FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 30, 2026
Contact: Timothy Young | timothy[dot]young at globalrefuge[dot]org
WASHINGTON – Global Refuge today expressed its concern that the Trump administration is reportedly moving to deport Afghans back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and called on these plans to be halted or reversed before a deportation flight carries more than 150 Afghans to Pakistan.
According to The New York Times, ICE has moved Afghan detainees from facilities across the country to Louisiana in recent days, and a chartered flight is expected to depart as soon as Nov. 2. Pakistan would then expel the group across the border into Afghanistan. Three U.S. officials told the Times that the deportation is, in effect, to Afghanistan, and detainees have been told the same.
“Five years ago, Americans watched Afghans cling to planes to escape the Taliban. On Monday, our government plans to charter one back to their persecutors’ hands,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, President and CEO of Global Refuge. “For the people on that manifest, the consequences could be prison, torture, or worse. For their families here, some of whom served alongside U.S. servicemembers, it means losing a loved one without knowing whether they’ll ever hear from them again.”
Pakistan offers no safe harbor. Since 2023, its government has expelled or forced the return of more than 2.7 million Afghans, and it has vowed to remove the roughly 1.5 million who remain, regardless of immigration status. Inside Afghanistan, the United Nations has documented killings, arbitrary detention, and torture of people tied to the former government and security forces. The Taliban has also barred women and girls from secondary school, higher education and most work, and confined them under policies that amount to their erasure from public life.
“Pakistan is patently unsafe for Afghans. Its own government has made that clear by hounding them out of the country by the millions,” added Vignarajah. “Deporting Afghans into that crackdown is a deliberate decision to put them in harm’s way.”
The flight marks an escalation of the administration’s third-country removals, which have already sent deportees to unsafe countries like South Sudan and the Central African Republic. It also comes amid a broader campaign against Afghans, from a travel ban that bars most Afghans from entering the country to the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Afghanistan and a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) processing freeze that has left thousands already here in limbo.
The administration has not announced the plan, and the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment. Global Refuge is calling on Congress to:
- Demand full disclosure of any arrangement with Pakistan or the Taliban, including how travel documents were obtained.
- Require DHS to confirm that no one slated for removal holds a court order barring deportation to Afghanistan, and that pending legal challenges are resolved first.
- Escalate oversight into third-country removal agreements and policies used to reach countries where the U.S. cannot deport directly.
- Push for full resumption of USCIS processing of Afghans’ applications for protection and lawful status
“If this flight takes off unchallenged, it won’t be the last, and each one after it will be easier to send,” noted Vignarajah. “What happens in the next few days will decide whether this is remembered as an outrage or accepted as American policy.”
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