(RNS) — “We will bring honor to your name,” my Afghan friends said to me across our glowing Zoom screens.
My team had just informed the group that a church in my hometown in Upper East Tennessee was eager to serve as the family’s sponsor through the Welcome Corps private sponsorship program.
For months, we’d been too busy pulling details to marvel at the opportunity to welcome another family of Afghans to the holler-filled mountain community that birthed and raised me. It was the Afghan family’s gift of thanks — pledging honor is a deep sign of respect in their culture — that caught my breath and gave me a sense of wonder.
I’ve returned to those words again and again. Since the Taliban retook Kabul three years ago as American troops withdrew, Allied Shepherd has been helping Afghans reach safety. When people thank us for our work, we appreciate it, but, like combat veterans who sometimes chafe at hearing “Thank you for your service,” we also know that anyone outside this beautiful, exhausting work can’t begin to fathom what we and our clients have been through.
This Afghan family’s humbling gift of honor hit deeper. They are appropriately weighting this work because they are living it more than I am. They know the real cost. Without understanding their Dari language, we’ve come to know the extroverted mom, the shy daughters who are my new sisters, the persistent brother who made sure we didn’t forget them. They are the ones who have suffered. Yet they thank me.
The father of the family is a judge who presided over hearings of members of the declared terrorist organizations that now run the Afghan government. In a country of reprisal killings, the judge is a hunted man. His family escaped three years ago to neighboring Pakistan — a country that doesn’t want Afghans and regularly deports even those there legally — and waited while they waded through the interminable immigration processes to come to the United States.
In the past month the family finally completed their interviews, medical exams and other extensive vetting necessary for approval. We entered 2025 cautiously hopeful, just waiting for them to receive travel documents so flights could be scheduled.
The team at the evangelical Christian church in Tennessee has been preparing for the family’s arrival, securing housing, collecting household furnishings and organizing to best help the family get their feet under them in smalltown Tennessee. The judge’s wife is already planning to thank everyone with delicious Afghan chai and meals.
But all those excited preparations slammed into a brick wall last week.
On Inauguration Day President Trump signed an executive order suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for at least 90 days, “until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States.” The order states that the suspension “shall take effect at 12:01 am eastern standard time on January 27, 2025.” But within 48 hours of signing, five days before the deadline, vetted refugees manifested for travel were already notified that their flights were cancelled.
According to #AfghanEvac, our judge’s family is not alone. Thousands of Afghan wartime allies have completed years of security vetting and final medical checks, but their travel is now indefinitely on hold. Among those affected are families of at least 200 Afghan-American U.S. service members. These families face retribution by the Taliban because of their U.S. military relatives.
The Afghan advocacy community knew this suspension might happen, given the travel bans President Trump instituted upon taking office for his first term. That’s why we had preemptively stated the case for continued Afghan relocation and resettlement efforts in a letter signed by more than 1,600 veterans, frontline civilians, advocates, elected officials, former ambassadors and everyday Americans.
Afghan refugees line up for food in a dining hall at Fort Bliss’ Doña Ana Village, in New Mexico, where they are being housed, Friday, Sept. 10, 2021. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Watching Trump campaign alongside families of service members killed during the Afghanistan withdrawal gave us hope that he understood the costs of the war. He held the Biden-Harris administration to account for the ways they betrayed Americans, U.S. service members and our Afghan allies as the 20-year war ended. We know he values loyalty, and our Afghan allies merit all the protection unwavering loyalty earns.
So the optimistic among us hoped that the president would protect our allies when he signed his promised day-one executive orders.
But he did not protect them. His orders have instead thrown their lives into new distress, when they have already lived a lifetime of hardship.
We are doing everything we can to call his attention to this unintended consequence, reminding him of how so many Afghans have stood by America and Americans, making the U.S. safer and stronger.
We are asking fellow Americans to join us by contacting their members of Congress to express support for maintaining immigration pathways for our Afghan allies. Polling shows Americans overwhelmingly support keeping our pledge to Afghan allies who helped U.S. forces against the Taliban. One poll, conducted by veteran organization With Honor and Ipsos in October 2023, showed that 77% of Americans said these Afghans would “be welcomed if they were resettled in their community.”
This polling is borne out in real action. In a statement last week, Welcome.US CEO Nazanin Ash noted, “In just three years, over 2 million Americans across all 50 states and 12,000 zip codes have raised their hands to privately sponsor newcomers through safe, legal, and orderly pathways.”
Through Welcome Corps, one of the private sponsorship pathways Welcome.US coordinates, teams of at least five Americans commit to privately funding a qualifying refugee family’s arrival in their community and to guiding them through the administrative aspects of settling in. These commitments by volunteers contradict the executive order’s statement that “the United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees.”
People of faith are especially important in reminding President Trump to protect and stand by our Afghan allies. We helped elect him, and we need to hold him to account for representing our values. Christians in particular can sign a World Relief letter urging the president to both “uphold his commitment to protecting persecuted Christians” and “sustain the refugee resettlement program.”
The judge’s family will be the second family this Tennessee church group welcomes to our community. In 2022 my Afghan friend Karima, reeling from the death of her husband, told me she just wanted to resettle somewhere safe with good schools for her little boys. I suggested my hometown. She did her own research and decided that this was the place for her.
More than two years later she works as a preschool teacher, her sons flourish in school, and her home is a hub of social life, including people from the church group that sponsored her. It’s because the experience has been so rewarding that these East Tennesseans are ready to welcome a new family.
But they can only provide safety for the judge’s family if President Trump will provide Afghans with an exception to his suspension of the refugee program. If he honors Afghan allies’ loyalty, our Afghan allies will remember. And they will bring honor to his name, just as my Afghan friends want to do for me when they finally arrive to make my dear Appalachian hometown their new American hometown.
(Kami Rice is a cofounder of Allied Shepherd and editor of Anthrow Circus. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)