The story of Enduring Welcome
Seventeen years, four administrations, one promise. Scroll through how a program that nearly died in its infancy became the first standing enterprise the United States ever built to relocate its wartime allies, and how it was shut down in a single year.
Interpreters, guides, embassy staff, and contractors begin working with the U.S. military and diplomatic mission. No visa program exists yet to protect them for that service.
The Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 promises a path to safety for Afghans who worked for or on behalf of the U.S. government and face a serious threat because of it.
The United States issues 31 Afghan SIVs all year, including just 3 to principal applicants. Interagency security checks have no deadlines, no owner, and no accountability.
The FY2014 NDAA requires all government-controlled SIV steps to finish within nine months. Issuances jump to 9,107 the next fiscal year.
FY2017 closes with 16,170 visas issued. Then the coordinating position built to run the program sits vacant for years, and the backlog grows underneath the surface.
The United States and the Taliban sign an agreement in Doha committing to a full U.S. troop withdrawal within fourteen months, in exchange for Taliban counterterrorism guarantees. The Afghan government is not a party to it. The agreement makes no mention of the interpreters and staff whose service to the U.S. mission is about to put them in danger, and SIV processing does not speed up to meet the deadline it just set.
Embassy Kabul suspends visa operations and never reopens. Thirteen U.S. service members die at Abbey Gate. Operation Allies Welcome begins receiving, screening, and resettling Afghans on U.S. soil.
Days before Kabul falls, Shawn VanDiver starts fielding calls from Afghan allies who are stuck and afraid. Within days, a coalition of veterans, technologists, and volunteer organizations is running charter flight coordination calls, building a master list of people trying to get out, and holding daily intelligence briefings, all before Operation Allies Welcome or any formal government relocation program exists. That volunteer coalition becomes AfghanEvac.
With refugee processing inside Afghanistan not yet operational and the Taliban unrecognized as a government, the United States tells Afghans with refugee referrals it cannot help them unless they reach a third country. Tens of thousands cross into Pakistan on short-term visas, with no durable legal status, to wait for a process that has nowhere else to happen. Advocates warn from the start that the arrangement is fragile.
The State Department creates the Office of the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts. For the first time, one accountable office owns the mission end to end, backed by an interagency structure and its own funding.
Operation Allies Welcome ends. It had resettled roughly 86,000 Afghans domestically over thirteen months, most on two-year humanitarian parole. Enduring Welcome takes its place: a joint DHS/State Department effort built around durable status instead of parole, moving SIV applicants, refugees, and family members through processing overseas rather than through U.S. domestic bases. It extends relocation eligibility to refugees still inside Afghanistan, but for the tens of thousands already stuck in Pakistan with nowhere to return to, the policy shift doesn't undo the reality on the ground.
The State Department releases Form DS-4317, the first formal mechanism letting Afghans paroled under Operation Allies Welcome, including those later granted TPS, request U.S. government departure assistance for spouses and unmarried children under 21 still in Afghanistan. It becomes the primary pathway CARE uses to process family reunification cases for the OAW parolee population, more than a year after the airlift separated those families in the first place.
After a year of rising enforcement pressure, sustained U.S. embassy engagement, and an October 2023 AfghanEvac letter to Pakistani officials signed by a bipartisan group of former U.S. ambassadors, retired generals, and humanitarian leaders, the United States and Pakistan reach a practical understanding. The U.S. commits to keep processing a defined, documented population of refugees, SIV applicants, and parole seekers; Pakistan commits to hold off on arresting or deporting them while that processing continues. For more than a year, it mostly holds. Arrests decline, deportations slow, and U.S. embassy letters are honored.
18,301 SIVs issued in FY2023, then 33,119 in FY2024, the highest annual total in the program's history. Congress adds 12,000 more visa numbers, the largest single increase ever.
The State Department submits a required report to Congress laying out a plan to wind down the SIV program. It projects that 99 percent of eligible applicants would complete processing by summer 2029, roughly eight years after the withdrawal, and flags that the estimate depends entirely on "Enduring Welcome continuity." If relocation operations in Afghanistan stopped, the report warns, completion would slip past 2029 by "an extensive period of time." Four months later, relocation operations stopped.
CARE starts removing some Afghans from U.S.-sustained housing in Pakistan whose cases are considered stalled, a sustainment decision the agency says is separate from any immigration or visa determination. On November 15, CARE tells AfghanEvac and partner organizations that lodging will end Monday, November 18, with transportation and exit visas provided, and families are asked to report where they'll go next. Evictions begin November 17, a day earlier than announced, and continue into the 18th. Several of the Afghans removed later receive Chief of Mission approval anyway, proof a stalled case wasn't the same as an ineligible one. The removals land months before U.S. processing stops entirely, leaving an already-vulnerable population with even less cushion.
The FY2025 NDAA writes the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts into statute, authorizing the relocation enterprise through 2027. It passes with support from both parties. The whole point of putting CARE into law, rather than leaving it as executive policy, was to protect it from being unilaterally shut down by a future administration. Weeks later, the administration changes anyway, and moves to gut CARE regardless of the statute.
Three executive orders land at once. The refugee order is formally set to take effect January 27, but is enforced immediately, suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program worldwide. Foreign aid is frozen, cutting off flights for Afghans who already hold visas. The State Department pauses all U.S. government relocation flights out of Kabul "until further notice," and they never resume. A vetting review is ordered that will produce two travel-ban proclamations within the year.
The instant relocation flights and refugee processing stop, the U.S. side of the 2023 arrangement breaks, and Pakistan's incentive for restraint disappears with it. Pakistan resumes detaining and deporting Afghans with active U.S. cases almost immediately. Around the same time, with no U.S. consulate operating inside Afghanistan and no coordination with Islamabad, the State Department designates Islamabad the default processing post for most Afghan visa categories, concentrating even more demand on the country where enforcement is intensifying fastest.
Temporary Protected Status for Afghanistan is terminated, stripping protection from roughly 11,700 people.
The State Department notifies Congress of a sweeping reorganization plan. Buried in Congressional Notification CN 25-032, the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts is marked for elimination, its functions "realigned" to the Afghanistan Affairs Office, effective July 1, seven months after Congress wrote CARE into law.
Proclamation 10949 fully bars entry from twelve countries, Afghanistan among them, effective June 9. It explicitly exempts Afghan Special Immigrant Visas tied to U.S. government service, the exemption Congress built the program to guarantee.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act imposes unwaivable fees on asylum, TPS, parole, and work permits, and strips lawfully present Afghans of Medicaid, Medicare, ACA, and SNAP eligibility.
The State Department sends reduction-in-force notices to CARE's entire leadership team and the vast majority of remaining staff, the same day roughly 1,350 State employees department-wide receive theirs. The office Congress had funded through 2027 is gutted with the rest of the reorganization, and no successor coordinator is ever named.
A federal government shutdown furloughs two-thirds of the direct-hire staff at the office that adjudicates Chief of Mission applications, the largest chokepoint left in the pipeline, gutted less than four months after CARE's own leadership was RIF'd.
An Afghan national who arrived under Operation Allies Welcome in 2021 and was granted asylum in April 2025 shoots two National Guard members near the White House. Spc. Sarah Beckstrom dies of her injuries the next day. Within days, USCIS halts all Afghan immigration applications and the State Department pauses visa issuance for Afghan passport holders nationwide. The administration points to the attack as the reason for the shutdown that follows, including a second travel-ban proclamation three weeks later, even though every one of the 178,000 Afghans still waiting had already been through the vetting process this attack is used to question.
Three weeks after the shooting, Proclamation 10998 expands the travel ban to 39 countries and eliminates the SIV exemption Proclamation 10949 had carved out five months earlier, effective January 1.
The statutory deadline for new SIV Chief of Mission applications closes. Applicants rush to beat it, filing 8,857 applications in a single quarter.
The exemption that had protected Afghan Special Immigrant Visas since June is gone. From this date forward, the State Department issues no principal applicant SIVs to applicants holding Afghan passports. The only exceptions all year are two National Interest Exceptions, both issued to infant derivatives rather than principal applicants, and one visa issued to a single litigation class member.
The State Department notifies the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Camp As Sayliyah, the flagship Doha processing site, will shut down by March 31, 2026, with the facility handed over to the Qatari government by September 30, 2026. The March 31 deadline comes and goes with the camp still open and 1,039 fully vetted Afghans still stranded there, including pregnant women and children.
In Afghan and Iraqi Allies v. Rubio, Judge Chutkan rules the administration has "no authority — statutory or otherwise" to unilaterally suspend processing Congress required it to expedite.
Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, evacuated by the United States in 2021 after a decade fighting alongside U.S. Army Special Forces, dies within 24 hours of being taken into ICE custody in Dallas.
The State Department's progress report to the court shows a single visa issued to a class member between March 5 and June 3, 2026, while average Chief of Mission review time rises to 698 days against a 120-day court standard.
Reps. Jason Crow, Don Bacon, Sam Liccardo, and María Elvira Salazar, two Democrats and two Republicans, introduce the Afghanistan TPS Act (H.R. 9899). It would designate Afghanistan for Temporary Protected Status through July 1, 2029, restoring protection from deportation and work authorization for vetted Afghan allies already living in the United States, and require DHS to adjudicate applications within 90 days. It does not touch the SIV pipeline or anyone still waiting abroad.
The pipeline is fuller than it has ever been. The machinery still works — the FY2025 adjudication numbers prove it. What's missing is the will to let it run.