Reflections on the #AfghanEvac Global Briefing

1,900 people from 31 countries joined today's AfghanEvac briefing. Some personal reflections on what I learned and why this issue deserves more attention.

I attended a global briefing today organized by Shawn VanDiver and #AfghanEvac, and I wanted to write down some of what I took away while it’s still fresh in my mind. This is more of a personal reflection than a data post, but I think the moment calls for it.

Shawn shared with us the astonishing geographic and political diversity of people registered for the call. Nearly 2,000 people registered. Over 900 of them were physically in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Qatar. Twenty-seven countries in total were represented. Nearly 50 congressional offices were on the line, with connections to both Republicans and Democrats. In email this evening, Shawn said, “This was the largest globally concentrated coordination briefing related to the relocation and resettlement of Afghan wartime allies ever convened.” The briefing was simultaneously translated into Dari and Pashto so that the people most directly affected, many of them still inside Afghanistan, could participate. (Kudos to the interpreters.) The audience was diverse in ways that mattered. Some were people directly in the pipeline, waiting to see what would happen to their cases, while others were congressional staffers, veterans, advocates, and people simply trying to understand what is happening and why.

One of the things that struck me was how many people, both inside the United States and around the world, came with very specific questions about their own cases. This is something I see constantly in the immigration space, in workshops and briefings and legal clinics, and it speaks to a reality that I think gets overlooked. We talk a lot about the importance of immigration attorneys, and I spend a lot of my own time studying the role that legal representation plays in immigration court outcomes—but it’s easy to forget just how many people out there simply cannot access that kind of guidance. They show up to briefings like this one hoping to learn something that applies to their situation, and every single one of them has a case that is unique and often heartbreaking and does not fit neatly into some general category.

The organizers received over 800 questions in advance. 800. There is no way for a single briefing to answer all of them, and it was frankly really hard to sit with the truth of that. These are people who are determined, resilient, and willing to follow whatever law or policy the United States puts in front of them. They just want to know what the rules are so they can comply. And part of what makes this moment so frustrating is that the current answer, delivered with a broad brush, is essentially that no one is coming, end of story.

I had the opportunity to talk about data, accountability, and transparency, things I know well after fifteen years studying the US immigration system. But I want to be honest that most of the issues discussed today are ones I’m still learning about. The Afghan SIV pipeline, the refugee admissions process, the specifics of enduring welcome and care processing, all areas where advocates like Shawn and organizations like HIAS and AILA and IRAP have been doing the work for years. I’m newer to this, and in awe of these organization’s commitment to this topic.

What I’m not new to is understanding how this administration uses the language of national security and public safety to justify policies that have nothing to do with either. I’ve spent the past several months tracking immigration enforcement data closely. Over 90 percent of the growth in immigrant detention has come from people with no criminal convictions whatsoever. Although the administration claims to be targeting threats, the data consistently tells a different story. And when you extend that logic to the people on today’s call, vetted allies who served alongside US soldiers, people who already have visa approvals, families who risked everything because we asked them to, the gap between the rhetoric and the reality is absurd and even deeply offensive to incredible service that our allies made for our troops.

The practical advice from the experts on this call, people who have devoted their careers to helping Afghan allies navigate the system, was devastating in its plainness. If you’re waiting on a refugee case, your case is unlikely to move for years—if ever. If you’re in a dangerous location, shelter in place. If you can find safety elsewhere, don’t hold out for the United States. If you have a visa in your passport but haven’t traveled yet, get here as soon as possible, because the door could close at any moment. And for those at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, the State Department is closing the camp by March 31st, and they haven’t found countries willing to take most of the people there.

The advice, in so many words, was to make a life somewhere else, because America isn’t keeping its promise to you right now.

Hassan, a Marine who rose to the rank of Gunnery Sergeant, served in embassies under high-threat conditions and helped process over 5,000 Afghan evacuees during the fall of Kabul. His brother, who also worked alongside Americans, is stuck with his family at Camp As Sayliyah, waiting in limbo. “If my family, who served Americans, isn’t good enough,” he asked, “who is?”

Beth Oppenheim, the CEO of HIAS, the oldest refugee resettlement agency in the country, said clearly and sadly that the refugee pipeline is unlikely to reopen for the foreseeable future. The only refugees being resettled right now, as of this writing, are white South Africans.

Vanessa from AILA walked through a new rule extending the processing time for work authorization applications for asylum seekers. The government’s own estimate of how long it will take to resolve the backlog is — and I’m not even kidding — between fourteen and one hundred and seventy-three years. That’s the number in the actual rule.

Johnny Mercer, a former UK cabinet minister, reminded the room that this is a global failure, not just the United States. Countries everywhere are finding reasons to say they’ve “done enough” and stop relocating Afghan refugees.

As a Navy veteran who served during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, this issue carries a particular weight for me. I didn’t work directly with Afghan interpreters or local staff. My connection to this fight came through Shawn, who has become a friend and collaborator, and through the data I study. But I don’t need to have been on the ground in Kabul to understand the moral stakes. The promises we made were ratified by laws that Congress passed, and they carry the weight of legal obligations, not aspirations.

What I find increasingly difficult to accept is that we are justifying the abandonment of those obligations through assertions that have no empirical basis. Yes, national security matters and, yes, public safety matters. These are legitimate principles that should inform immigration policy. But they need to be grounded in actual data and actual risk, not propaganda, not moral panic, and not the political convenience of an administration that has shown, over and over, that it will target the most vulnerable people it can find.

Nearly two thousand people showed up for this briefing. They showed up from war zones and refugee camps and congressional offices and living rooms across the country. That alone tells you something about the depth of concern, across borders and across the political spectrum, for people who served alongside us and were told they would be taken care of.

I came away from today’s call with enormous respect for the advocates and attorneys and organizations who have been doing this work for years. And I came away with a renewed sense of purpose. There’s a role for data in this fight, for using the government’s own numbers to tell the truth about what’s actually happening and who’s actually being harmed. More than that, we need to collect better data on impacted people such as our Afghan allies, so that we understand the scope and intensity of the consequences of these damaging policies. I intend to keep doing that work, and I’m grateful to be doing it alongside people like Shawn and the AfghanEvac community.

I hope more people pay attention to what is happening here. If you want to learn more, the AfghanEvac website at afghanevac.org is an excellent place to start. They publish detailed explainers on the policies affecting Afghan allies, breakdowns of who is impacted and how, and regular updates on the state of the SIV pipeline, refugee processing, and legal challenges. You can also follow their work on social media.

• Website: afghanevac.org

• X/Twitter: @afghanevac

• Bluesky: @afghanevac.bsky.social

• Instagram: @afghan_evac

• LinkedIn: #AfghanEvac

Post-Briefing Summary

Just as I was wrapping up this post, Shawn sent out a follow-up email with the final numbers and a recap. It’s worth including here because the scale of this thing really landed once you see the totals.

Watch the recording and find resources at https://afghanevac.org/global-update.

Today, 1,897 registrants from 31 countries signed up to attend the AfghanEvac Global Update.

• 781 from inside Afghanistan

• 249 from Pakistan

• More than 1,000 registrants are in case limbo

• 49 congressional offices were represented — 30 House and 19 Senate

• Participants joined from 48 U.S. states plus DC

Our speakers were:

• Johnny Mercer — Former U.K. Cabinet Minister and Senior Advisor for AfghanEvac

• Dr. Beth Oppenheim — Chief Executive Officer of HIAS

• Danilo Zak — Director of Policy at Church World Service

• Dr. Austin Kocher — Research Professor at Syracuse University

• Vanessa Dojaquez Torres — Practice and Policy Counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association

• Jon Feltham — Executive Director of Aman Lara and Co-Founder at Local Staff International

Topics covered:

• The current state of SIV, P1 and P2 processing, and family reunification

• Pakistan and CAS realities

• Administrative shifts affecting CARE and Enduring Welcome

• Litigation and legislative dynamics

• Global coordination and locally led implementation

• What you can do now