications, many of whom had already been detained after crossing the border. “We don’t know what we can do,” Monsef told me on the phone in March. “It is a kind of unknown future.”

Monsef was born into a Shia Muslim family from the Hazara ethnic minority. Both groups were targeted under the Taliban, whose forces tortured Monsef’s father, a well-known community leader, when Monsef was young. Monsef came of age shortly after the Taliban fell during the US-led invasion in 2001, and after getting his degree he worked for the Afghan government as a civil engineer on projects funded by the US. That alone, he knew, made him and his family into targets when, in 2021, the Taliban returned to power.

With his wife, their six children, and his elderly mother, Monsef traveled around the world to the Americas, then made his way up, mostly on foot, to the US–Mexico border. The journey was an extreme ordeal. During the walk through the notorious jungles of the Darien Gap, one of the deadliest land migration routes in the world, Monsef at times held two of his younger children in his arms. At one point in their hike his elderly mother collapsed; she was unconscious for over an hour. It was so physically arduous that he sometimes felt he might not be able to push through.

When Monsef and his family finally crossed into San Diego, in the spring of 2023, they felt an immediate flush of relief, he told me. They thought they were safe: “We were not thinking about what will happen after.” Soon advocates in New York City arranged to fly them to the East Coast.

Among the advocates who came to help the family was Arash Azizzada, who founded Afghans for a Better Tomorrow in 2021 to coordinate the resettlement of Afghans who were evacuated after the US withdrawal. In early 2023, when Republican governors in border states started bussing migrants into New York City as a political ploy, Azizzada and other volunteers began showing up at Port Authority to greet them, set them up with legal assistance, give them a sense of community, and arrange other forms of mutual aid. Their first order of business was handing out cell phones. Some of the refugees they helped would later chip in to support others.

The Afghans who came through the southern border under Biden were a particularly vulnerable crowd, Azizzada said in an email when he first wrote to me in early 2024. Being asylum seekers who had crossed the border, often without permission, they didn’t qualify for certain benefits typically extended to resettled refugees. Nor did they all have a clear path to citizenship that took into account their special circumstances as people who had fled not just a shared enemy but a situation the United States had a direct role in fomenting. Because of new rules the Biden administration implemented at the time, if migrants crossed without an appointment on a glitchy app, they were barred from seeking asylum altogether (although they could still pursue certain other types of protections). These policies were already hurting asylum seekers, and Azizzada worried that a second Trump administration could spell disaster for Afghans, among other new arrivals. Two years later, the disaster is unfolding as a slow burn.

The US, which signed the international protocol on refugees in 1968, has an obligation to all asylum seekers when they arrive at or enter its borders: it cannot, by law, return them to harm. The right to asylum was formalized into US law in 1980, almost three decades after it was codified into international law as a response to the mass displacement caused by the Holocaust. It has never been fairly and consistently implemented, and it almost immediately came under attack. In the decades since, successive presidents—both Democratic and Republican—have both made it much more dangerous for people fleeing persecution to arrive at US borders in the first place and chipped away at the due process they can access inside the US if they manage to enter. (Accessing asylum requires the applicant’s presence on US soil, and anyone can, at least on paper, legally request it regardless of how they enter the country.) Asylum law was created for people fleeing political persecution and excluded so-called economic migrants, but in reality these were never mutually exclusive categories, as the historian Mae Ngai has explained in these pages. And yet under Trump, Ngai writes, even this flawed protection has been dissolved “for cynical ends.” No matter how deserving a migrant is under the law, they remain a target.

In his first term Trump launched an escalating assault on asylum. During the pandemic he started turning away asylum seekers at the border, citing public health reasons. On the campaign trail Biden vowed to bring back humanity to the southern border, but once he entered the White House he retained and even expanded this Trump-era ban. Human Rights First documented around 13,500 cases of murder, rape, and other violence against migrants who were blocked or turned back under this policy after Biden took office. Biden also, for the first time ever, put numerical limits on how many people could seek asylum at the southern border. These policies meant that “more people will die, or face persecution and abuse, after they are blocked from accessing safety,” Heidi Altman, the vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said in September 2024.

When Trump returned to office in 2025 he shut down the entry of all migrants—including asylum seekers—by declaring an “invasion” at the southern border. An appeals court recently blocked this measure, but this past week the Supreme Court issued a decision in a separate case allowing the administration to restrict asylum in other ways. Over the past year and a half, meanwhile, the Trump administration has developed a range of methods to weaponize a system already stacked against asylum seekers, cancelling many existing pathways and protections and rushing to deport people, including asylum seekers with pending cases. To an unprecedented degree, many have been sent to third countries with which they had no ties, from Panama to Ghana.

The Afghans caught up in this dragnet are not legally distinct from other types of asylum seekers: they have to demonstrate the same asylum paperwork, and they remain subject to the same border policies and shifts in courtroom due process. But because they come from a country in which the United States has directly waged war, the US government has a special obligation toward them. At the same time, it also scrutinizes them from a particular, racialized point of view that developed in the years after September 11. The US occupied Afghanistan for twenty years as one of the crucial arenas in its War on Terror, muddling on with its attempt at regime change and counterinsurgency. Faced with political instability at home, thousands of Afghans fled, many to the country that had sold itself as a haven of democracy and opportunity while it invaded and further destabilized theirs. Between 2000 and 2019 the Afghan immigrant population in the US almost tripled, from 45,000 to 132,000, according to the Migration Policy Institute. All this gives the current suspension of protections for Afghan asylum seekers an especially cruel tinge.

During Trump’s first-term crackdown Afghans flew somewhat “under the radar,” Azizzada told me in a recent interview; perhaps because they were seen as useful to the War on Terror, they weren’t a primary target. That started to change after Biden pulled US troops out of Afghanistan in 2021, quickly reversing any meager gains the US may have made during its longest war. As the Taliban regained control, the hastily planned evacuation efforts left Afghans who had worked with the US scrambling to get on planes leaving Kabul. Reports from the time showed Afghans clinging to a military aircraft’s landing gears as the plane taxied towards takeoff; at least seven people died in the process. For days people rushed at the perimeter of the airport—which was manned by US Marines—waving their IDs and pleading to board. “Eleven years, I worked with the CIA,” one man said in English to the PBS correspondent Jane Ferguson, showing his paperwork. “No one is letting me in.” 

After facing criticism from advocates and Democrats in Congress, Biden announced a program that would allow vulnerable Afghans who had already undergone vetting to enter the US. They would have temporary permission to stay as they waited to be processed for special visas meant for those who helped US forces during the war—or for asylum, if they were eligible. A year later, the program was renamed and reoriented toward a longer-term approach, offering Afghans who had been evacuated to US bases in Qatar and elsewhere fast-track refugee resettlement and a chance to obtain special visas.

Since the withdrawal, meanwhile, advocates had been doubling down on getting Congress to pass legislation guaranteeing a permanent pathway to citizenship for Afghans allied with the US. In 2024 Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, then the top Republican on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, joined Amy Klobuchar to introduce an amendment along these lines in a national security package after Republicans blocked a broader border legislation that included the provision. “After the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, veterans extended the creed ‘leave no man behind’ and helped their Afghan partners flee to the United States for safety,” Moran said in a statement at the time. “Unfortunately, many of our Afghan partners are still overseas, and those who made it to the US face uncertainty as to whether they will be granted permanent residency.”

Moran saw securing a place in the US for Afghan allies as a matter of national security. “It sends a message to our allies that we’re dependable and a message to our adversaries that we’re united,” he told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. But hardline Republicans, notably Chuck Grassley and Tom Cotton in the Senate, have refused to back bills with a citizenship pathway for Afghans unless they include more vetting and higher-order asylum restrictions at the border, arguing that Biden’s evacuation efforts prioritized haste instead of security. As evidence, they have pointed to oversight reports finding that US authorities did not always have data to fully vet admitted Afghans. A 2022 report found that two of the parole program’s beneficiaries (out of tens of thousands) “may have posed a risk to national security.” A 2025 audit of the FBI’s role in the process found that fifty-five evacuees were on watchlists, but that the agency “effectively communicated and addressed any potential national security risks” overall. The federal government has emphasized that these people were among the most vetted immigrants, screened by counterterrorism departments and the FBI.

On the other hand, many advocates have noted that the government’s approach to Afghan resettlement was not just uniquely stringent but willfully sluggish, especially in contrast with the reception of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion around the same time. The few existing pathways sometimes closed for nebulous reasons, even after months of agonizing waiting, and even for those Afghan families who seemed to otherwise present a slam-dunk case. Moran and Klobuchar’s 2024 proposal was never included in the final national-security package, and subsequent legislative efforts to create new pathways to citizenship for Afghans have been similarly bogged down. Earlier this year, Politico reported that House Speaker Mike Johnson quietly stripped language that would continue relocation efforts for Afghans from the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. Even in 2026, five years after the withdrawal, some evacuees were still waiting to be resettled at the Camp As-Sayliyah military base in Doha, Qatar. When the US launched its war in Iran, many of them were stranded as debris from Iran’s retaliatory fire rained down.

Advocates also note that translators and other Afghans who worked directly with the US government were not the only ones whose lives were touched by—and continue to be affected by—US policies at home and abroad. Both the ground evacuation efforts and Biden’s special admission programs prioritized people allied with US war efforts, at least on paper. Bipartisan legislative pushes in Congress like the Afghan Adjustment Act (which attempted to create a pathway to citizenship and formed the basis of Moran and Klobuchar’s failed amendment) and the Enduring Welcome Act (which sought to continue resettlement efforts) have also emphasized the US’s obligations to those who helped its service members—to “protect those who protected us, and preserve our nation’s credibility for future generations,” as Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican, said when introducing that second piece of legislation in August 2025.

This left many asylum seekers without recourse. “There were activists, or just people who have marginalized identities, or ordinary Afghans who were impacted—as everyone was—by US foreign policy,” said Laila Ayub of Project ANAR (Afghan Network for Advocacy and Resources), which started in 2021 to provide legal support to Afghans. “We really view everyone as equally deserving of protection.” Those who were not immediately evacuated on US flights and who couldn’t risk waiting in Afghanistan for the monthslong refugee resettlement process fled to Pakistan or Iran—but they faced long delays there, during which they remained vulnerable to deportations. Many Afghans who were not eligible for special pathways to the US or who hit bureaucratic snags in these or other third countries eventually tried to make it to the US southern border and request asylum. When Trump retook office those waiting abroad saw their cases grind to a halt, and those who did make it found themselves caught in a political storm of their own.

After arriving in New York, Monsef and his family spent a few months at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, where thousands of new migrants from around the world were being housed. (Starting last spring the Trump administration targeted this shelter in particular, describing the hotel as a base for Salvadoran gang operations and announcing that it would pull millions in emergency management funding that allowed the city to use the building as temporary housing for the new arrivals.) After Roosevelt, Monsef’s family lived for a year and a half at another hotel shelter that was smaller, less crowded, and, in Monsef’s view, more hospitable.

But the shelter system still denied them a sense of agency and stability. They couldn’t cook their own food or even make their own tea; the government meals were bland and unappetizing; it wasn’t clear if the meat was halal. Only when Monsef got approved by a New York state initiative supporting the resettlement of migrants outside the city and moved to a single-family home, he told me, did he feel he had taken the “first step of starting my life in the US.”

In the suburbs Monsef had a backyard where his younger kids could play. The neighbors were friendly, and the family could finally buy groceries and cook their own meals. After an initial struggle, Monsef found a job suited to his training as an engineer; his wife also got part-time employment in food service. His oldest daughter, whose schooling was interrupted by their journey out of Afghanistan, graduated high school but couldn’t find a way into the elite colleges to which she had aspired. She started at community college. The second-oldest, who commuted every day to high school in the city, got into Georgetown.

And yet the family’s future remained unsettled. Throughout 2025 the Trump administration shut down legal pathways to the US and intensified restrictions on Afghan and other migrants. On January 20 Trump suspended the refugee program, pulling over a thousand Afghans already cleared to travel to the US off of flights. Then, in February, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security started terminating Temporary Protected Status and similar safeguards, which are given to people from countries that have suffered natural disasters or conflict, starting with Venezuela and Haiti. In May it terminated TPS for Afghanistan. (The administration has since also announced the end of TPS and a similar program known as Deferred Enforced Departure for people from several other countries, including South Sudan, Honduras, Palestine, and Yemen.)

Monsef’s TPS expired in May 2025, making him more vulnerable to deportation. His family had also applied for asylum, and they could legally stay and work in the country as long as their application was pending. But the process was drawn-out: Monsef’s first court appearance was scheduled for 2028 until his lawyer got it moved up to March of this year.

More restrictions on Afghan migrants followed, with particularly dire consequences for those who still had close family outside the US. In the summer, the president announced travel restrictions for twelve countries, including Afghanistan (although still with narrow exceptions for special visas meant to bring in allied Afghans). Soon after, the State Department started denying final travel documents for family members of Afghan asylees already in the US whose own “derivative” asylum cases had been remotely approved. The International Refugee Assistance Project sued, arguing that the travel ban did not apply to this subset of Afghans, and secured a temporary block. Recently a judge rejected the government’s request to throw out the case.

“These were lawful pathways that were already set up, and what we see time and time again is the Trump administration cutting them off,” Pedro Sepulveda of IRAP told me in an interview. As the case winds its way through an already circuitous legal process—made even more so by repeated government shutdowns in the US—the plaintiffs continue to suffer. Some remain in Afghanistan, fearing for their lives from the Taliban, while a regional conflict with Pakistan escalates. “At the core of this, it’s really about family reunification,” Sepulveda says. “We see a complete abandonment of Afghans, entirely.”

In September, as federal agents were conducting targeted raids around the state, Azizzada could claim a small victory: the government notified some families that their asylum cases had been approved. Among them was Nabila Mirjan, a thirty-year-old single mother I had met at the same 2025 mosque event where I first crossed paths with Monsef. A survivor of gender-based violence who had worked in Afghanistan at organizations for women’s rights, Mirjan spent a year in Iran with her family after fleeing the Taliban before traveling to Brazil and then—with her young son, adult brother, and sister—to the US border. (Three of her brothers and her elderly parents stayed behind in Brazil.) Upon entering the country in San Ysidro her brother was detained for seventy-five days, at which point he was released and told to attend his asylum court hearings and scheduled ICE check-ins. When we met, Mirjan was living at the Roosevelt Hotel with her six-year-old son and her sister, wondering where they would go once the city phased out its migrant shelters, as it had announced it would.

By the time I saw her again at the church iftar event in 2026, she had become a more confident English speaker. She now has a part-time job, and her son is getting used to life in the city, although he still has separation anxiety and cries from time to time because he misses his grandparents and uncles. She too is getting used to the US, but only after adjusting her expectations. When she first decided to come to America, she thought “all my dreams will turn to reality,” she told me. “When I came here, I saw that that is not true. It’s not easy.”

Last November the footing of Afghan asylum seekers already in the US got even more precarious. That month an Afghan man who had worked alongside the C.I.A. and previously been granted asylum in the US fatally shot a National Guard member in Washington, D.C., and injured another. When Monsef heard the news, he called his daughter at Georgetown and told her not to go out in case there was retaliatory violence against Afghans. 

News reports suggested that the shooter was struggling with mental illness, but the Trump administration used the killing as a pretense both to impose a spate of new measures against Afghans and to initiate a crackdown for which the foundation had already been laid. Just days before the shooting, the administration had announced that it would be reviewing refugee cases already approved under Biden. Now, however, the Homeland Security agency that considers asylum applications announced that it was halting processing for all the asylum applications in its pipeline. It also suspended green-card and other immigration cases for countries subject to Trump’s travel ban, which had been announced in June 2025 and later expanded. When we spoke in March, the IRAP attorney Laurie Ball Cooper said that this “use of the travel ban domestically” was “unprecedented.” In essence, she continued, it was a “racist deployment of nationality as a restriction on immigration,” a tactic with its source in “the earliest roots of US immigration law.”

In New York City, ICE started calling Afghans waiting for their court dates and demanding they show up for non-routine check-ins, then arresting single men who arrived for their appointments. Among the first cases Azizzada got wind of in the area was that of Mirjan’s twenty-year-old brother, who was taken into custody at a check-in at 26 Federal Plaza on December 2. That evening Mirjan called Azizzada crying. Her brother’s first detention had been hard enough: by the time they reunited that time, she remembers, he had lost his appetite and developed a restless gait.

Two weeks later, with the help of a lawyer that Azizzada’s team helped find, her brother was released again. The family huddled together on a video conference with their siblings and parents in Brazil. “Some of us were crying with joy,” Mirjan told me over Whatsapp, translating her thoughts through an AI app. “My brother couldn’t speak.”

One of the next major threats to recent Afghan arrivals emerged not in New York but in Minnesota. In January 2026, as federal agents descended on the state, lawyers started noticing a disturbing trend: refugees who had already been approved but had not yet received their green cards were being detained. Again IRAP sued on behalf of plaintiffs—including some Afghans—who reported being swept up by masked agents, handcuffed, and aggressively shoved into unmarked vehicles. They were shuffled from building to building without being able to make a call, then put on a plane in shackles and taken out of the state. Some were released days later, on strange streets, far from home.

In February the judge responded to IRAP’s lawsuit by ordering a temporary pause to this practice. Government court filings in the proceedings revealed that the administration had claimed the authority to detain any refugee who was already approved but had not yet applied for their green card or attended the required interviews within a year of arriving in the country. They were clearly planning, civil rights lawyers understood, to take the Minnesota pilot nationwide—so IRAP and other organizations sued again and got a Massachusetts district court to order a stay. “Wide-scale roundup and detention of refugees for the sole reason that they have not yet received their green card? We have not in forty-six years of refugee resettlement seen anything of that kind,” Ball Cooper, who is on the team litigating these two lawsuits, told me.

Trump’s visa adjudication agency lifted its general pause on asylum processing in March. But a hold remained in place on any pending applications from Afghans and others who are on the list of expanded travel-ban countries. “Certainly in terms of policy, we’ve really seen a layering of one restriction on top of the other,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the US immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, told me in March. “Almost no Afghan can get almost any kind of status right now, either to come to the United States from abroad, or to renew their status in the United States, or to obtain a more secure status.”

The cumulative effect of these policies has been a kind of paralysis. People in the Afghan community worry about which events are safe to attend and whether they can go to the market. Many struggle to manage the anxiety of going about their daily lives. When Monsef leaves home for his office every day, he told me when we spoke in early March, he wonders whether he will return that evening, “or maybe I will go back to some detention center.”

In the past several months, court battles have yielded interim victories. On June 5 a court ruled in a separate case that the federal government’s pause on immigration applications, including from travel-ban countries, was unlawful. The development should, at least for now, mean that Monsef’s family and Mirjan’s siblings might finally see their cases start moving. The government will almost certainly appeal, but because the First Circuit may not side with the administration, the fate of these applications may ultimately fall in the hands of the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, amid the continuing uncertainty and anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US—as well as the eruptions of conflict around the world—small gestures of local communal support and solidarity take on even greater weight. The iftar where I caught up with Monsef and Mirjan this past March took place at St. Ann & The Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Brooklyn Heights, an institution that was hosting this dinner for Afghan immigrants for the fourth year in a row. When I talked to Mirjan there, she told me that even with a document in hand that says they can stay in the country, she feels unsafe: she knows that paperwork hasn’t protected other refugees or asylum seekers from being detained in recent months. She worries even more for her two siblings whose asylum cases remain pending. In the last year or so, she said, she hasn’t had a “single night of decent sleep.”

As we were talking, the volunteers asked for the crowd’s attention, and Monsef got up to make a few remarks. “Events like this,” he read off his phone in English, “remind us that regardless of which religion we practice, we share common values of compassion, kindness and generosity.” On one end of the room sat large aluminum trays of Kabuli pulao, homemade okra, lentils, sabzi, kebabs, and at least two preparations of chicken; volunteers had used the church’s tremendous gothic sanctuary to lay out boxes and tote bags full of kitchen utensils, prayer mats, clothes, hygiene products, and children’s toys. The church is known for candlelit concerts of Bach and Debussy, among other composers, but earlier that evening the first thing I had heard when I ducked out of the rain and into the parish hall was the sound of three young Afghan boys sitting at a grand piano, smashing away cheerfully at the keys.