By Inés M. Pousadela CIVICUS Senior Research Advisor, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
Thousands of Afghans who fled to the USA when the Taliban took over in August 2021 now face the prospect of deportation to countries they’ve never been to. People who risked everything to escape persecution, often because they helped US forces, now find themselves treated as unwanted cargo under the Trump administration’s anti-migration policy.
Trump’s expanded deportation programme targets an estimated 10 million foreign-born people who live in the USA but lack proper legal documentation. This includes people who entered the country without authorisation, whose visas have expired, who’ve had their asylum claims denied, whose temporary protected status has lapsed, or whose legal status has been revoked or suspended. Within a hundred days of Trump’s inauguration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had arrested over 66,000 people and removed over 65,000. Some 200,000 had been deported by August.
