US plans to deport more than 150 Afghans via Pakistan, with first flights possible from Monday, court papers and reports say
The Trump administration plans to deport more than 150 Afghan immigrants back to Afghanistan through Pakistan, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press and reporting by The New York Times, a move advocacy groups say could put former United States allies and their relatives at risk.
The administration of United States President Donald Trump plans to deport more than 150 Afghan immigrants back to Afghanistan through Pakistan, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press and reporting by The New York Times cited by Agence France-Presse. The first flight could leave as soon as Monday, 2 November, the reports say, in what advocacy groups describe as an unprecedented mass deportation of Afghans to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
According to the court documents, the United States intends to initially deport Afghan immigrants as early as Monday on flights from Louisiana, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detention and processing facilities, to Pakistan. In a document filed in federal court in Virginia on Friday, a senior ICE official acknowledged that an Afghan immigrant had been scheduled to be on an upcoming charter flight from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Pakistan, “with further transport onward to Afghanistan.”
The route matters because the United States cannot arrange deportations directly to Afghanistan: Washington does not have formal relations with the Taliban government. The New York Times, citing three unnamed United States officials, reported that Pakistan will oversee the onward expulsion of the deportees to Afghanistan. Human Rights First, an advocacy group that tracks deportation flights, said on Saturday that it had confirmed a scheduled flight from Louisiana to Pakistan on Tuesday carrying Afghan immigrants — a timing that differs by a day from the earliest Monday date in the court documents, and a reminder that the precise flight schedule has not been officially confirmed.
A spokesperson for the United States Department of Homeland Security said in an email to The Associated Press on Saturday that ICE does not comment on future immigrant-removal operations, citing operational security and personnel safety. United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio declined to comment on the report when asked at a briefing on Saturday during a gathering of G20 foreign ministers in Atlanta, advising journalists to ask the Department of Homeland Security.
Immigrant rights organisations say those deported could face retaliation from the Taliban. “This is absolutely unconscionable,” said Shawn VanDiver, a United States Navy veteran and president of the advocacy group #AfghanEvac. “It seems like there’s no end to their willingness to break the law and violate people’s human rights.” Savitri Arvey, director of policy, refugee and immigrant rights for Human Rights First, said in an email to The Associated Press: “It is beyond egregious that this administration plans to carry out an unprecedented mass deportation flight of Afghans, forcibly sending them through Pakistan and into the hands of the Taliban.”
Among those expected to be deported are relatives of Afghans who assisted the United States military before the fall of Kabul in August 2021, according to AfghanEvac. Some of those affected were granted special immigrant visas following the Taliban takeover, but the Trump administration last year issued travel bans for a number of countries, including Afghanistan, as part of a broad immigration crackdown, and sought to end deportation protections for Afghans. The administration has deported thousands of immigrants to countries other than their own in cases where it is unable to send them directly to their home countries.
Pakistan’s own policy adds a further layer to the story. Earlier this year, Pakistan’s government ordered law enforcement nationwide to arrest Afghan citizens without visas as part of a years-long repatriation policy that has pushed back millions of Afghans who fled after the Taliban returned to power. Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been fraught since the Taliban took power in 2021, and worsened after deadly border clashes last October that led to the near-total closure of the border — a dispute that is also the subject of a separate diplomatic development reported on Monday, in which Pakistan said it would welcome United States facilitation of talks with Kabul.
The legal context is still unfolding. The account of the deportation plan rests on court documents and on reporting citing unnamed officials, not on an official announcement by the Department of Homeland Security or ICE, which have declined to comment on future operations. That means the number of people on any first flight, the exact departure date, and the arrangements for their onward movement from Pakistan to Afghanistan have not been publicly confirmed by the authorities carrying out the operation.
What happens next will be watched closely by advocacy groups, lawyers and lawmakers. If a flight does depart this week, it would test both the legal challenges already filed in federal court and the practical question of how Pakistan handles arrivals destined for Afghanistan. If it is delayed or blocked, it would still leave the underlying policy in place: an administration that has made deportations central to its immigration programme, and a population of Afghan nationals in the United States whose protections have already been narrowed.
For the people at the centre of the story, the stakes are described in stark terms by the groups that support them. They include former allies of the United States military and their families, people who left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, and others who have lived in the United States for years. Their advocates say return to Afghanistan exposes them to retaliation; the administration has not publicly addressed that specific claim in the reporting available so far, beyond declining to comment on future removal operations.
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