The Dictatorship
Afghans who helped the U.S. fight the Taliban should not be deported to Afghanistan
It was a bitterly cold evening when I arrived in Kabul on a U.N.-chartered flight in early 2002. The city, like much of Afghanistan, was in turmoil. The trauma of Al Qaeda’s deadly Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States was still raw, U.S. forces were advancing from the north, the Taliban was retreating south, and ordinary Afghans in the middle were torn between fear and the first flickers of hope.
‘You’re finally here,’ an old man outside Bagram Airfield told me. ‘Maybe now my grandchildren will have a future.’
U.S. airstrikes lit up the sky, but it was Afghans opposed to the Taliban who moved on the ground — risking everything to help the U.S. pursue justice for 9/11. Armed with little more than battered rifles and unshakable hope, they stepped into the fight, driven by a belief in a future they were told the U.S. would help them build.
“You’re finally here,” an old man outside Bagram Airfield told me. “Maybe now my grandchildren will have a future.”
In the weeks that followed, I reported from the front lines as Kabul bureau chief for Turkey’s Ihlas News Agency. Embedded with U.S. troops, I watched Afghan civilians — students, farmers, former resistance fighters — step forward to support the U.S. mission.
Now, the United States is telling Afghans who resettled in the U.S. after helping it fight the Taliban that they’ve got to self-deport by May 20 — back to a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. “If America can’t honor its word to those who bled for it,” a retired U.S. colonel told me, “why would anyone trust us again? This isn’t just immigration policy — it’s a test of our moral credibility. And we’re failing.”
The Afghans who aided the U.S. during its war in Afghanistan weren’t just interpreters or cultural advisers; they were bridge builders in every sense. They helped restore America’s credibility, one act of courage at a time. With their support, the Taliban was driven out — temporarily, at least — and a U.S.-backed government took root.
“Ahmad” (not his real name) was one of them. Now living in the U.S. under temporary protected status (TPS), he spent years serving in nearly every role imaginable — interpreter, logistics officer, project coordinator — all under the U.S. flag.
“It felt like our chance to shape a better future,” he told me. But that future came at a steep cost. “As the Taliban turned to guerrilla tactics, we were constantly on the move — new cities, new homes. I tried to stay invisible, but the threats never left.”
The Afghans who aided the U.S. during its war in Afghanistan weren’t just interpreters or cultural advisers — they were bridge builders in every sense.
Another Afghan — I’ll call him Murtaza — was a former English teacher I met in 2002 who stepped up. He used his language skills as an interpreter, serving alongside U.S. forces in some of Afghanistan’s most dangerous terrain.
Murtaza and Ahmad survived countless attacks — but more than 241,000 others didn’tincluding 71,000 civilians and 2,442 U.S. troops. Still, like many Afghans, they remained committed to the U.S. mission.
That loyalty was shattered on Aug. 15, 2021, when the Taliban seized Kabul and U.S. forces withdrew in chaosleaving thousands of allies behind. Branded as traitors, many Afghan partners went into hiding before eventually making it to third countries — holding on to the promise of U.S. resettlement.
Murtaza, like thousands of others, has spent three and a half years stranded in a third country. His special immigrant visa (SIV) — once a lifeline to safety in the U.S. — remains stalled, and the State Department’s recent decision to suspend the refugee admissions program has indefinitely blocked his path.
That decision now leaves him — and thousands like him — facing imminent deportation, as their stay in their host countries was based on the promise that they’d eventually resettle in the U.S.
With the SIV pipeline already clogged, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced April 11 that it’s terminating TPS for more than 9,000 Afghans like Ahmad who are in the U.S. They’ve been given that May 20 deadline to leave or face removal. Some were coldly notified of their fate by email.
Both men — one stuck abroad, the other inside the U.S. — face the same looming betrayal.
These aren’t undocumented migrants. They were vetted and approved for resettlement after risking their lives alongside American forces in our longest war. Now, with the deadline fast approaching, they’re being told: Get out — or face consequences.
We’re not just abandoning them; we’re throwing them to the wolves.
In doing so, we’re not just abandoning them; we’re throwing them to the wolves.
“TPS exists for moments like this,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refugea refugee rights group. “It’s designed to protect people whose return would place them in serious danger.” She added, “Make no mistake: Afghanistan remains under Taliban control, gripped by humanitarian crisis, economic collapse and brutal extremism.”
The latest situation update from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), covers January to March 2025 and delivers the grim assessment that the Taliban continues to hunt, torture and execute former government officials and military personnel.
Women are completely erased from public life, and girls remain barred from school beyond sixth grade. LGBTQ Afghans face public floggings, and religious minorities endure constant persecution.
On Jan. 23, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and his chief justice for alleged crimes against humanity, specifically gender persecution.
Is this the regime the U.S. expects our Afghan allies to return to?
Ahmad, who’s still in the U.S. but is staring down the May 20 deportation deadline, is terrified. “It’s not just about me,” he said. “If I’m forced to leave, my family loses our only income — and given our political background, my entire extended family could be in danger.”
The Trump administration claims Afghans in the U.S. under TPS no longer meet the threshold for protection. But Ahmad firmly rejects that. “Safety isn’t just about bullets,” he said. “It’s the right to live with freedom and dignity, the right to learn, to travel, to speak. I invite President Trump to see what life actually looks like on the ground.”
This isn’t just about Afghans — it’s about every partner we’ll need tomorrow.
This isn’t just about Afghans — it’s about every partner we’ll need tomorrow. If we abandon them today, future allies in Ukraine, Taiwan or anywhere else in the world will think twice about cooperating with the U.S.
“This is cruel and chaotic,” Shawn VanDiver, president of #AfghanEvac, a nonprofit supporting the resettlement of Afghan allies in the U.S., told NPR. VanDiver, a military veteran, said, “It shatters everything America claimed to stand for when we promised not to abandon our allies.”
There’s still time to do the right thing.
Congress must reinstate TPS, clear the SIV backlog and pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would give Afghans who helped the U.S. in Afghanistan a path to permanent, legal residency. People like Ahmad and Murtaza didn’t just work for us; they fought for us, bled for us, believed in us.
We owe them more than empty promises. We owe them protection. We owe them our word.
Because if we fail them now, we’re not just abandoning Ahmad, Murtaza and thousands like them — we’re telling the world that America’s word means nothing.
Muhammad Tahir
Muhammad Tahir is a nonresident senior fellow at The Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He previously held key roles at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in Washington, D.C., and Eastern Europe and served as bureau chief for IHA, the Turkish media, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Most recently, he led media strategy at the nonprofit Corus International. His work has been published by BLN, BBC, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post and The New Atlanticist, among others.
Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.
Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.
Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.
Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.
In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.
Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)
Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.
Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.
Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.
The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.
“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.
“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”
Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”
The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.
The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.
“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”
Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”
Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.
Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.
“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.
More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinionfor the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.
“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.
“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.
In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.
“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in real danger,” Joseph said.
Staying in the U.S. without legal status creates a different crisis.
“We received calls this morning from people saying that, unfortunately, starting on July 1, they won’t be able to go to work anymore,” Joseph said Friday.
Joseph predicted that families would be separated during the deportation process.
“We know that there will be separation,” she said. “A lot of those parents with TPS … they have kids who were born in the United States, so we know that it will happen, not for everybody, not for all the families, but it will happen,” she said.
The oncoming nightmare for the Haitian community in Springfield was, in many ways, predictable after Trump notoriously targeted them on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024.
“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said without a shred of evidence, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.
That rhetoric continued Trump’s track record of racist languageparticularly when it comes to immigration, including during his first White House stint when he referred during his first to Haiti and other majority non-white nations as “shithole” countries.
Dorsainvil argued that the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday proved his beliefs are institutionalized, calling it “a validation of all those bad rhetorics of the president against us.”
Asked by MS NOW if those with TPS should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.”
Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, went on to single out the Haitian population by name.
But the outcry against the court’s ruling blurs party lines in Ohio.
“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said.
Springfield’s Republican mayorRob Rue, has denounced Trump’s misinformation about his community as dangerous from the start.
“Many of the individuals affected by this decision are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers, and parents,” Rue said in a statement after the ruling came down. “They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield.”
Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.
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