The Afghan Refugee Program Is an Unfixable Mess—and May Bring the Next Terrorist Attack

History will rightly lambast the Biden administration for the tragic and disastrously managed evacuation from Kabul in 2021. In the wreckage and chaos of that withdrawal, the Biden administration’s National Security Council (NSC) set up a program to assist Afghans who had worked with U.S. authorities to leave the country and resettle in the United States. The State Department’s “Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts” (CARE) has largely managed the resettlement operation, but not without controversy. Whistleblowers have credibly alleged that CARE officials have tolerated unacceptable security risks in resettling unknown Afghans, while also ignoring internal corrupt screening practices. There is little doubt that CARE has prioritized resettling Afghans over protecting the American homeland. 

The good news is that the new Trump administration has paused resettling Afghans. The bad news is that Congress wants to continue the program. Trump has not yet permanently terminated CARE, and program contractors are still in place, ready to turn the processing back on. The right move is to end this program. 

Besides the usual open-border lobby, most supporters of continuing CARE are those well-meaning Americans, many of them veterans of the failed 20-year Afghanistan nation-building project, who believe Washington has a continuing obligation to those Afghans who worked with us. This view, admittedly, is a noble recognition of a debt, and Americans can, and should, debate when that obligation has been honorably discharged. 

But that question is far from the only issue. Whistleblowers have made the case that unacceptable deficiencies riddle the program. Just as with the Afghanistan nation-building project, the ability of Congress to snap its fingers and throw money at an issue does not mean that a U.S. government solution can be successfully implemented. CARE’s proponents dangerously overestimate the operational capability of U.S. officials to identify, vet, and safely resettle those deserving Afghans we want to extract. 

CARE fails on the basic security question of verifying who is entering our country. CARE is confronted by several risk elements—Taliban duplicity, confused Afghan identity issues, and limitations on federal government screening capacities—that the program cannot overcome. As one whistleblower has explained: 

Since 2022, the CARE office has facilitated the entry of hundreds of thousands of Afghan nationals to the United States as refugees or Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders. However, CARE has failed to adequately vet the backgrounds of these Afghans. Instead of bringing Afghan allies who worked with the U.S. military or in our diplomatic mission, CARE has allowed the process to be corrupted by allowing Afghans to come to the U.S. through fraud and bribery. There is evidence some of these Afghans have Taliban loyalties. Contrary to President Trump’s America First foreign policy, CARE has wasted billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars and imported a significant threat to our national security.

Start with the unacceptable vetting vulnerabilities. Biden’s NSC irresponsibly set the tone when senior officials, led by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer, demanded that the CARE priority be admitting and not screening Afghans. Finer knew that U.S. vetting capabilities could actually clear very few Afghans because U.S. intelligence is simply too incomplete to resolve complications in identity information. Mostly, the vetting process involves reviewing an Afghan’s identity—based on name, facial photo, biometrics, or other intel—to see if it comes up as a “hit” or a “match” to a possible suspect in security databases. 

U.S. vetting analysts labor intensively over this incomplete and sketchy personal identity information, but very often the results are unclear. As another insider explained: “The baseline vetting system errs on the side of caution; a hit means an individual is excluded from U.S. resettlement. For Afghans, the system is flipped; CARE has done everything it can to ‘clear hits’ and assume the national security risks of doing so.” 

Americans have a right to expect their government not to run such risks. For several years, researchers at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) have been shouting and waving their hands about this kind of irresponsible vetting. At issue is not just the risk of admitting Afghans with criminal pasts, but also those collaborating with or capable of becoming terrorists. For example, in 2021 the task force that became CARE admitted and resettled Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, an Afghanistan citizen living in Oklahoma City who last October was arrested and charged with conspiring to commit an Election Day terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS. Tawhedi was set to become a suicide bomber.

The CARE interview procedures for Afghan applicants are so poorly managed, in fact, that they constitute malfeasance. This stems from the fact that CARE engages around 200 Afghan contractors, mainly working remotely, to serve as case managers for Afghan applicants. For linguistic and cultural reasons, it is reasonable to use Afghans, but whistleblowers indicate that the American supervisors—again, in an effort to admit migrants—are on automatic pilot and not doing their due diligence. The CARE case managers who control which Afghan applications are eligible for further processing and thus their initial eligibility to be admitted into the United States are themselves Afghans, the same contractors who in many cases were not properly vetted themselves; most are not U. S. citizens. 

In this unacceptable process, there is almost no effort to corroborate what Afghan applicants claim about the threats they face at home or their record in actually assisting U.S. authorities. In fact, it seems that CARE has no capacity to or real interest in trying to expose fraudulent claims. Certainly, it is not an easy task, but no effort is really being made. Imagine the American CARE supervisor trying to double-check the work of his Afghan contractor who just conducted an interview with an applicant in a Pashto dialect and presented documentation in official bureaucratic Dari. The American supervisor has no idea. This is the kind of flimsy screening that puts a would-be terrorist in Oklahoma City. 

Moreover, the Afghan diaspora is fully networked online and information is constantly circulating on how to game CARE. According to whistleblowers, this process is furthermore riddled with payoffs and other Afghan-to-Afghan reward kickbacks about which the American CARE supervisors know little and, apparently, care even less. Bribes and illegal favors, the Achilles heel of all immigration sausage-making, appear totally out of control with CARE. 

Unfortunately, the corruption network stretches from Kabul back to Washington. Bad practices that the empire encounters abroad come home with the empire’s returning soldiers, spies, and diplomats. According to a 2023 Defense Department/SIGAR report former U.S. officials who served in Afghanistan (there were over a million Americans there, including the military) have been discovered selling recommendation letters to Afghans who want to get out. 

Then there are the Taliban overlords who manipulate the process for payoff, favors, and other unscrupulous rewards. The fact that Taliban authorities knowingly allow Afghans to fly out to third countries where CARE can process them strongly indicates at least these applicants are not facing persecution in their homeland. Such Taliban manipulation also helps explain why CARE is admitting disproportionately few members of Afghan religious or ethnic minority groups (e.g., Christians, Hazaras), who probably have real fears and no way to leave. It is exasperating to see, yet again, how the Taliban and their agents continue to manipulate the hapless, clueless Uncle Sam. 

So far, the federal government has paid out over $4 billion, which includes processing and housing centers in Qatar and Albania. The open-border Biden administration never saw a resettlement NGO and migrant federal contractor that it did not want to rain U.S. taxpayer dollars on. To its credit, the Trump administration believes it has frozen CARE, but it is important to follow the money. 

According to insiders, CARE officials are, at least partly, ignoring President Trump’s EO freezing all foreign assistance. CARE officials claim they are financed by appropriations outside of foreign assistance. This means that, even though refugee admissions have been halted, CARE is still paying salaries to contractors and operational costs to keep unprocessed Afghans in third countries. One can only hope that someone at State is directing Elon Musk and DOGE to look at CARE, because this program has resisted all scrutiny. 

Despite CARE’s terrible record, Congress has passed new legislation that calls on State to continue the program. In response, the Trump administration needs to shine a bright light on the corruption and security risks ongoing in CARE and redouble its efforts to permanently close down another disastrous Biden migrant-refugee program. Americans deserve the full story. 

Until we receive it, thousands of insufficiently vetted Afghans remain within our borders. In many cases, their intentions and even their true identities are unknown. It’s time to end that.