Veterans say immigration crackdowns and politics around the shooting of two National Guardsmen in November has led to “wholesale punishment” against Afghan allies still in that country who once aided American forces and now seek refuge from the Taliban in the U.S.
“There are zero Afghans coming right now. No refugees, no [Special Immigrant Visas]. President Trump has turned off everything,” said Shawn VanDiver, an Iraq veteran and founder of AfghanEvac, one of several volunteer groups that were stood up to aid evacuees during the Kabul withdrawal.
Scott Mann, a former Green Beret who was part of a group of veteran volunteers who aided evacuees as part of Task Force Pineapple, said the policy discussion has become a source of “political theater” and “it’s not even about Afghan allies.”
“It’s more about one party upping the other party and frankly in many ways, manipulating veteran support,” he said.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who worked with the CIA, is charged with killing one National Guard soldier and seriously injuring another in a shooting on Thanksgiving Eve in Washington, D.C. In the aftermath, President Donald Trump suspended asylum decisions and halted visa applications, impacting Afghan nationals who were waiting for visa applications or other immigration pathways.
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While Lakanwal came to the U.S. through a last-minute parole program created in the wake of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal, advocacy groups said the political fallout of the shooting is overshadowing established immigration pipelines, which should be reopened.
“There was no way to give all these folks visas. They didn’t qualify for existing visa categories or there was just no time. It was a way to get around that,” said Camille Mackler, an immigration lawyer and fellow at the Truman Center for National Security. “The parole program was a way to sort of really quickly get people into the country that the president could do without congressional approval.”
The comments came ahead of a Wednesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Biden Administration-era parole program under which Lakanwal came to the U.S. with thousands of other “Zero Unit” soldiers who worked with the CIA.
Andrew Sullivan, executive director of No One Left Behind, said the shooting clearly highlighted a failure, but that he hopes the hearing will be “a substantive discussion on policy” for other resettlement efforts.
“We need to take a scalpel, not a sledgehammer to address the problem,” said Sullivan, a former infantry platoon commander in Afghanistan. “We should examine that. But then we need to turn the program back on because, unfortunately, there are tens of thousands of allies that kept Americans alive, kept Americans safe, that are going to be punished by this one gentleman.”
Trump’s recent orders in the wake of the shooting also come as the administration has shuttered visa, refugee and asylum pathways for Afghans who fought and worked with American military personnel, and their family members.
A quarter-million still stuck in Afghanistan
According to State Department data tracked by #AfghanEvac, there are nearly 243,000 Afghans in the refugee and special visa program pipelines.
Veterans echoed a sentiment that has long driven the work that they do — that Afghans who fought alongside American military and intelligence personnel were given promises of protection and accountability for sacrificing their lives, personal safety and putting their families at risk for working with the U.S. — but because of immigration politics, they’ve been abandoned.
“When we send veterans from my generation down range and we tell them to make promises, we shouldn’t turn them into liars,” VanDiver said. “It’s not about Afghanistan. It’s about our national honor and these folks earned their shot at the American dream.”
The Trump administration’s series of recent immigration blockades is the latest political battle affecting Afghan ally immigration efforts. Chris Purdy, founder of The Chamberlain Network, who has worked on Afghan resettlement, said the topic used to be “pretty bipartisan” with Congress passing legislation to keep the specialized visa program going with “this understanding of what we needed to do for our Afghan allies.”
“It’s just been wrapped up in immigration over the past 10 years,” Purdy said, “and this is unfortunately a casualty of that.”
Afghan Adjustment Act
Peter Lucier, a Marine Corps veteran who deployed to Afghanistan in 2011, said lawmakers have ignored veteran calls to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would enhance security checks and balances.
“When you’re shutting those things off and you refuse to pass an adjustment act at the same time — it’s a completely untenable situation,” he said.
Outside of the parole program, there are several immigration pipelines for Afghans to come to the U.S., but eligibility depends on the work they did and who they were paid by. For instance, Afghans who were employed by the U.S. military qualify for the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa program, but those who were paid by the Afghan government, like soldiers in the Afghan National Army, do not.
Sullivan, who deployed in 2013 with the 1st Infantry Division, credited an Afghan team of ordnance disposal techs with destroying 50 improvised explosive devices on his unit’s 10-day mission. Those Afghans are not eligible for the visa program, he said.
Elizabeth Lynn, director at Operation Recovery, said the political whiplash has been increasingly difficult for veterans working with Afghan allies and who have had to be the bearer of bad news about asylum cases not going through or their family members not being eligible to come to the U.S.
“That’s really hard for a veteran to navigate, especially coming out of Afghanistan or Iraq and dealing with years and years of war,” said Lynn, an Air Force and Navy Reserve veteran who deployed to Afghanistan as a combat advisor to train Afghan soldiers on logistics. “The disappointment is probably one of the hardest things that many of us in the veterans community have to deal with.”
