‘He earned power, and now he’s going to use it’

A day-one order from President Donald Trump puts on pause the plans of Afghan allies who have been approved for resettlement in the U.S., a delay that advocates say could be the difference between life and death at the hands of the Taliban. 

A pause on refugee resettlement in the U.S. will include Afghans who are in hiding after the Taliban takeover and the family members of U.S. troops.

“There are lawyers, doctors, journalists stuck in Pakistan who have been waiting for three and a half years to relocate to the U.S. We finally got the program moving, and we got the U.S. government to agree to allow them to relocate,” Shawn VanDriver, president of resettlement group AfghanEvac, told Fox News Digital. 

“Now, they’re f***ing panicking.” 

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The executive order, entitled “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program, will take effect on Monday and will immediately pause the resettlement of those who have worked their way through a system to get approval to move to the U.S. 

 It will go on “until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States.”

A report will be submitted to Trump every 90 days until he determines that refugees should be allowed in.

“They’re getting it wrong here,” said VanDriver, worried the pause will be “indefinite.” 

“It could be any day that the Taliban or ISIS-K shows up at your door,” he said. “Can you imagine being a U.S. service member coming to work yesterday thinking that your mom is going to get out of Kabul and then they’re like ‘nope’?” 

The family members of roughly 200 U.S. service members will be immediately impacted, according to VanDriver. 

Some of those service members worked as combat interpreters for the U.S. during the war in Afghanistan, only to relocate to and join the service in the U.S. 

“The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees,” the order says.

Since the end of the war in 2021, some 180,000 Afghans have resettled in the U.S. 

“How can the US government leave me behind in Afghanistan after I approved thousands of airstrike packages against the Taliban?” one Afghan who was in the final stages of case processing wrote in a text message shared with Fox News Digital. 

“Members of Trump’s cabinet are U.S. military veterans and they fully understand what someone in my situation must feel like right now,” the Afghan wrote. “This was the only hope for me and my family.” 

Prior to the executive order AfghanEvac sent a letter to the Trump team and other lawmakers urging them to continue resettling Afghan allies in the U.S. VanDriver said his letter has received no response from the new White House team.

Trump campaigned on the chaos that ensued when the U.S. military pulled out of Afghanistan in August 2021. President Joe Biden pointed his finger at Trump, who had agreed to a 2021 deadline with the Taliban, but Trump claimed the Taliban had not held up their end of the deal so he would not have stuck to the agreement. 

If the refugee program is paused for 90 days, it would affect some 2,000 people. If it is paused in definitely, it could affect between 25 and 30,000 people, according to Van Driver. 

Many of those who are waiting for approval to come to the U.S. are hiding out in Pakistan fearful of deportation back to Afghanistan where their lives are at risk before they get approval to come to the U.S. 

Advocates say the decision walks back on a promise the U.S. made to Afghans who aided U.S. troops and non-governmental organizations when the U.S. pulled out and the government collapsed to the Taliban. 

The order drew mixed reaction from Republicans. 

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“It doesn’t have to include the Afghans,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., a Navy SEAL veteran, told Fox News Digital. “I learned a long time ago there’s waivers for everything. If you’re a man, woman or child and you assisted us in Afghanistan –  I’m alive because of our Afghan allies.They’ve earned the right to come here. 

“I think the move itself is correct,” said Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, another former SEAL, said, adding that Afghan allies should be exempt from the order. “Those Afghan refugees fought alongside us. They have every single right, in my opinion, to be able to navigate these challenging waters to be in our country.” 

Hundreds of people gather near a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane to try to escape in August 2021.  (AP)

Military parade celebrates third year of Taliban takeover in August 2024 (AP Photo/Siddiqullah Alizai)

“When you were bringing everybody out of Afghanistan, we were supposed to be targeting the civilians that helped us,” said Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio,  a former Army ranger said. “[Biden] flooded everybody that had any proximity to Afghanistan through that program.”

“There are people who were inside those C-17s [that evacuated Afghans in 2021] who should not have been there, who had been locked up in prison the day before,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. 

“So we’re going to look carefully and review that. Are we going to pause it for five years and not keep our promise? No.” 

The Trump administration “will be abandoning thousands of individuals who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with American service members, and who now, due to their loyal service and commitment to our shared values, remain at great risk in Afghanistan,” VanDriver said in a statement.

“Even a temporary pause puts our allies in further danger, compromises our global standing with any current and future allies, and breaks the promises we made as a country,” the AfghanEvac letter circulated among lawmakers reads. 

WASHINGTON  —  A day after President Trump issued 11 executive orders cracking down on illegal immigration, advocates and a coalition of states led by California are preparing for court battles against an administration that appears to have learned from previous legal missteps made during his first term.

Among the many sweeping changes in Trump’s orders were the declaration of a national emergency at the southern border, the revocation of birthright citizenship and the designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

Immigrants and those who hoped to immigrate to the U.S. are reeling from the news. Thousands of migrants are indefinitely stranded in Mexico after Trump ended use of a phone app and canceled long-standing appointments by asylum seekers for legal entry. Afghan refugees who had been cleared for travel to the United States are now in limbo after Trump paused refugee resettlement. Undocumented immigrants in Chicago and other cities across the country stayed home out of fear of planned immigration raids.

Legal experts said subtle modifications to some of the orders reflected attempts by the Trump administration to beat back legal challenges preemptively.

“Some of this stuff they have done is to try and preempt a lot of the issues that they bumped into last time,” said Amy Fischer, director of the refugee and migrant rights program at Amnesty International USA.

Opponents of Trump’s orders wasted no time in challenging them. A coalition comprising California, 17 other states, the District of Columbia and the city of San Francisco sued the federal government Tuesday over Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, calling it unconstitutional and asking the court to block it from taking effect.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Monday night over the birthright citizenship order and submitted a legal filing in an ongoing case over the cancellation of appointments for asylum seekers at the border. Nayna Gupta, policy director at the left-leaning American Immigration Council, said the organization is also planning a lawsuit this week against Trump’s use of executive authority to “suspend the entry” of certain immigrants when doing so is deemed to be detrimental to national interests.

The ability to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border is suspended, according to Trump’s order, “until I issue a finding that the invasion at the southern border has ceased.”

“Trump’s barrage of executive orders is calculated to create fear, create chaos, induce anxiety and drive our elected officials to capitulate and collaborate in a mass deportation agenda,” said Naureen Shah, deputy director of government affairs at the ACLU. “If we let Trump exert this kind of death grip over our communities now for immigration enforcement, we fear it will embolden Trump to come again and again for our civil rights.”

Longtime critics of illegal immigration hailed the president’s actions. “Thanks to Donald Trump, America’s borders are about to get a lot more secure,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) said in a post on X. Issa’s district runs along the border east of San Diego.

Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement that “nothing exemplifies a new day in America more than President Trump’s unwavering commitment to border security and restoring enforcement of our nation’s laws.”

Some of Trump’s orders are predicated on what opponents contend to be legally dubious claims. Birthright citizenship, for example, is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

“He cannot unilaterally change that,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said Monday night on CNN. “But that’s the conversation — the chaos — he wants to create.”

And in designating drug cartels as terrorist groups, Trump is preparing to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against them. But utilizing the law would require courts to agree that criminal groups can be considered a nation at war with the United States. The Alien Enemies Act allows the president to arrest, imprison or deport immigrants from a country considered an enemy of the U.S. during wartime.

“Whether this is a war or there’s an invasion is going to be subject to litigation, and there is good law on the side against the president on this,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

But challenging some of Trump’s policies will be a challenge in itself. Fischer, of Amnesty International, said it’s harder to cleanly pick apart policies that are laid out in executive orders that overlap and rely on one another.

Other aspects of the orders have less conclusive legal precedent. Fischer pointed to the pause on refugee admissions, something Trump did during his first presidency. This time, the executive order calls for a report to be sent within 90 days to the president by immigration officials detailing whether resumption of refugee processing “would be in the interests of the United States.”

Tom Jawetz, a former senior attorney at the Homeland Security Department under the Biden administration, said Trump’s new administration is being both more cautious and more aggressive than last time. The policies he implemented before, such as Remain in Mexico, could be carried out more quickly and possibly more effectively. Under that policy, asylum seekers must stay across the border as their cases are being adjudicated.

But the more “exotic” provisions of some executive orders are largely legally untested, Jawetz said. Trump said during his inaugural address that he would deploy the military to the border region to combat illegal immigration.

“Aligning the mission of the U.S. military to border security, combined with a national emergency declaration and all of this invasion rhetoric, taken to the extreme, could be completely unprecedented and transformative,” Jawetz said.

Trump’s opponents are waiting to see the written policies that emerge from the executive orders. Litigation strategy will come down to how the orders are implemented, Jawetz said.

Some of those policies started trickling out Tuesday. In a news release, the Homeland Security Department announced that acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman had issued a directive ending the broad use of temporary humanitarian programs, which under then-President Biden were expanded to give legal protection to 1.5 million immigrants. Another directive rescinds long-standing guidelines that prevent immigration enforcement in sensitive locations, such as hospitals and churches.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest. The Trump administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense,” the release states.

Times staff writer Rachel Uranga in Los Angeles contributed to this report.