Now that the Taliban controls Afghanistan, the return of refugees, granted temporary protected status in the U.S. under former President Joe Biden, amounts to a death sentence, American veterans of the longest war in U.S. history warn.
“Some of these are our closest partners, people that actually worked with us and for us, that are simply using the TPS program because that was the only option,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a former Army Ranger who fought in Afghanistan, told The Washington Post.
“If they’re sent back to Afghanistan, it would be a death sentence for them.”
And a vocal group of President Donald Trump backers, American veterans, are behind that warning, perhaps even to the point of standing in the way of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation forces.
“If they attempt to deport the Afghans, you’re going to see actual physical conflict between veterans and ICE,” Army veteran Matt Zeller, who says an interpreter saved his life in the war, told the Post.
The Trump administration believes conditions in Afghanistan are more favorable now for the return of an estimation 10,000 refugees under the Biden TPS program that the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced could be terminated by July.
The safety of Afghanistan refugees stands to become a political divide for Trump-backing veterans, according to the report.
“To me as a veteran, that’s incredibly offensive,” No One Left Behind’s Andrew Sullivan, a former infantry commander in Afghanistan told the Post, calling the Trump administration’s security position “laughable.”
“If there was ever a country that deserves TPS, it is Afghanistan.”
The White House did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.
“Taliban authorities intensified their crackdown on human rights, particularly against women and girls,” Human Rights Watch wrote in its 2025 report, saying the situation has “worsened” in the past year, including “emergency levels of hunger” for nearly 3 million in the Taliban-controlled country.
Even Trump-backing Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., who lost both legs in an Afghanistan war explosion, noted those who aided American forces might deserve the protection that all of the TPS beneficiaries might not.
“They’re not one in the same,” Mast told the Post. “There’s people that maybe worked on a base, maybe they worked at [TGI] Fridays on a base as a waiter or something like that.
“That doesn’t mean that they were out on missions with me, rolling people up, right?
“I’ll think about how I feel about that.”
Lack of equivocation “is both morally bankrupt and strategically foolish,” because the Taliban treats everyone coming from the U.S. as complicit, according to #AfghanEvac President Shawn VanDiver, calling out Mast’s “political amnesia.”
“These are real lives, not talking points,” VanDiver told the Post. “And the idea that a cook, a janitor or a mechanic at Bagram [air base] deserves less protection than a combat interpreter is both morally bankrupt and strategically foolish.
“The Taliban doesn’t do performance reviews. They don’t check résumés. They kill people for being associated with us.
“These are people whose only ‘crime’ is having lived, learned, or worked in the United States. And now, with TPS terminated and no viable pathway forward, they face an impossible choice: return to persecution or risk deportation from the very country they trusted.”
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