Pakistan to Force Tens of Thousands of Afghan Refugees Out of the Capital

Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees who have congregated in Pakistan’s capital region to seek resettlement in other countries are being ordered to move elsewhere in Pakistan by March 31.

The refugees have arrived in large numbers in the capital, Islamabad, and in neighboring Rawalpindi because of the embassies and refugee agencies based there. Forcing them to go elsewhere in the country is intended to put pressure on Western nations, including the United States, to accept them quickly.

The Pakistani government’s announcement, issued last week, said that Afghan refugees who could not find a country to take them would be deported to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, although it did not say how quickly that would happen after the March 31 deadline.

The order has added to the fear and uncertainty faced by the refugees, especially the 15,000 who had applied for resettlement in the United States. Days earlier, President Trump put those Afghans’ fate in doubt with an executive order suspending all refugee admissions to the United States.

Many of those Afghans worked with the United States-led mission in their country, or with NGOs or other organizations funded by Western countries, before the Taliban took power in August 2021. Others are family members of Afghans who did so. Advocates for these refugees have accused the U.S. government of betraying wartime allies by blocking their paths to resettlement.

The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, and the International Organization for Migration said on Wednesday that many of the refugees threatened with deportation — particularly members of ethnic and religious minority groups, women and girls, journalists, human rights activists and artists — could be subjected to persecution by the Taliban government. In a joint statement, they urged Pakistan to “implement any relocation measures with due consideration for human rights standards.”

Sara Ahmadi, 26, a former journalism student at Kabul University, said her family had feared being deported to Afghanistan — “the very place we risked everything to leave” — since the Trump administration halted refugee admissions.

“That fear is now becoming a reality,” Ms. Ahmadi said in a telephone interview. Her mother had worked in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, for Children in Crisis, a U.S.-funded NGO. Their six-member family arrived in Islamabad in November 2021, hoping to eventually settle in the United States.

They were among hundreds of thousands of Afghans who fled to Pakistan after the Taliban takeover.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, Shafqat Ali Khan, recently said that nearly 80,000 Afghan refugees had left Pakistan for other countries, and that about 40,000 who had applied for resettlement elsewhere were still in Pakistan.

That includes the roughly 15,000 who were waiting for approval from the United States Refugee Admissions Program when Mr. Trump suspended it. The three-month suspension took effect on Jan. 27; the Trump administration has given no indication of whether resettlement will eventually resume.

Pakistan has forced hundreds of thousands of other Afghans — both documented and undocumented migrants, and even some who arrived in Pakistan for resettlement to Western countries — back to their home country because of rising tensions with the Taliban.

Pakistan accuses the Taliban of harboring Pakistani militants who conduct cross-border attacks, which the Taliban deny. The Pakistani authorities also frequently accuse Afghan nationals of involvement in terrorism.

The U.N. refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration said there had been an increase in arrests of Afghan nationals in Islamabad and Rawalpindi since Jan. 1, with more than 800 Afghans, including children, deported from those two cities alone.

Ms. Ahmadi said her family had endured police harassment and struggled with Islamabad’s relatively high housing costs for more than three years, while remaining hopeful that they would be relocated to the United States.

“One midnight in December, police officers forcibly entered our house and treated us roughly,” she said. “It was a terrifying experience.”

But Mr. Trump’s suspension of refugee admissions shattered her optimism, and Islamabad’s new directive to evict Afghan refugees from the capital has deepened her distress, she said.

“For two decades, my family built a life in Afghanistan, only for it to be destroyed in a single day when we were forced to leave everything behind in Kabul,” Ms. Ahmadi said. “We endured all these hardships in Islamabad with the hope that we would soon reach the United States and begin a new life.”

“But it seems the U.S. has abandoned us,” she said.