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Many Afghans living in the U.S. fear being tortured or killed if they get deported
Sayedyaqoob Qattali moved to Houston with his family after legally entering the United States in late 2023.
Sayedyaqoob Qattali
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Sayedyaqoob Qattali
HOUSTON — Sayedyaqoob Qattali spent years aiding U.S. forces as a security commander for the Afghan Interior Ministry in Herat province. He was caught there when Afghanistan’s government fell to the Taliban in August 2021 and was unable to get U.S. help to evacuate.
“I went to Iran, and I applied for Brazil, [to get a] humanitarian visa. That was just the option that was left. Then, after one year, I got the visa, humanitarian visa,” Qattali said.
What happened next was an odyssey. From Brazil, he and his family went to Peru, then to Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and finally Mexico. Most of the time, they walked.
“In all these countries, we got … the legal paper that [said] we can stay there,” Qattali said.
When they arrived in Mexico in November of 2023, Qattali and his family used the CBP One app to apply for U.S. humanitarian parole.
“Some of [the] people … they were waiting one, two, three months,” Qattali said. “And, fortunately, we received an appointment after two days.”
Qattali and his family entered the U.S. at the San Ysidro Port of Entry between Tijuana and San Diego. They came to Houston, getting relocation help from the Houston-based veterans organization Combined Arms.
Qattali speaks seven languages. He got a job as an apartment leasing agent, where his language skills enabled him to help fellow Afghans settle into the community. And he enrolled his two children in a charter school.
Everything was going well. Then, President Trump took office, and one of his first actions was to end the CBP One function for new applicants.
Initially, that wasn’t a problem for Qattali, as he and his family were already settled in the U.S. and had begun applying for asylum.
That changed last month.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “we got an email … that you have to leave. We have like seven days. After that, they’re going to charge … $900 per day.”
Qattali’s attorney told him not to worry, as he’s protected by the asylum application process, but he’s still frightened for his future.
“I have … a threatening letter,” Qattali said. “If I go back, like, 100% they’re going to kill me and my family as well.”
Khalil Yarzada, a former interpreter for U.S. and NATO forces, now heads a program with the Houston-based veterans group Combined Arms, which helps Afghans who aided U.S. forces to settle in the United States.
Andrew Schneider
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Andrew Schneider
“We don’t feel safe”
Even Afghans who have legal permanent residency in the U.S. worry what Trump’s policies mean for them.
Muhammad Amiri is a former pilot trainee with the Afghan air force who found himself stranded in the United Arab Emirates when the Taliban took Kabul.
Amiri managed to get to the United States on what’s known as a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), a status for which individuals who fought and worked alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan are eligible and which can lead to permanent legal status.
Four months ago, Amiri received his green card.
“The words cannot express just my feeling,” Amiri said. “It was out of my control. I started crying, and the tears were coming, just without any control. And just, I thanked God.”
Amiri has had several jobs since coming to the U.S. He’s currently a security supervisor at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and he’s taking IT courses with the goal of getting a job working as a computer help desk associate. He also recently got engaged.
But Amiri’s fiancée is still in Afghanistan, and until his legal situation is settled, he doesn’t dare leave the U.S. to see her, for fear he might not be allowed to return.
Indeed, he worries even his green card won’t protect him in the current political climate in the U.S.
“It doesn’t matter just how you got here,” Amiri said. “We don’t feel safe, and we don’t feel good because now, we feel threatened, if they send us back to our country, it will be the same story. [We] feel threatened to be tortured, maybe be killed by [the] Taliban.”
Ali Zakaria, an immigration attorney based in West Houston, said people like Amiri are right to be worried.
“As unfortunate as it sounds,” Zakaria said, “my first advice to all my clients — and my family and friends — is that, if you’re not a U.S. citizen, do not talk or post on your social media anything that’s negative about the current administration. Do not voice your opinion. Do not engage in any protest, because you will be targeted by this administration for revocation of your status.”
The end of Enduring Welcome and temporary protected status
Roughly 200,000 Afghan immigrants and refugees came to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021. That includes about 10,000 in Greater Houston.
Sayedyaqoob Qattali served as a security commander with the Afghan Interior Ministry in Herat province, Afghanistan, before the Afghan government fell to the Taliban in August 2021.
Sayedyaqoob Qattali
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Sayedyaqoob Qattali
While some of them have since received green cards or even U.S. citizenship, many have more tenuous legal status, such as humanitarian parole or temporary protected status (TPS).
TPS is a program that allows individuals from countries where their lives might be in danger — due to wars or natural disasters — to legally live and work in the United States until it is safe for them to return home.
The current TPS for Afghans began in September 2023 and extends through May 20 of this year.
Afghans who are here on TPS got a shock in April when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that she would not be renewing the protection when it expires.
After that, any Afghans in the U.S. under the program will be at risk of deportation to Afghanistan.
“Everyone I speak to is concerned that if this protection is revoked, a lot of people’s lives are going to be in danger,” said Khalil Yarzada, a former Afghan translator for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan who became a U.S. citizen in February. “A lot of people are going to see a target on their back.”
Soon after President Trump took office, the State Department shut down its Office of the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts (CARE) and the program that CARE oversees, Operation Enduring Welcome.
U.S. Congressman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, is the former chair of both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee.
In March, he and two other Republican representatives sent a joint letter to President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Noem urging them not to end the Enduring Welcome program.
“Such a decision would abandon over 200,000 wartime allies and have lasting consequences for America’s global credibility, military operations, and veterans,” McCaul and his House colleagues wrote. “The Taliban considers anyone who worked with the U.S. to be an enemy. They are being hunted, detained, and executed. Over 3,200 documented killings and disappearances of former Afghan military personnel, interpreters, and U.S. government partners has already occurred.”
The reasons for the policy change
Zakaria, the Houston immigration attorney, thinks the president’s motivation for ending programs like TPS for Afghans is because of his campaign pledge to enact mass deportations when he took office.
“What the Trump administration’s policy [is] at this moment is to create this mass group that can be deported,” Zakaria said, “and one way is to cancel the existing legal protocols or legal protections that are in place, and thus making those people unlawfully here, and then deport them.”
Ali Zakaria is an immigration attorney based in West Houston.
Andrew Schneider
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Andrew Schneider
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS,) issued the following statement explaining the decision to end TPS for Afghans:
“Secretary Noem made the decision to terminate TPS for individuals from Afghanistan because the country’s improved security situation and its stabilizing economy no longer prevent them from returning to their home country,” McLaughlin wrote. “Additionally, the termination furthers the national interest and the statutory provision that TPS is in fact designed to be temporary. Additionally, DHS records indicate that there are Afghan nationals who are TPS recipients who have been the subject of administrative investigations for fraud, public safety, and national security.”
While Noem argues that the security outlook in Afghanistan has improved, the U.S. State Department’s website lists the travel advisory for Afghanistan at the highest risk, Level 4: “Do Not Travel, due to armed conflict, civil unrest, crime, terrorism, and kidnapping. Travel to all areas of Afghanistan is unsafe.”
NPR reached out to two of the staunchest critics of former President Joe Biden’s handling of Afghanistan, Congressman McCaul and Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, for their reactions to the approaching end of TPS for Afghans.
Cornyn did not respond to repeated requests for comment. McCaul sent the following statement:
“From the Houthis in Yemen to the cartels on our coasts, the Trump administration is taking decisive action to root out terrorism and make our world safer,” McCaul wrote. “The Taliban, however, have made their thirst for retribution against those who helped the United States clear. Until they demonstrate clear behavioral changes, I urge the administration to continue prioritizing the safety of the Afghan men and women who risked their lives to help our troops.”
The last two Congresses have taken up a bill called the Afghan Adjustment Act, aimed at speeding up the path to permanent legal status for Afghans who aided U.S. forces during the war and expanding the eligibility for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs).
The measure died at the end of 2022 and 2024, and the current Congress has yet to refile the bill.
“Personally, I would like to see that happen yesterday,” said Yarzada, who heads the SIVs and Allies Program at Combined Arms. “The SIVs have given so much of their life, of their livelihood, to be in a place where they are, and I think it is our duty as Americans to support them, to give them a fair shot, a fair chance to be able to build a life here in the United States, because this is the most American thing that we can do.”
The bombing of an Iranian elementary school that killed some 165 people, many of them schoolgirls, included more targets near the school than has been initially reported, a review of commercial satellite imagery by NPR has found.
The images suggest that the school was hit on Saturday as part of a precision airstrike on a neighboring Iranian military complex — and that it may have been struck as a result of outdated targeting information.
The new images come from the company Planet and are of the city of Minab, located in southeastern Iran. They show that a health clinic and other buildings near the school were also struck. Three independent experts confirmed NPR’s analysis of the additional strike points.
The strike points “look like pretty clean detonation centroids,” said Corey Scher, a postdoctoral researcher at the Conflict Ecology laboratory at Oregon State University.
“These certainly appear like detonation sites,” agreed Scher’s colleague, Oregon State associate professor Jamon Van Den Hoek.
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College who specializes in satellite imagery, said the imagery was consistent with a precision airstrike.
The images show “very precise targeting,” Lewis told NPR. “Almost all the buildings [in the compound] are hit.”
A satellite image of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard compound taken on March 4, several days after an airstrike destroyed a school on the edge of the compound. The image reveals that half a dozen other buildings in addition to the school were struck.
Planet Labs PBC
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Planet Labs PBC
Iranian state media said 165 people died in the bombing, which struck a girls’ school. The school was located within less than 100 yards of the perimeter of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base, according to satellite images and publicly available information. The clinic was also located within the base perimeter, although both facilities had been walled off from the base.
Israel has denied involvement. “We are not aware at the moment of any IDF operation in that area,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told NPR on Monday. “I don’t know who’s responsible for the bombing.”
At a press conference Wednesday morning, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the U.S. is looking into what happened at the school. “All I know, all I can say, is that we’re investigating that,” Hegseth said. “We, of course, never target civilian targets.”
Given Minab’s location in the southeastern part of Iran, Lewis believes it’s more likely the U.S. would have conducted the strike than Israel. As one gets farther south and east in Iran, “a strike is much more likely to be a U.S. strike than an Israeli strike because of the type of munitions and the geographic location,” he said.
Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, called the strike “deliberate” and said that the U.S. and Israel bombed the school in part to tie up Iranian forces in the region with rescue efforts. “To call the attack on the girls school merely a ‘war crime’ does not capture the sheer evil and depravity of such a crime,” he said.
But Lewis said it’s more likely that the strike was the result of an error. Satellite images show that the school and clinic buildings were both once part of the base. The school was separated from the base by a wall between 2013 and 2016. The clinic was walled off between 2022 and 2024.
Lewis believes it’s possible American military planners had not updated their target sets.
“There are thousands of targets across Iran, and so there will be teams in the United States and Israel that are responsible for tracking those targets and updating them,” he said. “It’s possible that the target didn’t get updated.”
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for additional information about the strike.
NPR’s Arezou Rezvani and NPR’s RAD team contributed to this report.
Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the assassinated Ali Khamenei, is being heavily tipped to succeed his father as supreme leader of Iran, which would pitch a hardliner into the task of steering the Islamic republic through the most turbulent period in its 48-year history and offer a powerful signal that, for now, it has no intention of changing course.
No official confirmation has been given and the announcement may be delayed until after the funeral of Ali Khamenei, which was on Wednesday postponed.
His son is believed to have been the choice of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Israeli defence minister, Gideon Saar, has warned he will be assassinated.
Ayatollah Seyed Khatani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses the new supreme leader, said the assembly was close to selecting a leader.
Rigid in his anti-western views, Mojtaba Khamenei is not the candidate Donald Trump would have wanted. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said on Tuesday that Iran was run by “religious fanatic lunatics” – and Khamenei’s appointment is hardly likely to dispel that opinion.
The choice of supreme leader is made by the 88-strong Assembly of Experts, who in this case are picking from a field of six possible candidates. His election would be a powerful if unsurprising symbol that the government is not looking to find an accommodation with America.
Trump has said the worst-case scenario would be if Khamenei’s successor was “as bad as the previous person”.
There has been speculation for more than a decade that he would be his father’s successor, which grew when Ebrahim Raisi, the elected president and favourite of Khamenei, was killed in a helicopter crash.
Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969 and studied theology after graduating from high school. At the age of 17, he went to serve in the Iran-Iraq war, but it was not until the late 1990s that he came to be recognised as a public figure in his own right.
After the landslide defeat of Khamenei’s preferred candidate, Ali Akbar Nategh Nuri, in the 1997 presidential election, where he won only 25% of the final vote, various conservative Iranian groups realised the need to make changes to their structures and Mojtaba Khamenei was central to that project.
He was also seen as instrumental by reformists in suppressing the protests in 2009 that came after allegations the presidential election had been rigged, with his name chanted in the streets as one of those responsible. Mostafa Tajzadeh, a senior member of Iran’s reformist parties who was imprisoned after the vote, alleged that his and his wife, Fakhr al-Sadat Mohtashamipour’s, legal case was under the direct supervision of Mojtaba Khamenei.
In 2022 he was given the title of ayatollah – essential to his promotion. By then he was a regular figure by his father’s side at political meetings, as well as playing an influential role in the Islamic Republic’s Broadcasting Corporation, the government’s official media outlet often criticised for churning out dull political propaganda that many Iranians reject in favour of overseas satellite channels. He has also played a central role in the administration of his father’s substantial financial empire.
His closest political allies are Ahmad Vahidi, the newly appointed IRGC commander; Hossein Taeb, a former head of the IRGC’s intelligence organisation; and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the current speaker of the parliament.
His rumoured appointment and its hereditary nature has long been resisted by reformists. The former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, referring to the long history of rumours about Mojtaba Khamenei succeeding his father as leader, wrote in 2022: “News of this conspiracy have been heard for 13 years. If they are not truly pursuing it, why don’t they deny such an intention once and for all?”
The Assembly of Experts, in response, denounced “meaninglessness of doubts” and said the assembly would select only “the most qualified and the most suitable”.
Israel on Tuesday struck the building in the Iranian city of Qom, one of Shia Islam’s main seats of power, where the assembly was scheduled, but the building was empty, according to IRGC-affiliated media.
new video loaded: Senators Question Kristi Noem on ICE Immigration Tactics
transcript
transcript
Senators Question Kristi Noem on ICE Immigration Tactics
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem repeatedly refused to apologize for suggesting that Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two U.S. citizens shot and killed by agents, were domestic terrorists.
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What we’ve seen is a disaster under your leadership, Ms. Noem. A disaster. What we’ve seen is innocent people getting detained that turn out are American citizens. I could talk about the culture that’s been created here. After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, when I spoke to Alex’s parents, they told me that you calling him a domestic terrorist — this was directly from them — the day after he was killed, a nurse in our V.A., Alex — one of the most hurtful things they could ever imagine was said by you about their son. Do you have anything you want to say to Alex Pretti’s parents? Ma’am, I did not call him a domestic terrorist. I said It appeared to be an incident of — I think the parents saw it for what it was. In a hearing — recent hearing before the HSGAC committee, C.B.P. and ICE officials testified under oath that their agencies did not inform you that Pretti was a domestic terrorist — during that hearing, stated during that hearing, I was getting reports from the ground, from agents at the scene, and I would say that it was a chaotic scene. How did you think that calling them domestic terrorists at that scene was somehow going to calm the situation? The fact that you can’t admit to a mistake, which looks like under investigation, it’s going to prove that Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti probably should not have been shot in the face and in the back. Law enforcement needs to learn from that. You don’t protect them by not looking after the facts.
By Christina Kelso and Jackeline Luna
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