When Aminullah and his family finally received their Afghan Citizen Cards in late 2017, they thought their days of evading the police and living in fear of their Pakistani neighbours exposing them as undocumented Afghans had officially come to an end.
They were among almost 90,000 Afghans legally registered in Punjab province between 2017 and 2018. Issued only during that year, the cards didn’t entitle them to services, but they did allow them to legally remain in the country. On 29 January this year, that suddenly changed as the Pakistani government announced that all ACC holders would face immediate deportation, along with all other unregistered Afghans.
The announcement signalled the start of the second round of Islamabad’s effort to expel “all illegal foreigners” – a drive the government says is to rid the country of criminals and militants, but which rights groups say includes abusive and unlawful deportations.
The first round of deportations began in November 2023 and saw more than 800,000 Afghans return. This new wave, which began in earnest on 10 April, is wider still, marking the first time ACC holders are being deported as part of official Pakistani government policy.
“We had these damn cards for years, and now they’re useless,” Aminullah, 26, told The New Humanitarian. “They just made them invalid in one day.”
Aminullah’s extended family of 51 people – his parents, along with the households of his five brothers and eight cousins – are among the 82,000 Afghans that returned from Pakistan between 1 and 24 April, according to the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation. Islamabad claims that number is closer to 100,000 people.
Currently, Afghan refugees with what are called Proof of Registration, or PoR, documents from the UN's refugee agency (UNHCR) are protected from deportation, but the Pakistani government has indicated it will start expelling them as well in the coming months. Those with visas should remain protected.
“We would be made to go”
When The New Humanitarian met them on 9 April, Aminullah’s family was surrounded by thousands of other families taking temporary shelter in the Omari camp in Nangarhar’s Torkham district.
The camp – located only a few kilometres from the Torkham crossing, which separates Afghanistan from Pakistan – can accommodate up to 100,000 returnees in tents and compact pre-fab homes.
The Taliban government, which prefers to be known as the Islamic Emirate, works to provide electricity, healthcare, and telecom services in the camp, but it is only meant to be a transit centre for returnees heading back to their home provinces.
Once they leave the camp, returnees find themselves in a country where 22.9 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance and 48% of the population live below the poverty line. Children – 60% of returnees – face their own challenges, especially girls, who are still barred from government-run education beyond the sixth grade.
Deportations weren’t supposed to officially kick off until the day after The New Humanitarian visited, but people said they felt pressured to leave since late March.
“They were going around house to house, warning everyone that if we didn’t leave ourselves, we would be made to go,” said Janat Gul, another returnee.
Several people corroborated media reports that Pakistani authorities had been rounding up and detaining Afghans since March in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Lahore, and Karachi. Police in Rawalpindi, the city closest to the capital, said they arrested 820 Afghans in a single week.
Janat, who was born in Punjab, said that on 28 March, as Afghans were preparing to perform their final Friday prayers of Ramadan, Pakistani police stood at the front of the congregation and issued a bleak warning: “If you’re Afghan, this will be your last Friday ever in Pakistan.” Janat said this was followed by house-to-house searches.
Immigration raids have long been common in Pakistan, but last year the authorities took it a step further and started demolishing homes on the outskirts of Islamabad belonging to Afghans.
As the deadline, which was moved twice, inched closer, rights groups criticised Pakistani officials for what they call “abusive tactics” towards Afghans, even those with registration documents like the ACC.
Amnesty International called the expulsions “unlawful” and yet another example of how Islamabad’s immigration policies over the last year-and-a-half amount “to arbitrary decisions that are shrouded in secrecy”.
“They’ve built lives, families, and communities, and now they’re being forced out like criminals.”
The UN said the rushed expulsions fail to take into account the years, even decades, ACC holders have spent in Pakistan.
“They should have been given more time,” Qaisar Afridi, UNHCR’s spokesperson in Pakistan, told The New Humanitarian. “It’s too short notice for people who have businesses here, whose children are studying here.”
Zaman Gul, 45, had spent a lifetime in Pakistan. But after 30 years living in Peshawar, and then Punjab, his family was forced to leave in early April. “In the end, we only left with the clothes on our backs,” he said, speaking at the Omari camp.
“The deportation process is unfair. Many of these people have lived in Pakistan for decades – some were even born here,” Moniza Kakar, a Pakistani human rights defender, told The New Humanitarian by phone from Karachi. “They’ve built lives, families, and communities, and now they’re being forced out like criminals.”
Faced with a struggling economy, 13 million people living below the poverty line, 8% unemployment, persistent protests, and renewed tensions with India following last month’s attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, critics say the Pakistani government has turned to an easy target to try to bolster its popularity: the estimated 3.7 million Afghans, including at least 1.3 million registered refugees, who have been seeking shelter in Pakistan and Iran since the Soviet occupation of the 1980s.
And like many other countries undertaking large-scale deportation drives – from the United States to India to Turkey – Islamabad is using allegations of security threats and economic strains to bolster public support for the expulsions.
“A significant portion of those involved in criminal and terrorist activities are among these illegal immigrants,” Pakistan’s then-interior minister said in 2023, providing no evidence for such claims. Anti-Afghan rhetoric has only increased this year, with the hijacking of a passenger train by Baloch separatists and a double suicide bombing targeting a military base in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The incidents took place within days of each other in March. Pakistani officials said both attacks could be tied back to Afghanistan. “The use of foreign weapons and equipment in recent terrorist attacks was clear evidence that Afghanistan remained a safe haven for such elements,” the military said shortly after the base attack.
Pakistan officials have also routinely blamed Afghan refugees for contributing to the country’s economic crisis, citing housing shortages and rising unemployment, despite plenty of research to the contrary.
For Afghans who have spent decades trying to build a life in Pakistan, these deportations, including a proposed third round slated for the summer, show how neighbourly hospitality can soon give way to political expediency and xenophobia.
“More than four decades ago, we were embraced as brothers – today, we are cast out like strangers,” Gul Zada, a garment trader who has spent 45 years in Pakistan, told The New Humanitarian in Rawalpindi.
Waiting on the West
Muhammadullah is among the 700,000 Afghans who have entered Pakistan since the Taliban’s August 2021 return to power. One of the many refugees whose family worked for the former Western-backed Islamic Republic government, he is currently waiting to be reunited with his family, who were able to immigrate to Canada in 2023.
“I am in constant stress, thinking of deportation to Afghanistan – fearing the Taliban’s wrath,” Muhammadullah, who resides in Islamabad, a city that has now become off limits to Afghan households, told The New Humanitarian.
Muhammadullah’s fear of retribution is not without warrant. Though dozens of high-profile former officials of the previous government have returned to Afghanistan with little trouble, rights groups and media outlets have documented the targeting, disappearing, and retaliatory killing of former Afghan government workers, despite the Islamic Emirate’s promise of a general amnesty.
When Pakistani authorities first announced that all Afghan nationals must vacate Islamabad and neighbouring Rawalpindi, it was seen as deliberately targeting asylum seekers like Muhammadullah who needed to be in close proximity to foreign embassies to follow up on their cases.
The situation is even more precarious for the 20,000 Afghans awaiting approval to resettle in the United States, as this round of deportations comes less than two months after US President Donald Trump issued his executive order freezing refugee resettlements to the country.
“What makes this ordeal even more unbearable is the lack of clarity – confusing deadlines, vague procedures, and uncertainty about who will be forced to leave,” Muhammadullah said. “You never know what will happen next.”
US aid cuts cripple response efforts
This round of deportations also began two months after the Trump administration announced a 90-day freeze on all international aid, prompting concern among NGOs operating in Afghanistan about their capacity to assist.
“At some point, we all will have to make drastic decisions, whether we choose lifesaving [programmes] or being at border points for the newly returned,” an aid worker from a European NGO told The New Humanitarian in the lead-up to the latest wave of returns.
“If your work is humanitarian, if you want to help humanity, this is a humanitarian cause – come put your money towards helping needy people.”
During last year’s expulsions, both the Islamic Emirate and international NGOs set up reception, registration, and transport services in Kandahar and Nangarhar provinces, but this may not be possible this time if aid agencies don’t have the budgets for it.
“With humanitarian needs bound to rise, we need donors to sustain critical lifesaving programmes and ensure preparedness for emerging crises. It was already difficult last time,” the European NGO worker said.
The Afghan Red Crescent Society has launched an emergency appeal asking for 20 million Swiss francs ($24 million) to help provide income-generating activities, vocational training, and cash-for-work opportunities to returnees.
When The New Humanitarian visited Torkham district last month, it was clear there was much less of an international NGO presence compared to similar visits to Nangarhar and Kandahar last year.
Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal, who heads the Afghan government committee responsible for the management of the Omari camp, said the Islamic Emirate was doing the best it could under difficult circumstances, having already distributed 80 million afghanis (more than a million US dollars) to 9,000 families.
But with tens of thousands of people arriving each week, the needs are immense. The UN estimates that anywhere between 600,000 and 1.5 million Afghans could return in this wave.
Maiwandwal said international NGOs had warned Afghan officials that their efforts would be scaled back.
“They told us that the aid cuts mean they have less money this time around,” he said of the late-March meetings between Islamic Emirate and NGO officials. “If your work is humanitarian, if you want to help humanity, this is a humanitarian cause – come put your money towards helping needy people.”
Italy has stepped up with $3.5 million to assist the returnees, but it’s a drop in the ocean when you consider that the UN’s migration agency (IOM) has appealed for nearly $477 million in aid for this year alone, including $58 million for immediate cash-based assistance to meet the returnees' most pressing needs.
But with 2.43 million Afghans returning to the country in less than two years – most of them forcibly from Iran and Pakistan – it’s a huge task. Afghanistan is also reeling from the economic effects of global aid cuts, the continued freezing of billions of dollars in assets, sanctions on the Islamic Emirate’s top leadership, major banking restrictions, and the refusal to recognise the Taliban as the official government.
The soaring deportations – combined with the fact that more families who had spent years or decades in the West are now spending more time in the country due to the end of the war – are driving a severe housing shortage in Afghanistan’s main urban centres.
The Ministry of Justice has called on property owners to rent homes at affordable rates for returnees and deportees, but it seems these calls aren’t being heard. In the western city of Herat, for example, rents have increased by as much as 40% in recent months.
One Kabul property manager told The New Humanitarian that at least a dozen returnees ask him for a rental every day, but he has no space and they couldn’t afford the rent anyway.
“The problem is people are putting profits over their morality. They’re taking advantage of the situation, rather than helping,” the property manager said, asking for anonymity in order to speak more candidly. “How many of these returnees can afford 17,000 afghanis ($240) a month for a two-bedroom apartment. It’s not right.”
Aminullah’s family is originally from Sorkh Rod, a district bordering Nangarhar’s provincial capital of Jalalabad, but he said they will head to Kabul: “We don’t have anyone or anything in Sorkh Rod. We will just find any corner in Kabul and try to survive until the winter.”
Families like Aminullah’s receive only 5,000 afghanis from the World Food Programme, 5,000 afghanis from IOM, and 2,000 afghanis from the Islamic Emirate itself. The journey to Kabul could cost up to 38,000 afghanis. As a family of labourers who will have to transport themselves and their belongings with them, this is beyond their current means. And even if they do manage to reach the overcrowded capital, what next?
On 9 April, one day before Pakistan’s deadline, The New Humanitarian visited the Omari camp in Nangarhar province, where thousands of Afghan families were already arriving see the video below:
Osama Ahmad reported from Islamabad, and Ali M. Latifi reported from the Afghan side of the Torkham crossing. Edited by Andrew Gully.
