Five Years Later, America’s Promise to Afghans Remains Unfinished

By: Sara Lowry, Associate Director of Humanitarian Legal Services at U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI)

Five years ago, I turned to social media, asking people to help reunite four Afghan children with their mother in New York. The children were hiding in Kabul during the chaotic August 2021 evacuation after their father was taken by the Taliban and was presumed dead. The story quickly hit national news, and finally the mother’s plea was answered.

For a few weeks that summer, it felt like the whole country was asking the same question: what can I do? Every year, I reread the responses and think about how, among countless others, an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and a Catholic veteran came to the aid of a Muslim family.

The question “what can I do” helped produce one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history. It also carried a promise: that the Afghan interpreters, embassy staff, aid workers, and families who put their lives on the line for the U.S. mission, alongside all those in need of protection, would have a real chance to build a safe and permanent future. Five years later, that promise remains unfinished.

Most Afghans evacuated in 2021 arrived in the United States through humanitarian parole, a temporary status with no direct pathway to permanent residence. After Congress failed to advance the Afghan Adjustment Act, the federal government recognized that evacuees would need help navigating what came next, whether applying for asylum, pursuing a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), adjusting to permanent resident status, or perhaps most important to Afghan arrivals, seeking to be reunited with family. In response, the U.S. government looked to U. S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants to implement a program that provided free immigration legal services to Afghan arrivals. The program – known as ILSAA, Immigration Legal Services for Afghan Arrivals – became a passion project, a way I could continue answering the question I asked myself repeatedly “what can I do?” While USCRI and its partners were able to serve well over 10,000 Afghans, the funding ended long before cases received a final decision due to lengthy government processing times.

The infrastructure created to help Afghans navigate the aftermath of the evacuation is shrinking as hurdles (such as required interviews) to permanent safety increase and travel bans restrict reunification.

The Afghan SIV program embodies a promise to Afghans who risked their lives supporting the United States.

Yet this pathway to safety in the United States is increasingly difficult to navigate. Tens of thousands of Afghans are still waiting in the SIV process, even as the number of visas available has dwindled. The deadline for new applications passed at the end of 2025, while thousands remained in the pipeline.

The SIV program has not disappeared, but the pathway created for Afghans who risked their lives alongside the United States is becoming increasingly constrained and mired in uncertainty.

For some Afghans already living in the United States, even temporary protection is being stripped away. DHS announced the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Afghanistan in May 2025, ending both work authorization and protection from deportation for over 11,000 Afghans, even as Afghanistan remains a country the U.S. State Department warns Americans not to travel to and conditions in Afghanistan have not improved. Nearly 22 million people in Afghanistan are in urgent need of humanitarian aid; the country is experiencing one of the most severe hunger crises in the world, and women and girls have had their rights stripped away. For Afghans who cannot safely return home or are waiting indefinitely for other forms of relief to be decided, taking away temporary protection leaves families once again facing uncertainty about whether they can work, remain together, and build the lives they began here. The Afghanistan TPS Act of 2026 is bipartisan legislation now before Congress that would restore that protection, and USCRI has joined its partners in supporting it. Congress should act to restore these protections.

The United States built an extraordinary infrastructure during the Fall of Kabul in August 2021: evacuation mechanisms, humanitarian parole, family reunification, visa processing, and temporary protection. Those measures were meant to give people time and a pathway toward more permanent safety. Too many Afghans are still waiting for that pathway.

Five years ago, this country asked what it could do. That question remains today. For allies still in hiding, families separated by the evacuation, and Afghans waiting in legal limbo.

To answer this question, it is up to Congress to ensure that the SIV program has the resources and visa numbers necessary to fulfill the promise made to Afghans who supported the U.S. mission. So too should the government end the travel ban that needlessly stops Afghans from accessing protection and prioritize the adjudication of Afghan evacuees’ applications.