The Veterans Group Running Interference for Open-Border NGOs

(Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)

Some veterans of the Afghanistan war are lobbying fiercely in Washington to resume admitting Afghan migrants, a process that the Trump administration has currently frozen. Many of these veterans are associated with an advocacy coalition called AfghanEvac, which maintains that America’s national honor will be stained if any Afghan allies are left behind under the Taliban. How many Afghans this coalition wants to bring to the United States is unclear, but the fact that we have already resettled some 200,000 Afghans appears to be, for this coalition, just a down payment on a debt that they believe America owes. 

While AfghanEvac talks about America’s honor vis-à-vis these foreign nationals, the coalition would have President Donald Trump go back on his word to his voters, arguably his strongest campaign promise, to end our country’s unprecedented migration chaos. As AfghanEvac lobbies Congress and the White House for more migrants, the president is deeply engaged in cleaning up the national security and rule-of-law catastrophe caused by the Biden administration in opening the border to some 8.3 million foreigners. The 200,000 Afghans, admitted in 2021–24, were part of that chaos. The Biden administration poorly vetted these migrants and failed to confirm that they even helped the American cause in the war. 

A closer examination of AfghanEvac reveals that it consists not just of U.S. veterans, although they are in the lead, but it also includes America’s professional open-border lobby: NGOs that are fundamentally anti-Trump and represent a key constituency of the Biden presidency. These are the same NGOs that received literal billions in federal subsidies from the Biden administration and never saw a foreign national population that they did not want to relocate into the United States. Republican Congressmen and conservatives sympathetic to AfghanEvac should ask these veterans why they are making common cause with these open-border, far-left NGOs.

The anti-Trump organizations include groups like Human Rights First; the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights; Church World Service; U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants; and the Biden administration’s signature open-borders group, “Welcome.US.” All of these NGOs were co-conspirators and abettors of President Joe Biden’s deliberate attack on the nation’s normal immigration laws, labor markets, and social service systems all across the country. Not only did these same groups attempt to legitimize Biden’s migration lawlessness; they siphoned off scandalous salaries and perks from the billions of federal subsidies that the Biden administration doled out as political payoffs.  

One of the AfghanEvac coalition members is an outfit known as Innovation Law Lab, which asserts: 

Like you, we are frustrated by the persistent exclusion of immigrants from civil society, the for-profit detention and deportation system, the immoral and inhumane restrictions on movement, and the unrelenting assault on those fleeing persecution. By scaling the impact of immigrant advocates working on-the-ground to defeat the Vast Deportation Machine, we are able to build permanent pathways to immigrant and refugee justice.

Republicans in Congress should ask AfghanEvac leaders to research how many lawsuits the Innovation Law Lab has helped bring against the Trump administration to keep illegal migrants, including criminal terrorists like Tren de Aragua gang members, in our country. 

AfghanEvac’s far-left partners marshal all of the radical Biden arguments to keep America’s borders open: they point to climate change, white supremacy, and the supposed absolute right of foreigners to enter our country. Groups like Human Rights First and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights are all about ending the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policies and legalizing illegal migrants. 

In fairness, most of the AfghanEvac veterans are probably not sympathetic with the radicals in these open-border NGOs. But still these veterans must acknowledge, when they lobby Republican Congressmen and White House officials, that AfghanEvac is in an unholy alliance with groups dedicated to undermining Trump’s core policies. While some in the AfghanEvac coalition, perhaps, have relatively modest goals—for example, just to process all Afghans with putative claims to special immigrant visas (SIVs)—their partners in the refugee and resettlement lobby are licking their chops to process hundreds of thousands, even millions, of new Afghan migrants. That is something President Trump should never permit to happen.

We must recognize that it is out of high principle that the veterans remain bound to the Afghan translator, the driver, the intelligence operative who risked his life to work with U.S. soldiers, marines, spies, and diplomats. Americans acknowledge the deep ties of fellowship that are forged in war-time. But this sentiment cannot be the basis, post-Biden, of another immigration wave. The many tens of thousands of such personal commitments Americans made to Afghans must be measured in the context of the long-term U.S. national interest. 

The original U.S. military incursion into Afghanistan had nothing to do with the well-being of the Afghans. Washington policymakers, of both parties, morphed our country’s 2001 counterterrorism mission to kill Osama Bin Laden and destroy Al Qaeda into a foolhardy two-decade nation-building project. Today, most Americans might reasonably conclude that merely undertaking that mammoth 20-year enterprise, an effort that claimed the lives of almost 2,500 of our countrymen, more than fulfilled any obligations that Uncle Sam has to the remote Central Asian country.

Those veterans committed to AfghanEvac might consider redefining the discharge of their perceived obligations by other means than encouraging migration to the United States. There is much to be said for private initiatives that deliver money and material support for Afghans to stay and fight for their country, to go underground to outlast the Taliban. Afghans waiting in third countries can be helped to reinfiltrate back to their native soil. Why is the only honorable “solution” facilitating Afghans to abandon their homeland for an alien country where they can drive an Uber or open up a restaurant? 

Yes, Afghanistan is a complicated, multi-tribal, multi-ethnic country, but one also with strong traditions of survival and resistance that outlasted the British Empire and Soviet occupation. There is at least a plausible argument that Afghanistan will be better off in the long run if all our allies remain, resist, and hold out for their country’s future. If the United States were sinking into oppression, most AfghanEvac veterans, even facing a national situation as bleak as Afghanistan’s, would not respond by emigrating to Canada. 

Finally, the veterans must acknowledge that the U.S. government does not have the capacity to reliably vet the Afghans who have already entered our country, not to mention all those who would seek to come. Discharging the American debt to Afghanistan certainly does not require our country to run unacceptably high risks of admitting terrorists and criminals. When they are lobbying, AfghanEvac advocates must address the fact that U.S. government vetting is seriously inadequate and vulnerable to error at such a level that the risk of admitting Afghan enemies or criminals remains too high. 

The Trump administration is right to permanently halt refugees and migrants coming from Afghanistan. Trump is right to defund Biden’s corrupt refugee and resettlement lobby. He is right to keep his pledge to the American people in the 2024 campaign. That is the highest American honor at stake in all of this business.