"We see families arriving with barely anything — often just the clothes on their backs," said Najib Ghiasi.
He's on the staff of the Afghan charity Aseel, and he's speaking about Afghan refugees in Pakistan who lived there for years, even decades — and are now being removed from their homes by police and sent back to the border.
Ghiasi told NPR that a refugee named Mausera spoke to one of his colleagues at Aseel and shared video of the interview. She told Aseel that interviewer that she had lived with her two grandchildren and worked as a cleaner in Pakistan to support them and that – her son had been was killed years ago and her husband abandoned her long before.
She told the interviewer that her family was left with nothing "No food, no clothes, not even our household items. We lost everything," she tells the interviewer from Aseel. The interview took place at the Torkham border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where she and her grandchildren now live in a makeshift tent.
Deportations are occurring from Iran as well. The two countries had been home to 3.5 million Afghan refugees. There have been waves of returnees over the last few years, said Sherine Ibrahim, the Afghanistan country director for the International Rescue Committee. But this year, Iran and Pakistan have stepped up the deportations.
A U.N. report released on Thursday says that 71,000 Afghan refugees from the two countries were deported just from June 1 to June 15, adding to millions who have been deported or left since 2023. Ghiasi says he and his colleagues spent much of early June at the Torkham crossing and counted some 5,000 families arriving every day.
This past week has also seen the largest number of returnees in a single day — 30,607, according to Ibrahim.
In videos shared by Aseel, the border crossing is a sea of humanity: Men, women and children packed into trucks, vans and small cars. Some of the women were clutching newborn babies. People sat atop piles of meager belongings, some of which are bundled in bedsheets.
Ghiasi said the forced deportations are hardest on children, who "understand that something terrible is happening, but they don't fully grasp why they are being removed from the only homes they've ever known." And perhaps the only homes their parents have ever known, he said. "Most of the deportees have lived in Pakistan for over three decades. A large majority of them have nowhere to go and no place to call home upon return."
Similar scenes are unfolding at the western borders that Afghanistan shares with Iran. Social media has featured images of men walking with bags of their belongings — everyday items like blankets and kitchenware.
The reasons for the waves of deportations aren't fully clear. Representatives of the two country governments did not respond to an NPR request for comments.
One explanation is that the governments want to remove those immigrants who do not have proper documentation.
On June 7, Fatemeh Mohajerani, an Iranian government spokesperson, told local media: "The government differentiates between legal and illegal residents. The decision is that those with valid legal documents will be allowed to stay in accordance with the law, while those without legal documents may leave."
The deportations reflect a growing anti-immigrant sentiment worldwide, says Teresa Casale, executive director of Mina's List, a human rights organization working on resettlement and advocacy for Afghan women refugees. And the U.S. crackdown on immigrants under Trump makes it more difficult if not impossible for Afghan refugees in other countries to resettle in the United States.
And the Afghan refugees in Pakistan have no real rights to protect them. "It's so unfortunate that Pakistan is not a signatory to any kind of international refugee protocols or conventions, so obtaining legal status for refugees there is virtually impossible," Casale added.
"In the worst-case scenario, more than three million people could be forced to return to Afghanistan by the end of 2025," said Jacopo Caridi, country director of Norwegian Refugee Council in Afghanistan.
A bad time to go back
One thing is clear to advocates: The timing couldn't be worse.
Afghans are returning to a country suffering a humanitarian crisis, which has grown more dire since the Taliban seized power more than three years ago.
"Afghanistan is a humanitarian crisis unto itself," says Ibrahim of the IRC. "There are 23 million people in need."
Millions of Afghans are unable to purchase food and rely on charity to get by. But aid groups, including the U.N.'s World Food Programme, scaled down their activities after the Trump administration initially pulled back most aid that it had designated for Afghanistan, including for food and basic medical care. Aid from the U.S. amounted to just over 40% of all funding that reached Afghanistan.
In February and March, other major aid donors, including the U.K., also announced they were curtailing their foreign aid budgets, forcing charities to curtail their activities in Afghanistan, which is among the world's most reliant countries on international donors. This year, foreign donors have only pledged 20% of what humanitarian groups say they need to offer basic services to Afghanistan, according to Caridi.
Then in early April, all U.S. humanitarian aid to Afghanistan was eliminated. The canceled contracts totaled $280 million with the World Food Programme, $24 million with the United Nations Population Fund and $257 million with other nongovernmental organizations.
What returnees face
Needs will not be met, says Ibrahim: "The surge of numbers means that very few people are going to be getting the immediate support that they need."
Many of the returnees are women on their own. She says: "I've met women who've said to me, I've been separated from my family. I have nowhere to go. I can't walk around Afghanistan or travel to a community of origin because I don't have a mahram, which is the male companion — a blood relative who is a male."
As families return to Afghanistan, aid workers say they expect to see a rise in child labor. Many of the deported families are headed by women — the Taliban does not allow them to work in most professions so "families rely on children to earn a living," said Safi Nurzai, who also works at the Afghan aid group Aseel.
If the female heads of family can't work, Nurzai said, the children will try and earn money by cleaning cars on the streets or selling tissue paper and pens. Nurzai adds that the kids are "often pushed into begging for survival."
Ruchi Kumar is a journalist who reports on conflict, politics, development and culture in India and Afghanistan. She tweets at @RuchiKumar
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