“While the administration stokes fear about Afghan immigrants, data paint another picture. A 2019 study from the Cato Institute showed that the incarceration rate for Afghans between 18 and 54 was 127 per 100,000, a stark comparison to the 1,477 per 100,000 for native-born Americans.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) reported that, according to a 2024 Department of Health and Human Services study, refugees brought a $123.8 billion net fiscal benefit to the U.S. between 2005 and 2019, contributing $581 billion in taxes while receiving $457.1 billion in government support. This combats the Trump administration’s objections based on the net cost of admitting refugees to the U.S.
While refugees’ earnings may be limited on arrival, IRC says they “increase significantly” with time. A median household income of $30,500 in a refugee’s first five years in the U.S. becomes a median income of $71,400 after being here for 20 years. That number exceeds the national median income by nearly $4,000.
IRC also reported that more refugees become entrepreneurs (13 percent) than their U.S.-born counterparts (9 percent), benefitting their communities.
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The administration is using an isolated act of violence to justify sweeping crackdowns on refugees and wartime allies who were already thoroughly vetted.”
“Trump has halted all asylum decisions and paused visas for Afghan passport holders. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has announced that the government is “actively re-examining” all Afghan nationals who entered the country under President Joseph Biden. CBS reports that the administration is thinking of expanding its travel ban from 19 to 30 countries.
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New data leaked to and analyzed by David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, show that of the people taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since October 1, 73 percent had no criminal conviction. Nearly half had no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges; about a quarter had no conviction but did have pending charges. Of those with a criminal conviction, the majority had vice, immigration, or traffic violations. Only 5 percent had a violent criminal conviction.
Since January, the number of individuals arrested by ICE without a criminal record or criminal charge has grown by 1,500 percent.
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Since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021, nearly 200,000 Afghan nationals have migrated to the U.S. as part of Operation Allies Welcome and its successor, Operation Enduring Welcome—programs designed to resettle Afghans who aided the U.S. during the two-decade Afghanistan War. Another 260,000 Afghans are still waiting to come to the U.S., according to Shawn VanDiver, the president of #AfghanEvac and a proponent of the Afghan refugee programs.
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Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told the Associated Press that refugees are “already the most highly vetted immigrants in the United States.” Revetting and reinterviewing the hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees peacefully living in the U.S. is not only cruel, Aly argues, but a “tremendous waste of government resources.”
Unfortunately, legal limbo is nothing new for Afghan refugees. Many of them legitimately fear for their lives if they return to Afghanistan after aiding the U.S. Now they face an even more uncertain future.”
“At the beginning of the war, the Taliban were almost completely routed, and the U.S. military could have left from a position of strength. The new Afghan republic announced that it had an offer from the Taliban to surrender in exchange for amnesty and a chance to participate in politics. But the Bush administration turned down that offer, settling for nothing less than total, unconditional victory.”
“The State Department is eliminating the CARE office and ending the Enduring Welcome program, stranding U.S. allies who risked their lives and were told America would protect them.”
“A new study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University pinned down exactly what that cost is: at least $22.76 billion from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2024. The bulk of the money, $17.9 billion, was spent on U.S. aid to the Israeli military—both financial grants given to Israel to purchase weapons, and the cost of replacing munitions such as artillery shells sent directly from American stockpiles to the Israeli army.”
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“The study only counts the direct burden on the U.S. military budget. It doesn’t include indirect costs, “such as increased U.S. security assistance to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or any other countries, and costs to the commercial airline industry and to U.S. consumers.” Nor does it count the $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinians.”
“The Haditha massacre was one of the worst U.S. actions during the Iraq War. After a roadside bomb killed a Marine in the town of Haditha in November 2005, the rest of his squad shot dead 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women, and children, many of them inside their own homes. The Marine Corps then lied about it, claiming that the victims were all killed by the bomb or by running gun battles with insurgents.
Only dogged reporting by Time Magazine forced the military to open an investigation. No one was ever jailed for the killings or the coverup. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the commander of the squad, pleaded guilty to one count of dereliction of duty and was demoted.”
“As part of a larger restructuring, the US Army also announced it is cutting thousands of posts in roles most heavily involved in counterterrorism. “The mission or the function of counterterrorism has continued, but it just doesn’t have the same limelight and focus that it did,” Javed Ali, a counterterrorism specialist formerly at the FBI, Pentagon, and National Security Council, told Vox.”
“All of the ghosts—or perhaps zombies—of U.S. foreign policy for the past 30 years seem to be assembling into one big war. Since the Obama administration, Washington has promised to pull U.S. forces out of the Middle East, while quietly dabbling in proxy wars all over the region. That arrangement turned out to be neither stable nor sustainable. Right under everyone’s noses, and without permission from Congress, the United States has gone from proxy warfare back to direct combat in the Middle East.
The immediate cause of the crisis was unexpected: the mass Hamas-led killing and kidnapping of Israelis last October and the Israeli invasion of Gaza in response. But the underlying dynamics were there for everyone to see. American leaders believed that they could impose an unpopular order on the Middle East without putting in much effort and freeze the Middle East’s conflicts on Washington’s terms. And like an overconfident character in a horror movie, the Biden administration accidentally foreshadowed the bloody events to come.
“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades now,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said a week before the war. “Now challenges remain—Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians—but the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced.””
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“The Trump administration was unbothered. “The biggest threat that our allies and partners in the region face is not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It’s Iran. You’ve got to start there,” Trump administration official Brian Hook said in August 2020. As was the Biden administration. Current Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in January 2021 that “it’s hard to see near-term prospects for moving forward” on the issue.
Perhaps the United States alone could have solved the conflict; perhaps no one could have. Either way, Washington had tied itself to the outcome. Israel continued to receive U.S. military aid in greater amounts and with fewer conditions than any other country. And the Abraham Accords made Israel a key part of the entire Middle East’s security architecture.
Meanwhile, Tehran was licking its wounds. Although the Islamic Republic of Iran is internationally isolated and domestically losing control, it has many cards left to play. Iranian leaders can still count on a large arsenal of missiles and drones and an array of pro-Iran guerrilla forces across the region. (The Houthis are one such group.) Saudi Arabia, once an advocate for bombing Iran, decided to cut its losses and accept a diplomatic deal with Iran last year.
“The stage was set, then, for the October war to spread all over the region. The Abraham Accords were exposed as both fragile and unpopular in the Arab world, especially after Israeli leaders began to talk about expelling Palestinians from Gaza en masse. Iran had a golden opportunity to escalate on its terms. Hezbollah, the pro-Iran party in Lebanon, immediately began firing on Israeli territory. Biden sent two aircraft carriers to the region to deter any further escalation against Israel, while also talking Israel out of a preemptive war on Lebanon.
Iraqi militias broke their truce with Americans the following week. The U.S. bases originally set up to overthrow Saddam Hussein and repurposed for the war against the Islamic State were now redoubts against Iran’s Iraqi supporters. Like the Obama and Trump administrations before it, the Biden administration cited the original Iraq War authorization to justify its newest battle.
Then the Houthis began to menace international commerce. Houthi spokesman Yahya Sare’e claimed that Israeli shipping was a “legitimate target” until the siege of Gaza was lifted. Echoing the logic of liberal American hawks, he claimed that Yemen had a responsibility to protect Palestinian civilians. But the Houthi attacks also struck non-Israeli ships and drove international shipping companies out of the Red Sea, which normally carries around 10 percent of global trade.
As it turned out, the problem wouldn’t take care of itself. Despite the Abraham Accords, no Arab state except Bahrain was willing to intervene against the Houthis on behalf of Israeli shipping. (Saudi Arabia also seemed more concerned with maintaining its own truce.) Biden decided to cobble together his own fleet to fend off the Houthi assaults.”