The holiday season is here. In government, that means Congress leaves DC and heads home. Federal agencies slow to a crawl. We tell ourselves nothing urgent can happen between Thanksgiving and the New Year.
But for tens of thousands of Afghans who trusted the United States, that pause has become permanent.
Across the United States, in Qatar, and in countries around the world, Afghan allies are trapped in limbo. They are former interpreters, civil servants, journalists, women leaders, and family members of those already living in the United States – left stranded while U.S. government systems stall.
This year, the cruelty is intensifying.
We are seeing indications that Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to carry out enforcement actions on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, federal holidays that are a time of celebration, and a time when courts are closed and legal representation is limited or unavailable. That is not an accident. It is a cruel choice. Detaining people when due process protections are weakest may be administratively convenient, but it is morally indefensible.
The harm is immediate and human. Parents disappear into detention. Children lose caregivers overnight. Families who were welcomed as allies are suddenly separated and treated as enemies. Each delay compounds trauma that began long before these families reached American soil.
The broader environment has grown harsher as well. Earlier this fall, my family and Afghan families we work with were forced to cancel a Thanksgiving gathering after public attacks by political provocateurs raised credible security concerns. Even expressions of gratitude and community gatherings have become risky when Afghans are included. That chilling effect is wrong and part of the same moral failure.
Since the fall of Kabul, the United States has relied on temporary authorities and fragile bureaucratic processes to manage a permanent obligation. We have normalized stalled cases, holiday slowdowns, and a dangerous assumption that time will solve what leadership has not. Meanwhile, enforcement accelerates precisely when accountability slows.
This is not how a country committed to the rule of law behaves.
And it is not how a country that values loyalty treats people who stood with it in war.
The fixes are neither complex nor radical. We have the tools and the humanitarian pathways at our fingertips.
The administration should immediately halt ICE detentions of Afghan humanitarian parolees and asylum seekers, especially on federal holidays. DHS must provide clear, uniform guidance protecting Afghans with temporary status while their cases are pending, including automatic re-parole and work authorization extensions. DHS must also end its heinous ICE raids at churches, in the middle of the night, and during routine immigration check-in appointments. Congress should finally pass a permanent immigration pathway for Afghans, a step the United States has taken before for those we have evacuated. And the State Department must fully staff, resume, and sustain relocation, resettlement, and reunification pipelines, with the understanding that moral obligations do not pause for holidays.
None of this requires new wars or new values. It requires only the will to treat Afghan lives as more than administrative inconveniences.
The next time the United States asks local partners to stand with us, this is what they will remember, not our speeches, but our silence; not our promises, but the years spent waiting while America took time off.
History will not judge us by how efficiently we cleared calendars. It will judge whether we kept our word when it mattered most.
Right now, we are failing that test.
Shawn VanDiver is the President of AfghanEvac, Navy Veteran, and civic leader in San Diego. Find him online at @shawnjvandiver
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