Following the August 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the Afghan allies—including interpreters, government professionals, media members, and military personnel—who supported U.S. efforts to bring democracy to their country have lived in fear of Taliban reprisal inside their homeland. Hundreds of thousands applied for visas or sought other forms of legal status in the U.S. and began the process of finding safety.
Over three years later, up to 140,000 primary applicants—and their spouses and unmarried children under the age of 21—were mired in slow-moving processing pipelines when a pair of January 20 executive orders from President Donald Trump suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 90 days and canceled the foreign funding that supports Afghans in transit from overseas processing hubs. A January 24 stop-work order from the State Department dealt a further blow, ending resettlement assistance for new arrivals in the U.S.
On March 14, The New York Times published a draft copy of a State Department travel ban that would end all travel to the U.S. from about a dozen countries, including Afghanistan. Three days later, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce denied that such a list existed. However, at a press briefing on March 31, Bruce responded to questions about the travel ban by saying, "Because there's not a date, it doesn't mean that it's not being worked on."
