Afghanistan Peace CampaignThe New York Times
The Trump administration has detained dozens of Afghan immigrants in Louisiana and plans to deport them to Afghanistan, according to three U.S. officials. The group includes people who could face discrimination or persecution under the Taliban, including relatives of people who helped the U.S. military and at least one gay man.
More than 150 Afghan immigrants are expected to be deported, one official said, making this one of the largest single expulsions of Afghans.
By sending them to Pakistan — which would then send them to Afghanistan — the Trump administration has found a way around the hurdles that have so far prevented vulnerable Afghans from being sent back to face repression or retaliation by the Taliban.
Lacking diplomatic relations with the Taliban, the United States cannot arrange deportations to Afghanistan. And some Afghans living in America have been granted legal protections from U.S. judges, which prevent them from being sent back to Afghanistan because of the persecution they would likely face under the Taliban government.
The officials say the deportation is, in effect, to Afghanistan, and that is what the detainees have been told by ICE. But Pakistan will oversee their expulsion over the border to Afghanistan.
The first flight is expected to leave as soon as Nov. 2.
One of the Afghans marked for deportation is Mohammad, 47, who said he was detained last year by federal agents while charging his electric car and had been held in Oklahoma. Last week, he was moved to a prison in Louisiana to be deported, he said in a phone interview from the prison. He said his family left Afghanistan as refugees in 1981, when he was 2 years old, after the Soviet Union invaded.
Over four decades, Mohammad navigated life in America. After serving time in his early 20s for two felonies, he lost his permanent residency. Mohammad said he came to accept being gay and married an American man in 2020.
“That right there is automatic grounds for imprisonment and execution there,” Mohammad said. In Afghanistan, homosexuality is punishable by death. He spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his middle name, explaining, “I am afraid for my life.”
In court filings for another case, an Afghan man said that he was arrested and tortured by the Taliban in 2023 because of his wife’s affiliation with the previous government. She had helped the U.S. military as a soldier with the Afghan army and as a member of the women’s police force, a group that the Taliban singled out for retribution when they returned to power.
He entered the U.S. illegally in 2024, was arrested by border patrol and has been in ICE detention since then. His asylum application had been denied by a U.S. judge. His lawyer shared the documents describing his case on condition that the man not be named.
U.S. law prohibits the government from deporting people to countries where courts have ruled they would most likely face persecution. It is not known if any of the Afghans being sent back in November have such court protections.
The United States has not announced the deportation plan, elements of which were first reported by Bloomberg. The New York Times pieced it together through interviews with lawyers for some of the people detained and with the three U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential policy. The Times also obtained documents to verify Mohammad’s criminal history, marriage and the plan to deport him.
Court filings for one of the Afghans indicate that he has been put on a manifest for a special chartered flight that leaves Alexandria, La., during the first week of November. Lawyers representing the two other Afghan immigrants shared emails from federal officials informing them that their clients would be deported to Afghanistan in early November.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said that ICE “does not comment on prospective removal operations, including flight schedules, passenger manifests, destinations, or individual case details.”
In recent days, the Afghan immigrants have been moved from detention centers all over the country by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to immigration detention facilities in Louisiana. Detainees and lawyers said they were given little information, other than that they are being sent to Afghanistan.
Melissa Medrano Henry, Mohammad’s lawyer, said the federal government had informed her that it had obtained travel documents for her client from Afghan authorities — meaning, the Taliban — but had yet to produce them or explain how the documents were obtained. She has filed emergency motions to block his deportation, but a judge has not yet made a decision.Next week’s planned deportation flight is the most expansive effort so far to include Afghans in the wider dragnet to carry out mass deportations. The group includes a mix of people who came to the United States legally and illegally, and some with criminal records. Lawyers for some of the detainees are challenging their deportations.
Over the past two years, the Trump administration has restricted immigration for Afghans who helped the American war effort, deported others to countries in Africa, and pushed some, who are stranded in a former U.S. military camp in Qatar, to return voluntarily.
Spokesmen for Pakistan’s ministries of interior and foreign affairs did not respond to requests for comment.
Pakistan is in the midst of its own campaign of mass deportation of Afghan refugees, as well as campaigns of public harassment and intimidation to push them out. Since 2023, Pakistan’s government has expelled or forced to return more than 2.7 million Afghan citizens to Afghanistan, calling their presence a national security threat.
Taliban government officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Pakistan’s mass expulsions of Afghans is one of several tools it has used to try to pressure the Taliban government, which it accuses of harboring terrorist groups that stage relentless attacks on Pakistani soil. It has vowed to expel all Afghans — about 1.5 million still live in Pakistan — no matter their immigration status.
Zainullah Niazmand, an Afghan cardiac surgeon practicing in the Pakistani city of Lahore, said he believed the Pakistani government, having first expelled Afghan refugees, traders and day laborers, was now intensifying pressure on the Taliban government by sending back doctors. His visa was revoked last year and he, his wife and their 3-year-old daughter are at risk of expulsion.
Mohammad, the Afghan immigrant detained in Louisiana, said he feels like he is paying for a mistake he made when he was young. After two felony convictions in 2003, for robbery and for making threats to a school, according to the government documents for his case, he said he spent about three years in prison, lost his green card and spent two decades rebuilding his life while checking in regularly with ICE.
“I was so scared to get married. I was so scared to get into a serious relationship, to try to have and maintain a regular life out of fear that one day, something like this could happen,” he said. “The one thing that I did hold dear and close to me in my life in this country was having the freedom to choose how I want to live my life. That’s being stripped away from me.”
In detention, as he awaits a flight to a country he has never known, Mohammad says he is growing his beard and trying to relearn Islamic prayers, fearful of what life will be like under the Taliban.
Yaqoob Akbary contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Pranav Baskar is an international reporter at The Times, based in New York.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
Elian Peltier is The Times’s bureau chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, based in Islamabad.