Afghanistan Peace Campaign
When the agents asked if he was a US citizen, Lal, 28, answered honestly: He isn’t. He, his mother and five of his brothers and sisters had fled Afghanistan in the wake of the US’ military withdrawal, and he is currently awaiting a decision on an asylum claim he submitted years ago.
As Said stayed on the line with his younger brother, Said could hear someone aggressively demanding to know who Lal had called and why. Said told Lal to provide whatever the officials needed so he could go, but his brother sounded worried, so Said told him to pass the phone to the agent.
He tried to calm the agent down, he told CNN.
“I told him ‘sir, let’s just talk to each other as adults, right?’ I was like, ‘you’re an officer and you took an oath to defend the Constitution.’ I said, ‘I have done the same thing, I was in the Army, I’m a veteran right now,’” he said.
That seemed to defuse the situation somewhat, Said recalled, but the man kept repeating that Lal is “not allowed to be here” in the US. Said tried to explain that Lal, who is married to a US citizen, was brought to the US legally through the US military’s evacuation of Afghanistan, an effort largely aimed at protecting families like his who had worked with American troops and faced threats from the Taliban. He tried to explain Lal’s pending asylum case, the legal process through which Lal was trying to gain permanent status in the US along with 80,000 other Afghan nationals who fled the country and have similarly looked to create new homes in America.
But soon the phone was handed to a second agent. He was told that they were working to verify Lal’s status.
Afghan asylum cases had received bipartisan support until a sharp shift in tone after an Afghan refugee shot two members of the National Guard in Washington, DC in November days before Lal was stopped at the checkpoint.
Hours passed, with Said continuing to communicate with his brother while the agents waited for a response from the Department of Homeland Security. But then the communication stopped. Said could still see Lal’s location on the app Life360, but he couldn’t get in touch with him, and when he called a nearby border patrol station, no one seemed to be able to find him.
For two days, Said told CNN he couldn’t find his brother — he called several border checkpoints but found himself trapped in a cycle of transferred calls.
“I came to America a legal way,” Lal told CNN from the detention facility in Laredo during a December interview, saying he and his family just want the chance to “live a good life.”
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin confirmed Lal was detained on December 1, after he’d been referred for secondary inspection at a border patrol point of entry. McLaughlin called Lal a “criminal illegal alien” whose “criminal history includes previous arrests for assault and damage to property.”
Court documents shared by Lal’s family, however, show that a charge of “criminal mischief” against Lal, brought in 2023, was dismissed by a judge in Galveston, Texas, resulting in no conviction or finding of guilt. Said told CNN the incident revolved around an allegation that Lal had broken another person’s phone, which Lal denied. The charge was dismissed due to there being no witnesses, the motion to dismiss said, and the family said that it was Lal’s only run in with law enforcement.
McLaughlin also said Lal was told to pull over in December because his work authorization had expired, but Said explained that he had already applied for a renewal. Lal was issued a commercial driver’s license in Texas in August 2025, which expires in 2034.
McLaughlin did not respond to follow-up questions regarding the dismissed charge or his work authorization renewal.
While Lal expected to have his final court hearing on February 12, a request by his lawyer to delay the hearing was granted as they seek to resolve the issue outside of court. Without an agreement, Lal will find out on March 10 if he is being deported back to the country he’d fled with his family nearly five years ago.
Lal and his family are among thousands of Afghans who were brought to the US as the country fell to Taliban rule in August 2021. The panic to flee materialized in a chaotic, frantic period of days as men, women, and children begged US and allied military partners to get them on a plane — any plane — out of the country. Children were handed over barbed wire at Hamid Karzai International Airport to US troops in desperate attempts to get them to safety.
The monumental task of getting civilians out of the country — primarily focused on Afghans who worked with the US government and military, and their immediate family members — resulted in the evacuation of more than 124,000 people, the Air Force later said. Dubbed Operation Allies Refuge, it was the largest non-combatant evacuation in US history.
Lal’s family was evacuated in a daring rescue organized by service members on the ground in coordination with Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton, a Marine veteran who traveled to Afghanistan with Republican Rep. Peter Meijer amid the withdrawal.
Like many, the family was facing particular danger given Said’s work with the US military as a civilian interpreter and later service as a soldier. Said moved to the US in 2014, joined the US Army in 2016, and was honorably discharged in August 2020.
At the time of the US evacuation, and for several years afterwards, there was strong bipartisan support for providing refugee status for Afghan families that had aided the US during the twenty years of operations in that country.
In 2022, now-Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz criticized the Biden administration for “abandoning” Afghan allies and called for officials to be held accountable for the “unkept promises of security for their safety.” Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, an Army veteran, called on former President Joe Biden to keep troops in Afghanistan “until we have rescued every American citizen and those Afghans who risked their lives for American troops.” In August 2021, a bipartisan group of 55 senators urged Biden in a letter to expedite the evacuation of Afghan Special Immigrant Visa recipients and their families.
But that support has faded, especially in the wake of a November shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, DC. One soldier, Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, died. The suspect was identified as a 29-year-old Afghan man who came to the US in the wake of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, further fueling criticism from Trump administration officials about vetting of refugees.
CNN previously reported that the man, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, underwent numerous rounds of vetting starting in 2011 as he worked with US military and intelligence agencies. He was ultimately approved for permanent asylum by the Trump administration last year.
In the wake of the shooting, the Trump administration announced that the processing of all immigration cases for Afghan immigrants was being “stopped indefinitely” pending further review.
President Donald Trump said at the time that he planned to pause asylum applications for “a long time.”
“We don’t want those people,” Trump said aboard Air Force One.
In the wake of November’s shooting, detentions and efforts against Afghan immigrants have “definitely ramped up,” Jordan Weinberg, Lal’s attorney at Atlas Immigration Law, told CNN.
“We are seeing a much higher difficulty for Afghans,” Weinberg said.
After the attack, US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it would be undertaking a “full scale, rigorous reexamination” of green cards issued to people from 19 countries “of concern,” including Afghanistan.
McLaughlin previously said in a statement that DHS was “indefinitely” stopping the processing of all immigration requests related to Afghan nationals “pending further review,” including asylum cases approved under the Biden administration.
McLaughlin told CNN this week that Operation Allies Welcome and Operation Allies Refuge “let thousands of unvetted Afghan nationals including terrorists, sexual predators, pedophiles, domestic abusers, and kidnappers into our country.”
“Under Secretary (Kristi) Noem, DHS has been going full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and criminal illegal aliens that came in through Biden’s fraudulent parole programs and working to get the criminals and public safety threats OUT of our country,” McLaughlin said.
Targeted by the Taliban
The year before he helped his family flee, Said was visiting them at their family home in Khost Province in Afghanistan. He’d just left the US Army as a sergeant, deciding to depart the service because he was not authorized to travel to Afghanistan as an off-duty US soldier, he said, and he wanted to help them with their immigration paperwork.
He’d been home in Afghanistan for roughly a week when his family held a gathering at their home, giving him a chance to talk to friends and family he hadn’t been able to see in years: school friends, cousins, other distant relatives and neighbors that he’d missed after moving to the US.
Lal had been on the roof of the house. The blast “literally picked him up and threw him onto the ground,” Said said. The family thought he’d been killed. When Lal regained consciousness, he thought he was dreaming, he told CNN from the detention facility in Texas, until he saw the dead.
“I can’t sleep, I get nightmares when I’m sleeping,” he told CNN, his voice cracking. “The people there, they died in front of me, in our home.”
Lal’s asylum claim paperwork, submitted in 2022, says six people were killed and more than a dozen others injured. The Taliban ultimately claimed responsibility, Said told CNN.
The family had been targeted because of his service, Said believes, both for helping the American forces while he was a civilian in Afghanistan and later when he put on the US Army uniform.
“There’s no future for them, no safety. There’s no mercy at all from the Taliban,” Said said of the threats against his family. “Lal’s fear is not based on imagination; his fear is based on memories.”
Lal and Said’s father and brother-in-law have faced detention by the Taliban in recent years, both brothers told CNN, weighing heavily on their mother who is now in the US.
Said felt strongly about supporting the US, he said, feeling that America “believed in human rights,” and that he would do “whatever it takes” to help the Americans prevail.
Official military records show Said joined the US military in October 2016 and served as an interpreter, deploying back to Afghanistan as a soldier for eight months in 2018. While deployed there, Said worked with senior military officers and even worked with local media, he recalled — a job that made him recognizable to the Taliban. He attended senior-level meetings alongside US officials as a translator, and appeared in photos with senior Afghan and US officials, including now-retired Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the last senior commander overseeing US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Lal and Said have a brother currently serving in the US Army and a younger sister who wants to join the US Air Force, Said said. He describes theirs as a US military family who care deeply about service and simply wanted a safer life for themselves.
“We believed in this country, right?” Said told CNN. “I risked my life for this country. I never imagined that I would be begging one day just to keep my brother alive, here in America, while he hasn’t done anything wrong.”
On the official DHS document provided to Lal, outlining the reason for his detention and saying he is subject to removal from the US, the allegations listed say only that he is not a citizen of the US and that he was paroled into the US after arriving through Operation Allies Refuge.
“You are immigrant not in possession of a valid immigrant visa, reentry permit, border crossing identification card, or other valid entry document as required by the Immigration and Nationality Act,” the document says.
A shift after November’s shooting
Lal’s detention happened just days after the November shooting, as the Trump administration was rapidly closing doors for Afghan refugees — and refugees from several other countries — to find ways to stay in the US.
In 2025, the Trump administration revoked 85,000 visas of all categories as part of a broader attempt to limit who can come to the US. Last month, the administration instituted an indefinite suspension of immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries, including Afghanistan. Lawmakers have also fiercely debated the topic of visas for Afghans, and just this month Congress declined to authorize any additional special immigrants visas for Afghans who worked with the US.
Top White House aide Stephen Miller railed against asylum seekers at the southern border in a post on X earlier this month, saying there is a “multibillion dollar fraudulent industry” to file “fake asylum applications.”
“Federal law requires illegal aliens to be detained pending a hearing for their (fake) asylum claim,” Miller said.
Heather Hogan, policy and practice counsel at American Immigration Lawyers Association, said Miller’s assertion that it is required to detain immigrants awaiting their asylum claim is “definitely not accurate.”
“In the past, asylum seekers were largely left to pursue their cases and work and live, and their kids could go to school while they were going through the motions of their cases because what is the utility of detaining them?” Hogan said. “When they could otherwise be and want to be working and participating in their communities and providing for their families and themselves?”
Hogan also said lawyers with AILA have reported seeing a more “aggressive” stance from the government toward Afghans in particular, including those who previously worked with the US government in Afghanistan.
People who worked with the US and are still in Afghanistan have faced revenge killings by the Taliban, according to human rights groups. Amnesty International, for example, reported Taliban officials beating, killing or disappearing Afghans who worked with the former government or served in the Afghan National Security Forces. In the weeks after the US’ withdrawal, Human Rights Watch also reported the killing or disappearance of at least 47 former members of the ANSF.
Lal has already gone to extraordinary lengths for a chance at a new life in the US.
He and his sister were shepherding her five young children to the gates of the Kabul airport, part of the desperate crowd attempting to flee, when a suicide bomber attacked Abbey Gate, killing 13 US troops and roughly 170 Afghan civilians.
Said recalled speaking to his brother right after the attack, asking him if he was sure he still wanted to try to escape with their family, knowing what danger they could face.
“Lal clearly said, ‘Yes, (it would be) better to die here than be in the hands of the Taliban,’” Said told CNN. “Just think about it — you saw people die in front of you, but you still want to take that risk for your entire family to get into the base, to come to the United States. Lal did not want to give up.”
