AILSA CHANG, HOST:
On Monday, the Trump administration welcomed the first planeload of white South African refugees into the U.S. Also on Monday, it announced it will end the Temporary Protected Status program, or TPS, for Afghanistan this summer. That means more than 9,000 Afghan refugees may soon be forced back to the country now ruled by the Taliban. Joining me now is Morwari Zafar, adjunct associate professor at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. Welcome.
MORWARI ZAFAR: Thank you.
CHANG: So Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said that conditions in Afghanistan have improved sufficiently enough to warrant terminating TPS. But I just want to point out the State Department lists the travel advisory for Afghanistan as the highest risk and warns American citizens, do not travel. So in your mind, what is the state of security in Afghanistan right now?
ZAFAR: Yeah, this statement is - it seems a little bit misleading because putting it in the context of - Afghanistan has a Level 4 security advisory. South Africa, from which we recently received refugees, I think, on Monday, has a Level 2 advisory, which is on par with Sweden and Italy. It calls into question, what are the benchmarks against which Afghanistan is being assessed in this regard?
CHANG: Right.
ZAFAR: One of the things that I think the statement ignores is the fact that the absence of war or large-scale conflict doesn't mean there's safety. There's still a massive humanitarian crisis, and putting people at risk of being returned there definitely exacerbates that situation.
CHANG: So in real-world terms, what will sending some of these people back to Afghanistan mean for their personal safety and well-being?
ZAFAR: You know, a lot of people here have - they've been working - living and working in the U.S. for anything from two to four years now. If they didn't even previously work with the U.S. administration, they're still marked as having lived in America. There's also that consideration that there are local populations who have started to bear resentment towards those who got out. As an anthropologist that has studied post-conflict societies, that's - that happens frequently. So it's creating this ripe condition for further conflict once these communities are returned.
CHANG: What are you hearing from people reaching out to you for help right now?
ZAFAR: I think there's just a lot of confusion right now. People don't really know where to go. They've effectively got until now and July 12 to come up with a plan. And a lot of that requires, you know, reaching out and getting a new immigration status. But that puts the burden on a lot of the immigration attorneys. And they're already - you know, they've got overflowing cases, and they can't handle everything. So two months is not remotely going to be sufficient time to be able to deal with these cases adequately.
CHANG: Yeah.
ZAFAR: So I think the only thing that can really assist these communities is for Congress to step in and at least require some form of extended cover for them until the cases can be repealed and reassessed.
CHANG: Well, you mentioned Congress. American veterans who served in the war in Afghanistan, including Republicans, are among the strongest advocates for protecting Afghan refugees in the U.S., especially those who helped the U.S. in its war effort. So do you have any hope that they or others can get Congress to take up this issue?
ZAFAR: I do. I think there's such an important and salient community in this effort because I think they understand what the ripple effects of these policies are on a national security perspective. But by injecting these communities back into Afghanistan, you're creating vulnerable populations that are then susceptible to recruitment by extremist groups. And ISIS is active and operating in Afghanistan. We already know this. So I think, you know, they understand the threat that this could pose to the U.S. in the long term - you know, a fight that we may have to fight another time. So I think that they would be more successful than other communities in pushing for it.
CHANG: Morwari Zafar, adjunct associate professor at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown, thank you very much for joining us.
ZAFAR: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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