In summary
After the Taliban retook control in 2021, tens of thousands of Afghans resettled in California. Many of them worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan. But in his second term, President Donald Trump has withdrawn legal protections and erected new barriers to permanent status that threaten their future in their adopted home.
Marwa made it out of Afghanistan with only one of her children.
As Taliban forces retook control of the country in August 2021, Marwa and other Afghans working for the United States government headed to the Kabul airport to help facilitate a chaotic withdrawal. Following instructions from her supervisor at the U.S. Embassy, who told Marwa that her family would be sent for later, she brought nothing but her infant son who was still breastfeeding.
For four days, between shifts cleaning, managing lists of evacuees, escorting people and translating, Marwa said she tried in vain to get her elder son and daughter inside. Even after they pushed through surging crowds and ducked gunfire from Taliban militants to reach the airport gates, her kids were not allowed past a strict military checkpoint. With her phone battery dead, Marwa could not reach her supervisor before she evacuated.
Now resettled in California, Marwa has been fighting through dead ends and black boxes of information from the U.S. government for nearly four years to reunite with her children, who later escaped with family members to Pakistan. She came painfully close earlier this year when they were scheduled on a Jan. 20 flight to Sacramento – then President Donald Trump, on his first day back in office, signed an executive order that canceled Afghan family reunification flights.
“I’m exhausted. There was times that I wanted to suicide. There was times that I give up,” Marwa said. CalMatters is referring to her only by a family nickname, because of ongoing safety threats that her family faces in Afghanistan.
“That’s the horrible part, that you don’t have any other choice but to exist, but to live, but to be present, but to be there,” she said. “My soul is dying. It’s only my body that sometimes is just pushing. And it’s just because of my kids.”
The devastating blow has been compounded in the months since by a stream of federal policy changes that not only closed the door to her children but may also force Marwa and other Afghan asylees like her out of the country.
California is home to the most Afghans in U.S.
Nearly 200,000 Afghans arrived in the United States under former President Joe Biden, according to the U.S. State Department, first in a massive airlift as the American military pulled out of Afghanistan and then through programs to relocate people left behind who had worked with the U.S. government, their families and others particularly vulnerable to retribution from the Taliban.
More ended up in California – which became a popular landing spot for refugees after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – than anywhere else in the country. The state was home to more than 58,000 Afghan immigrants in 2023, according to the most recently available U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute. Sacramento and Alameda counties have the largest Afghan immigrant populations in the United States, with thousands more in Contra Costa, Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange and Stanislaus counties.
But in the past six months, the Trump administration has blocked pathways for hundreds of thousands of Afghans still seeking to come to the United States. It has also canceled legal protections for many who are already here and erected new barriers to permanent status that cast doubt on their future in their adopted home. There is little California has been able to do to fill the gap as the federal government pulls back its support.
California’s Afghan community is reeling, with many recent arrivals who assisted the U.S. in its two-decade war and operation to rebuild Afghanistan feeling betrayed, said David Malikyar, a resettlement manager for the Los Angeles-based nonprofit the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.
“Fear rules the day,” said Malikyar, an Afghan refugee of the 1980s Soviet war who now helps immigrants navigate the asylum process, apply for public benefits and deal with the culture shock of a new country. “They are becoming disheartened and they are losing momentum in their belief in America and its democracy as they knew it.”
Trump closes doors to Afghans
The situation is complicated by the haphazard conditions under which many Afghans arrived in the United States. The military rapidly evacuated more than 120,000 people from Kabul in 2021, and tens of thousands without official permission to immigrate here were granted humanitarian parole while they applied for asylum or visas. Others fled the Taliban regime and presented themselves at the southern border after the Biden administration created a temporary protected status for Afghans in 2022.
Those who came through the refugee program or on special immigrant visas — for military interpreters and people who worked for the U.S. government – are on more solid footing, but may still be trying to bring over family members stuck abroad. One such visa holder was detained at a federal immigration office in Connecticut last week during a routine green card application appointment, raising new questions about how aggressively the Trump administration may pursue deportations of Afghans.
Malikyar said the distress in the Afghan community is further exacerbated by misinformation circulating on social media about the effects of Trump’s executive orders and by their provisional work authorization, which has made it difficult for many to find jobs.
Advocates for Afghan immigrants, including groups of veterans who served alongside them during the war, have made a loud public case to the federal government not to abandon U.S. allies. Yet it has not slowed the Trump administration’s crackdown.
The president signed executive orders on Jan. 20 pausing all refugee admissions, including for already approved cases. The order also canceled foreign aid, which funded resettlement agencies in the United States. Then in April, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would not renew the temporary protected status that shields Afghans from deportation, which ended on July 14.
The following month, the State Department notified Congress it was shutting down the office that coordinates continuing relocation efforts for Afghans. A few days later, in June, Trump placed Afghanistan on a list of countries whose citizens are banned from entering the United States. Provisions in his priority bill that just passed Congress create expensive new fees for asylum, humanitarian parole and temporary protected status, while making applicants ineligible for social services such as health care and food benefits.
“All of these different dynamics come together and basically choke any of the hope that people had,” Malikyar said.
A.T. has been waiting for three years for a determination on his asylum claim. He fears being sent back to Afghanistan if his humanitarian parole, which expires in August, is not reauthorized. CalMatters is referring to him by his initials for his safety.
A high-ranking civil servant in Afghanistan, A.T. and his family joined the throngs fleeing the Taliban in 2021 because his position in the government and his working relationship with international communities put them in danger. After sneaking out of the country with help from connections at the U.S. Embassy, A.T. said he learned that Taliban officials had searched his apartment and taken his car.
“It’s not easy to leave your country behind,” he said. “We were relieved that at least we could make it.”
A.T.’s family eventually moved to the Los Angeles area, where his sister had lived for four decades. In 2022, they applied for asylum after determining it would be their only legal route to stay in the United States, and they were interviewed twice that summer. While his son was approved and received a green card last year, A.T. and his wife have yet to hear anything about their case, he said. The stress has caused them to seek mental health counseling.
Though still grateful to the United States and others who had “shed their blood and their taxpayer money with Afghans to get rid of terrorism in that country,” A.T. said he now feels disappointed and worried that the American government will not follow through on what it owes its allies.
“The Afghans paid a very high price. People lost their loved ones. They lost parts of their bodies,” he said. “Please do not forget Afghans who fought with you in the war against terror. Whenever you give some final decision about the status, please consider the facts.”
California is not stepping in
While advocates hoped California might backfill aid for its Afghan immigrants, resources are limited.
The California Department of Social Services runs a program to help Afghans arriving as refugees or with special immigrant visas integrate into their community, but it is supported by federal funding. The department would not make anyone available to discuss the program and how its work has changed under the Trump administration; spokesperson Theresa Mier repeatedly refused to explain why.
With state officials working to close another multibillion-dollar deficit this year, even small funding requests have been rejected. Immigrant rights groups sponsored bills to establish a state immigrant and refugee affairs agency and to expand resettlement services to more recent arrivals, neither of which made it out of legislative fiscal committees.
The state budget includes $10 million for immigration legal services statewide, which could support Afghans navigating the asylum process, but it’s a small fraction of what organizations requested as the Trump administration ramps up its mass deportation agenda.
Opening Doors, a nonprofit that has served immigrants and refugees in Sacramento for about three decades, was actively working with 521 Afghans in the early stages of resettlement and 83 more who had already booked travel when Trump signed the executive order suspending the refugee program.
Chief Executive Officer Jessie Mabry said she immediately laid off 15% of her staff to maintain enough resources to pay for housing and other critical needs for refugee clients, who are supposed to receive assistance for 90 days to get on their feet.
“We made a commitment that we were not leaving those folks high and dry, that it would be immoral,” she said.
A two-year grant from the Department of Social Services – which state officials pushed through at the beginning of the year as it became clear that the Trump administration would end federal funding – stabilized Opening Doors.
Mabry said it has been essential because hundreds of Afghans continue to arrive in the Sacramento region. They are traveling on special immigrant visas that were approved before the federal government paused its resettlement work and are paying their own way to the United States, often with help from family or community groups.
In the past few months, Mabry said, Opening Doors has submitted more than 300 emergency applications for federal resettlement assistance for recent Afghan arrivals, as a lawsuit over the program shutdown plays out; 93 of those new enrollments were approved as of June 1.
“I’m worried about people slipping through the gaps,” she said. “There is just a sense of uncertainty and anxiety that cannot be overstated.”
Families still separated by politics
When the Taliban reentered Kabul in August 2021, Marwa was working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, a job that she hoped would eventually allow her to apply for a special immigrant visa to move to the U.S. Now it made her vulnerable to reprisal from Taliban forces, for being an enemy collaborator.
Marwa was going through a divorce and had moved into her parents’ home with her three children – a 10-year-old daughter, a five-year-old son and a four-month-old baby. That day, Marwa said, dozens of Taliban soldiers and the father of her estranged husband showed up demanding her infant son, whom her in-laws saw as their financial future. While her father distracted them, Marwa said she fled by climbing over a wall to a neighbor’s home.
Marwa knew she needed to leave the country. She reported for duty at the military airport in Kabul, where she realized that many of her colleagues had ignored the order not to bring their families along because this was their opportunity to escape.
Before she could get her two elder children into the airport, Marwa said her baby fell ill. When she sought treatment for his diarrhea and vomiting, she said she was instead pushed onto a departing plane.
“I didn’t move. I didn’t say anything. I was only crying and my heart was full of anger, full of emotions, full of pain,” she said. “The only thing that I will be regretting for [my] entire life would be listening” to instructions not to bring her family with her to the airport.
Marwa eventually settled in the Sacramento region, where she knew a former colleague from the embassy in Kabul. But her efforts to bring the rest of her family to the United States have dragged on unsuccessfully for years and without clear explanation, even as she has sought help from members of Congress and UN officials.
Her children, her mother and five siblings evacuated to Pakistan in 2022, expecting they would all soon be able to immigrate, before their visas eventually expired, Marwa said. Her father, who surrendered his passport to the Taliban as they tried to pressure Marwa to return to Afghanistan, was killed while on a video call with her as he walked to the bakery to buy bread.
Her own situation is unstable. Marwa was granted asylum, but she doesn’t know if she will be able to stay in the country, where her youngest son has received medical treatment for a tumor.
She does know she cannot return to Afghanistan. She is certain she would be killed or thrown in prison for having worked with the U.S. government. Marwa is angry with the Trump administration for shutting out Afghans now, because during his first term, Trump kicked off the negotiations with the Taliban that led to the United States’ 2021 withdrawal and her forced immigration.
“You’re the reason why I’m experiencing this,” she said. “It has been more than four years, and I’m still in shock. My mind is not accepting that the Taliban is back.”
Yet her primary focus is reuniting with her children, whom she compared to “tiny toys” destroyed by the immigration system. While Marwa tries to speak with her children every day, unstable electricity and internet access sometimes makes it impossible. When she reads about an explosion or kidnapping and can’t reach them, it puts her in a panic not knowing whether they are safe.
She said that the lack of information she has been able to provide them about when they might join her in the United States has put a strain on their relationship and made her feel like a “criminal hostage.” It’s been particularly excruciating watching from afar as her daughter has grown up from a skinny and shy little girl into a teenager; it pained Marwa not to be with her daughter to guide her through her first period.
“I’m coming from work, opening the apartment, holding my baby, and there is silence everywhere,” she said. “There’s no hugs, there’s no kisses.”