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Opinion: Afghan refugees and President Trump’s art of a broken deal
Dec. 18th, 2025 11:45 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
sjmerc_opinion_feedWorking for over three decades at Chabot College, which serves many immigrant communities, my colleagues and I taught and developed support programs for Afghan students meeting them at the often-challenging crossroads of their lives.
We bore witness to their struggles and successes as they and their families became woven into the very fabric of our community. Many are now medical workers, skilled technologists and teachers, as well as elected American political leaders who give back to their communities.
Afghan students often come from families aligned with 20 years of U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan. For infinitely varied reasons, and through two decades of war, they cast their lots with the United States and accepted the implicit — some might say sacred — promise to protect them as indispensable partners in our war on terror.
In 2021, the U.S. military departure from Afghanistan left many in devastating limbo, unable to get out of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, or dependent on a promise of temporary refugee status in the United States. Last month, the renewal of a ban on Afghan refugees, as well as earlier threatened nullification of formerly assigned temporary refugee status, represents a clear betrayal of our country’s implicit agreement to protect them.
When Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who came to the U.S. in 2021 after apparently working with a CIA-backed Afghan military unit, fired on the National Guard in D,C. on Nov. 26, tragically killing one guard member and critically wounding another, the president seized the opportunity to condemn all Afghans in the U.S. as potential terrorists.
There is no logic here: We don’t persecute Gulf War veterans because Timothy McVeigh, the home-grown terrorist who perpetrated the Oklahoma bombing of the Federal Building, was a Gulf War vet. Yet President Trump’s recent dehumanizing slurs against Afghans, Somalis and other non-European immigrants risk becoming dangerously normalized through repetition.
The anxiety among law-abiding Afghans and family members, who have come under now nullified temporary refugee status, is palpable as the president directly threatens a re-examination of their cases. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, now-ruling Taliban leaders have only intensified the detention and murder of journalists and human rights activists as well as their continued repression of Afghan girls and women.
This is the nightmare scenario of “repatriation” to which Afghans in America are currently threatened.
We are a nation of immigrants that has long struggled to live up to our highest ideals, including E Pluribus Unum (or “out of many, one”).
Across American history, xenophobic fears have been politically manipulated as a ready distraction from toxic political agendas of those in power. We remember with shame how Japanese Americans were confined to internment camps in a wave of hysteria given the imprimatur of law by the Supreme Court. We cannot allow the shame of this and other abandonments of our clear duty as a nation of immigrants to repeat.
My own family is no stranger to this history.
On March 10, 1941, my grandmother received a letter from the U.S State Department refusing a visa for her sister Miriam, a German Jew made stateless by the Nazi regime’s Nuremberg Decrees. Miriam and her family were soon thereafter sent to a death camp and murdered by the Nazis, as were many others following U.S. rejection of their refugee status. Ironically, rationales for granting refugee status included the fear that some European Jews might be Nazi spies.
If current exclusionary policies targeting Afghans seeking asylum are allowed to define our current historical period, there will no doubt be postmortem mea culpas as has been the case with the World War II Japanese internment and denial of refugee status to European Jewry.
And we should expect future generations of Americans to ask, “How could we have let this happen?”
Susan Sperling is president emerita of Chabot College. As a professor at the Hayward-based community college, she taught generations of Afghan students.
Today, I went on a journey to far away. Southeast of Cincinnati, to be more specific. While these past few days have been filled with icy roads, single digit temperatures, and disgusting slush of dirty snow and salt, today produced a much warmer and sunnier day. Thus, the snow began to melt, and everything turned to mud.
