WASHINGTON—The State Department is shutting down a Biden-era program that allowed Afghan allies to enter the United States, citing serious concerns about President Joe Biden’s failure to follow security procedures in vetting Afghans.
The Biden administration set up the refugee program at Camp As Sayliyah in Doha, Qatar, to support Afghan allies who fled their country during the botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
Around 1,300 Afghans have been waiting at the former American military base for years, in cramped living conditions, to enter the United States. Many of them have feared that they will be returned to Afghanistan, where they will be tortured and killed for working with the United States.
As of Wednesday, The Daily Wire can first report, the State Department says that the Biden administration’s failure to properly vet these Afghans, throwing standard security procedures out the window during the withdrawal, will prevent them from ultimately entering the United States. They will be sent to “a third country” — though what country this is, the State Department has not yet confirmed.
A State Department spokesperson shared that the Afghan nationals who are currently at Camp As Sayliyah “do not have a viable pathway” to the United States and that hundreds of these nationals have “derogatory information” that presents serious security concerns.
But President Donald Trump does not want these vulnerable groups of people to be forced to go back to Afghanistan “under the brutal Taliban regime,” particularly the women and girls, so the United States has presented the Afghan nationals at the camp with a “safe, third-country option for resettlement.”
Refugees walk through the departure terminal to a bus at Dulles International Airport after being evacuated from Kabul following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on August 31, 2021, in Dulles, Virginia. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The State Department says that it’s neither appropriate nor humane to keep the Camp As Sayliyah group as is, saying that a large minority of the population are women and children who are living in a confined space without much freedom to move around. According to the Wall Street Journal, residents at the program spend most of their time inside due to the blazing desert temperatures, typically walking around the hangars or scrolling on their phones.
State believes that moving the group to “a third country” is a “positive resolution” that will offer the Afghan nationals safety and the opportunity to start new lives — and at the same time, protect the American people.
“The United States has kept its promise to those Afghans who risked their lives to support the U.S. government during our attempts to help Afghans build a better country for themselves,” the State Department spokesperson shared.
“We have resettled roughly 400,000 Afghans since 2001,” the spokesman added. “It is now more than four and a half years since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan. It is long past time to move past this decades-long conflict, so costly in blood and treasure, and look ahead to the future.”
In this handout image, Sgt. Juan Miranda, culinary specialist, 155th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, files in Afghan Special Immigrants into the dining facility, August 20, 2021, at Camp As Sayliyah, Qatar. (Photo by Sgt. Jimmie Baker / U.S. Army via Getty Images)
The move comes on the heels of the tragic Thanksgiving week attack on members of the National Guard in Washington, D.C. Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who was brought into the country by the Biden administration in 2021, shot and killed Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and seriously injured Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe in an ambush-style attack on November 26.
Lakanwal was one of many thousands of Afghan nationals who were flown out of Afghanistan without proper vetting and put on “U.S.-controlled platforms for an eventual pathway to the United States.”
He is not the only Afghan national who has attempted to kill Americans: Abdullah Haji Zada and Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi were sentenced for intent to conduct a terrorist act in Oklahoma in October 2024, and Jamal Wali was killed in Fairfax, Virginia, after opening fire on police officers during a routine traffic stop in April 2025.
Two days after Lakanwal’s attack, and about 24 hours after President Trump pledged to dramatically shake up the United States immigration system in response, the State Department directed its posts to refuse visas to Afghan nationals using Afghan passports.
Trump argued at the time that the “refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America.”
“As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota,” the president said. “Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.”
On December 3, the president paused the processing of all immigration applications for individuals from 19 “high-risk countries”: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
And in mid-December, the president signed a proclamation expanding and strengthening entry restrictions on nationals from countries with “demonstrated, persistent, and severe deficiencies in screening, vetting, and information-sharing to protect the Nation from national security and public safety threats.”
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