Afghans who have moved to California have been shaking over the past few months and weeks as the Trump administration moved to end deportation protection amid increasing efforts to further limit Afghan citizens from coming to the United States.
This week, despite efforts by organizations calling for protection, the Trump administration ended the US-recognized temporary protection status of Afghans in May 2022 after withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. This position allowed Afghans to come to the US and get permission to work, but did not offer a path to citizenship.
“People are hopeless,” said Sean Vandiber, founder and president of Afghanvak, a nonprofit that helps secure relocate Afghanistan allies. “They follow all the rules. They did everything the US asked them to do.
In January, the Trump administration suspended Afghanistan’s refugee program and canceled scheduled flights for Afghans that had been dismissed by the government. In May, the State Department sent a layoff notice to coordinator staff for Afghan relocation efforts known as care, where Afghans are tasked with working to ensure that Afghans settle in the United States with government support. And in June, Trump enacted a travel ban, stopped travel for Afghan citizens to the US, leaving families who wanted to integrate the stack at Limbo.
Afghans are increasingly engulfed in the Trump administration’s efforts to strengthen deportation. In San Diego, an Afghan national who worked as a translator for the US military, was granted humanitarian parole and was taken into custody after attending an asylum hearing in immigration court.
The Ministry of Homeland Security announced that it would end Afghans’ temporary protected status in May. Secretary Christy Noem said the conditions in Afghanistan “does not meet the requirements for the TPS designation.”
In a press release, the department said: “Overall, the secretary determined that by calling for the return of Afghan citizens there was a significant improvement in security and economic situations so as not to pose a threat to personal safety due to continuous armed conflicts or extraordinary and temporary conditions.”
Many organizations supporting the relocation of Afghans have criticised the move, saying that the situation in Afghanistan, now under the Taliban, is not safe, especially for those who supported the US military during the war. Casa, a national advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against the DHS, violating the end of the Afghan and Cameroonian TPS, objecting it as illegal.
President Trump was detained in Scotland on July 25, 2025 at a joint base in Andrews, Maryland.
(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
On Monday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to appeal by CASA to postpone the agency’s actions. The case is ongoing in US District Court in Maryland.
In a statement, DHS Deputy Chief Tricia McLaughlin said individuals who arrive at TPS can still apply for asylum and other protections. She said the end of the TPS “promotes national interests and statutory provisions that TPS is actually temporarily designed.”
The TPS is a significant suspension for Afghanistan, who has arrived in the United States but has yet to apply for asylum or special immigration visa granted to Afghans who have worked with the US government, and are caught in a major backlog.
Halema Wali, co-director of Afghans, is a nonprofit that advocates Afghan refugees in the New York City metropolitan area and supports families entering the US from Tijuana, and said that almost all of the organization’s 800 members are at TPS.
“They’re stoned,” Wali said. “They don’t know how to approach this. Honestly, we’re in a hurry to figure out how we’ll make them safe when there’s no one left to protect them from deportation.”
Global Shelter, an organization that resettled thousands of Afghans, said that as many as 11,700 Afghans in the United States are now vulnerable to deportation, and those who do not have legal status or other means of obtaining pending applications could lose their job permits.
“The end of the TPS is not in line with the reality of the ground situation in Afghanistan,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, CEO of Global Revuge, in a statement. “The conditions remain miserable, especially for allies that supported the US mission, as well as for women, girls, religious minorities and ethnic groups that were targeted by the Taliban. The anxiety among Afghan clients is realistic and growing.”
Vignalaja called on the Congress to establish a path to citizenship for Afghans.
Protesters will protest a drastic new travel ban announced by President Trump at Los Angeles International Airport on June 9, 2025.
(Patrick T. Fallon / AFP Getty Images)
California is home to many Afghan refugees. As many as 58,600 states call their homes more than any other state, according to the Institute for Immigration Policy. The Greater Sacramento area has around 20,000 Afghan refugees, one of the largest communities in the United States.
The city of Fremont, home to its Afghanistan store and restaurant arrangement known as “Little Kabul,” has raised nearly $500,000 to support newly arrived Afghans for an Afghan refugee help fund launched in 2021.
Harris Mohadedi, an advocate for Afghanistan-Americans in the Fremont region, said there is deep uncertainty in changing immigration policies. Afghans in the community are beginning to receive self-abolition notifications from the DHS, and many have a hard time figuring out what will happen next.
He knows one Afghan couple. One spouse has a TPS and the other is a US citizen, living every day as if he were the last person. He said many Afghans are afraid to speak up for fear of government retaliation. He said people are afraid to drop their children off at school or call police if they are victims of crime.
“There’s a lot of fear, as you see with other communities. [Afghan] Community,” Mohadedi said it refers to the migrant attacks that have had a major impact on the Latino community.
Shala Gafary, the lawyer who leads a team focused on legal support for Afghans at Aslum Advocacy Nonprofit Human Rights, said that thousands of Afghans are still watching the aftermath of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, where the segregated Afghanistans have been. She has helped families submit applications and move to the US and reunite with their families under programs promoted by the Biden administration.
However, as soon as Trump took office, he issued an order to suspend US refugee programs and cancelled a flight that was scheduled to bring in about 1,660 Afghans who had been cleansed to resettle the United States by the US government.
Gafferries and other immigration officers call every day, starting with asking their families what they can do every day. And she has no answer to them. She had to instruct other lawyers (who asks their clients what to say) that all they could do was to tell Afghan families the truth and that there were no available options.
“Since January, that has only been bad news for Afghanistan’s population,” Gaffari said.
Back in Afghanistan, thousands of people living under the Taliban rule are worried about their future. As Pakistan and Iran began deporting Afghan refugees on a massive scale, their options for making life elsewhere have been exponentially reduced, and Trump placed Afghanistan on the US travel ban earlier this year.
For Afghan Americans in California who were enthusiastically anticipating the arrival of relatives who sought asylum in the United States, Trump’s immigration crackdown is being crushed.
One Southern California resident, a 26-year-old Afghan American woman, told The Times that seven members of her family, including her grandmother and several cousins, were in the frontier after they approved the visas, but did not confirm that the US would allow them. They were scheduled to arrive from Afghanistan in March,
She said the woman who requested anonymity because she fears influence from the Trump administration for families seeking asylum in the US said her family still wants policies to change and they hope they can enter as they have no other options.
She said that the young girls in her family were unable to go to school and another cousin who worked for an international aid organization was not allowed to work anymore.
“Everyone holds their breath and see what happens next,” she said. “The best thing we can do is expect the best, do what we can, check in with each other and keep our heads high.”
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