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The Trump administration is moving to force Afghans who worked alongside the U.S. military either back to the war-torn nation or to the Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C), veterans and refugee advocates say. Those Afghans have been stranded at a former U.S. military base in Qatar since 2021, and fear imprisonment and execution by the Taliban’s government if they are pushed back to Afghanistan. Experts are warning of a humanitarian disaster that will further degrade the United States’ global reputation if Congress fails to intervene.

About 1,100 Afghans and their families remain in prison-like conditions at Camp As Sayliyah in Doha, a transitory refugee compound that Qatar and the U.S. have been pushing to close for months. The majority are women and children; some are family of U.S. military members. Others served alongside U.S. troops as interpreters, medics, drivers, and special operations soldiers in the fight against the Taliban.

“Our children ask us every week where we are going,” Afghan residents of Camp As Sayliyah said in a collective statement this week. “We do not know what to tell them.”

Afghans who worked with U.S. forces were promised resettlement in the U.S. and heavily vetted, but the Trump administration froze the resettlement program in 2025 shortly after Stephen Miller and other anti-immigrant hardliners took control of the White House. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress quietly removed bipartisan language from must-pass legislation to authorize visas for the Afghans in Qatar, effectively blocking a program that has resettled thousands of Afghans who worked alongside the U.S. military since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul five years ago.

Now, the Trump administration is reportedly in talks with the D.R.C. to relocate the 1,100 people stuck at Camp As Sayliyah, according to The New York Times. After decades of internal conflict and devastating wars in surrounding nations, the D.R.C. already hosts roughly 600,000 refugees. But the refugee support group AfghanEvac say the D.R.C. is not meant to be a viable option for the Afghans stuck at Camp As Sayliyah.

Trump’s New “Muslim Ban” Wipes Out Hope for 250,000 Afghans Seeking Refuge in US

Instead, critics of the plan say the administration is preparing to give the refugees an impossible choice: Either go back to Afghanistan or be resettled in the D.R.C., a country the U.S. government warns against visiting “due to crime, and civil unrest” and risk of armed conflict in some regions, including intense fighting with rebel groups on the eastern border with Rwanda. If the Afghans instead return to Afghanistan — the only country where they have legal status — then President Trump can falsely claim they did so “voluntarily.”

In their collective statement, the Afghans said they cannot go to the D.R.C. “We have no family there. We have no language there. We have no legal status there. It is a country in its own war. We have been in enough war. We cannot take our children into another one.”

They also cannot return to Afghanistan. “The Taliban will kill many of us for what we did for the United States,” the statement said. “This is not a fear. This is a fact. The United States knows this because the United States is the reason we cannot go home.”

“This is not them trying to resettle 1,100........

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