Afghanistan Peace CampaignAs Pakistan and Afghanistan have escalated military clashes and closed their borders, the Pakistani authorities have intensified mass expulsions of Afghans, saying they can no longer accommodate the decades-old refugee community.
So far this year, about one million of the three million Afghans living in Pakistan have been deported or forced to return to Afghanistan, a country where many have never lived and where jobs and affordable housing are scarce amid a worsening humanitarian crisis. Many have lived their whole lives in Pakistan, which had served as a haven during Afghanistan’s successive wars since the Soviet Union’s invasion in 1979.
It no longer is.
On a recent evening on the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, four families with children, including an infant just 7 days old, were loading a truck with their lifelong possessions: bed frames, chickens, water jerrycans and a few pieces of luggage.
Saifuddin, who goes by one name, said they had decided to leave before the crackdown on Afghans got worse. They had heard calls to go back to Afghanistan both at the mosque where they prayed and from the loudspeakers on police cars patrolling their slum.
Pakistan’s push overlaps with moves by Western nations to restrict or prohibit Afghans from entering. The Trump administration said that it had stopped processing immigration applications from Afghanistan, and that it would review the status of Afghan asylum seekers already in the United States, including those who worked for American or NATO forces during the U.S.-led war, after the shooting on Wednesday of two National Guard members in Washington. The main suspect is Afghan.
Iran, another of Afghanistan’s neighbors, has also deported or forced out more than 1.5 million Afghans this year. The large Afghan refugee communities abroad have served as a lifeline for Afghanistan, sending money back home and driving cross-border trade that has helped keep a battered Afghan economy afloat.
But as Pakistan and Iran have faced their own economic crises, their governments have amped up the xenophobic rhetoric in recent months and accelerated large-scale expulsions that they initiated in 2023. Since then, the two nations have expelled or forcibly returned more than 4.5 million Afghans. More than half of those — 2.5 million — were driven out this year.
The Pakistani authorities have urged landlords to kick Afghan families out of apartments and encouraged citizens in at least one province to help them deport Afghans through a whistle-blower system. They have already arrested 12 times as many Afghans this year as in all of last year, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency.
Those leaving before they get arrested, like Saifuddin’s family, have become a common sight on Pakistan’s roads, loaded aboard colorful trucks that carry entire families and their possessions to the border.
They are being driven out of the slums of Karachi, where many lived by collecting metal scraps or other garbage. Others have left the city of Lahore, where they worked as day laborers and mechanics, and the onion fields and coal mines of Balochistan, where they served as a cheap, hard-working labor force.
“We’re at the mercy of the Pakistani authorities,” said Mehrafzon Jalili, 24, a former Afghan dentistry student who for months lived in a tent encampment in a park in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. She shared the park with hundreds of other Afghan families who were evicted from their homes this year.
Early on Tuesday, Pakistani police officers swept in to arrest the stranded Afghans and take them to a deportation facility, according to Ms. Jalili and another Afghan woman in the encampment, who shared videos of the raid with The New York Times.
The mass migrations of Afghans into Pakistan began after the Soviet invasion, when Islamabad welcomed them as “holy warriors” and “Islamic brethren.” But the official messaging has shifted over the decades, increasingly portraying them as “criminals,” “drug peddlers” and, most recently, “terrorists.”
“We have been welcoming and hosting them with open arms for decades,” Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the spokesman for Pakistan’s armed forces, said in an interview this year. “But a large number of Afghans are involved in criminal activities.”
Pakistani officials now argue that all Afghans in the country are a threat to national security. They have said that the attacker behind the bombing of a courthouse in Islamabad that killed 12 people this month was Afghan.
A faction of the Pakistani Taliban, which is independent but has pledged allegiance to the Taliban government in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack.
The tensions between the two countries escalated this past week, when a suicide attack on the headquarters of paramilitary forces in the western Pakistani city of Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, killed three officers and wounded 11 others. President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan blamed the Pakistani Taliban for the attack.
Pakistan has retaliated in recent months by launching airstrikes on Afghanistan’s two largest cities and in the border areas that have long been a hotbed of insurgent activities. On Tuesday, the Taliban government spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, accused Pakistan of killing 10 people in air raids overnight. The Pakistani military denied responsibility.
Afghan security forces have struck back by attacking Pakistani military posts, in a sharp spiral of violence this fall that has killed dozens and has pushed regional powers like Qatar, Turkey, Iran and Russia to try to mediate between the two belligerents, to little success so far.
The authorities have refused to renew the visas of Afghans who have lived in Pakistan for their entire lives, including children born there. Some 620,000 of the Afghans living in Pakistan are under the age of 15. “Expelled young Afghans will remember it for generations,” said Saba Gul Khattak, an independent Pakistani researcher who has campaigned for better treatment of Afghans.
While many wealthier Afghans have avoided deportation so far through connections or bribes to renew their visas, the expulsion drive has fallen hardest on the poor.
Ms. Jalili and the families who were arrested in the park are among those who face expulsion.
She worked for years as a hospital receptionist, serving as the main breadwinner for her mother and three of her siblings, until her family’s Pakistani landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Her father was an Afghan Army colonel who was arrested and killed by the Taliban while in hiding in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, she said.
At night, when a shivering cold fell on the park, Afghan men and teenage boys took turns standing at entries to protect the community. But they could do little when the police cleared the park and forced the Afghan families onto buses.
Ms. Jalili has a valid visa and said in text messages from the detention facility that she hopes she and her family will not be sent back to Afghanistan.
“But what about others?” she wrote. “They will deport them. Who will ask?”
Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Elian Peltier is an international correspondent for The Times, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.