Afghan refugees need to stay in America

To claim the situation has improved enough for Afghans to safely return is to turn a blind eye to the Taliban’s draconian rule, which is especially barbaric for women and girls. The government does not allow girls to receive education beyond sixth grade. In December, seeking to close what it saw as a loophole, the Taliban banned women from studying to become midwives or nurses. Some provinces bar male doctors from treating female patients, which means denying women any medical care. No wonder Afghanistan has the world’s highest rate of maternal mortality outside Africa.

Many women in Afghanistan don’t leave home because they fear the morality police, who enforce strict gender segregation and require that they wear hijabs. Women are not to look at men other than their husbands or relatives. Last year, the Taliban restricted women from even raising their voices in public.

In 2023, Alejandro Mayorkas, Noem’s predecessor as DHS secretary, extended TPS for Afghans for 18 months. The people needed protection, he said, because there was a “serious threat posed by ongoing armed conflict; lack of access to food, clean water and healthcare; and destroyed infrastructure, internal displacement and economic instability.” These conditions still exist.

Adding insult to injury, as DHS seeks to repatriate Afghans, the Trump administration has cut critical humanitarian assistance to the country. Last week, the White House reversed recent cutoffs in emergency food aid to Somalia, Syria and Iraq but maintained the cuts on Afghanistan. The U.N. World Food Program says this will mean the end of food assistance for 2 million Afghans, including more than 650,000 malnourished children, moms and pregnant women. The country’s total population is about 40 million.

Action Against Hunger, an aid agency, warns that the cuts threaten children’s lives. This week, the group is closing its therapeutic feeding unit in Kabul because of earlier cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development. “The children who came to the feeding unit often could not walk or even crawl,” the Associated Press reports. “Sometimes they were unable to eat because they didn’t have the energy.”

In pushing to expel Afghan refugees, the United States finds itself aligned with Pakistan and Iran. All three governments say they’re no longer willing to support large migrant populations. Pakistan wants to expel more than 3 million Afghans this year. Iran announced plans in September to send away 2 million.

Afghans who can prove that they directly assisted the U.S. war effort are still able to stay in America through the Special Immigrant Visa program. But advocacy groups say TPS has offered a layer of stability to people going through the arduous process of trying to secure the special status, which requires documentation that can be difficult to obtain. Applying for asylum is another option, but this system has a backlog of more than 2.6 million cases, and applicants must credibly demonstrate a specific personal risk if they’re sent home, rather than general fear or systemic oppression.

The Taliban craves international recognition. In the interest of “normalizing” ties, the group has freed four Americans from its custody since the start of the year. Last month, the U.S. government lifted bounties on three Taliban leaders, including the interior minister, who organized attacks against the U.S.-based government that fell in 2021.

Ideally, U.S. courts will step in before any Afghans are forced onto planes headed back to Kabul. On March 31, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen temporarily paused DHS’s attempt to revoke TPS status for Venezuelans, because letting it take effect could “inflict irreparable harm,” and said the Trump administration had failed to show “real countervailing harm” in letting the program continue.

The same is true in the case of Afghans. There is no harm in letting their TPS status continue — and no good that can come from sending them back, subjugating innocent women and children to Taliban abuse.