On the morning of August 15th, Halima, a twenty-two-year-old engineering student at the Afghan National Defense University, was sitting in her dorm room and studying for a final exam when she heard some girls screaming in the hallway. Taliban fighters had just arrived in Kabul, after the withdrawal of American troops, and were taking over the city. Halima, who is quiet, with delicate features, had grown up in a rural village in southern Afghanistan, where her father taught science at a girls’ school. Like many other young women who joined the Afghan military, she was Hazara, an ethnic and religious minority that has long been persecuted in Afghanistan, including by the Taliban.
Halima was an aspiring artist, but her father had decided that she should become a civil engineer. She had received a full scholarship at the leading military academy in Afghanistan, where, in her third year, she was first in her class of some five hundred students. “There were a few other girls in my engineering class at first,” she told me. “But, by my third year, I was the only one left.” As Taliban fighters approached the university, Halima left her textbook open on her desk and rushed to escape, grabbing only her passport. Her name and photograph were still posted on her dormitory door, which could tip the Taliban off to her identity.
Halima had nowhere to go; her family lived hours away. “The road was too dangerous,” she told me. “And if the Taliban found out who I was, they would target my family.” She hid in the home of a kindly classmate whose father was out of the country. Soon afterward, another classmate put her in touch with “Mr. Sam” and “Miss Tory,” handlers working with the U.S. military. The handlers directed her to the basement of a house, where she hid with dozens of other women. (Halima requested that I use only her first name, to protect her family.) For the next three months, she was shuttled through a series of windowless safe houses with about eighty other female military personnel, journalists, and activists. Safe-house operators allowed them outside only to be hustled between hiding locations. “When you don’t see the sun for that long, your bones begin to hurt,” she told me, recently. Sometimes the women were crammed into spaces too small to lie down in, so they curled up their knees and leaned against one another to sleep.
Sadiqa Khalili, who was twenty-seven, had passed the entrance exam to become a pilot in the Afghan Air Force and was about to start training. “I sat in the dark, just waiting for the Taliban to come,” she told me. “Everything I’d worked for my whole life had just vanished.” Amena Haidari, twenty-eight, and Halima Akbari, twenty-five, had both worked with Afghan commando units. “We whispered to one another about whether or not we should wipe our phones and destroy our passports,” Akbari told me. For the women’s security, they were instructed not to talk to one another. Taliban fighters were raiding houses, attempting to find unchaperoned girls. The less the women knew about one another, the safer they would be if one were caught. “The Taliban tortures military girls like me,” Halima told me.
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In the darkness, Halima’s phone buzzed with threatening messages from men claiming to be the Taliban fighters who’d raided her dormitory. One sent photos of burning textbooks. “You will never read these again,” he wrote. “We will find you, you shameless girl who joined the military.” She wrote in her diary, “Why is it a crime to be a girl in my country? I’m a poor girl in a land of terror with 1000s of hopes and dreams.” She drew in a sketchpad, and, when the other women saw her talent, several asked Halima to draw their portraits. At night, some women whispered into their phones, letting their families know that they were alive. But Halima’s father had destroyed all photographs of her and deleted her number from his phone. He was frightened that, if she called, one of her younger siblings might overhear and tell other children in the village.
The women soon learned that, of the roughly eighty in hiding, only the few with passports—including Halima, Khalili, Haidari, and Akbari—would be able to leave the country. On November 10th, at a safe house in Kabul, Halima received an encrypted message that instructed her to hand her passport over to the safe-house manager. The manager left for several hours and returned with airplane tickets for the next day. “We’d been told we were leaving so many times that I didn’t know if it was really going to happen,” she said. On November 11th, the four women boarded a flight to a U.S. base in Qatar. A month later, they arrived at a military base called Fort Dix, in New Jersey. At the base, they spent their days learning English, which no one but Halima had studied before. “At night, we listened to music and relaxed, which was really a new level of freedom for us,” Halima said. Some soldiers brought Halima canvases, and she painted portraits of the women who had been left behind.
Fort Dix was slated to close to Afghans in the following weeks. Military bases, part of an emergency solution, were never intended to house tens of thousands of new arrivals for lengthy periods; at other bases, Afghans slept in tents in freezing temperatures. There was a push to get people off the bases as quickly as possible, and the women were determined to find a new home together. “We know one another in a way that no one else can,” Akbari told me. But resettlement agencies had been gutted during the Trump years, and no agency had enough capacity to take all four of them.
Soon, the women learned about a new kind of program, called a Sponsor Circle, through which civilian volunteers could sign up to resettle Afghans themselves. A group in Duluth, Minnesota, was willing to take the women in, and to help them find jobs and attend a local university. “We Googled Duluth and saw how much snow there was,” Halima told me. “But their letter also said that they could help us continue our education, and that was most important.” On the morning of Valentine’s Day, they left for Duluth.
This past winter, American military veterans, retired professors, pastors, and hundreds of others took a leading role in resettling displaced Afghans. They’ve met planes from U.S. bases, found apartments, co-signed leases, puzzled through public-assistance paperwork, and located halal meat. (One trick: head to Costco.) The Sponsor Circle program began last fall as an emergency response to the arrival of Afghans. But Lucretia Keenan, a strategist for the program, told me that it was also the culmination of efforts by organizers across the U.S. to ease conditions for newcomers in the wake of the global migration crisis. “This is part of a global movement,” she told me. The Sponsor Circle program is modelled on a successful, decades-long citizen-led resettlement effort in Canada, and a dozen other countries have recently started such programs. In the U.K., two hundred thousand people and organizations have expressed interest in housing Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion. Gregory Maniatis, who works at the Open Society Foundations, told me, “It isn’t abstract. People are volunteering to host Ukrainians in their own homes for six months.”
In some ways, Sponsor Circles recall the best of earlier ad-hoc methods of refugee resettlement. In the eighteen-hundreds and early nineteen-hundreds, religious organizations and their grassroots networks were the primary institutions working to resettle immigrants in America; many saw it as part of a theological calling. But in 1980, after Congress passed the Refugee Act, which outlined the basic tenets of asylum and established the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the process of welcoming refugees became professionalized; since then, almost all refugees have been resettled through the federal bureaucracy. The Refugee Act also granted the President authority over the number of refugees allowed to enter the country. When Trump came to power, he used the Refugee Act, as well as a series of executive orders collectively known as the Muslim ban to block refugees from entering the country. According to the National Immigration Forum, in the fiscal year of 2016, eighty-five thousand refugees entered the U.S.; in the 2020 fiscal year, that number was less than twelve thousand. Federal funding of resettlement agencies is tied to how many refugees arrive in the U.S., and dwindling numbers meant slashed budgets. “Something like one-third of resettlement offices lost their funding,” Maniatis said.
When the Taliban captured Kabul last August and hundreds of thousands of Afghans headed for the exits, their pathway to the U.S. was in shambles. Closed offices and a dearth of caseworkers made it impossible to resettle so many displaced people so quickly. In response, Sarah Krause, the executive director of a nonprofit called Community Sponsorship Hub, and others scrambled to create a program that would allow ordinary citizens to help out. During the past seven months, some fifteen hundred volunteers in more than twenty-five states have formed about a hundred and seventy-five Sponsor Circles to help welcome several thousand Afghans. “Groups have come forward as far away as Alaska,” Krause told me.
In Duluth, Charlotte Frantz, a semi-retired pastor’s assistant at Peace Church, asked her congregation if they wanted to participate in the program. “We were wondering what we could do,” she told me. Peace Church, a place decorated with rainbow bowls and worry stones, has a history of activism. In the eighties, some of its members belonged to the Overground Railroad, a network that smuggled undocumented migrants over the border to Canada. After Trump ramped up deportations in Minnesota, Frantz remodelled part of the Peace Church basement as a sanctuary for people fearing deportation. Duluth is more than a hundred and fifty miles from the nearest resettlement agency—which, in the past, would have ruled the community approach out, but the new program made it an option. Terrie Shannon, a seventy-eight-year-old retired education professor, agreed to lead the circle. “I said yes partly in defiance of the people in this county who supported Trump’s executive order to ban immigrants,” she told me. None had any experience with resettling immigrants or with Afghanistan. “Duluth isn’t really very international,” Shannon said.
On February 14th, Halima, Haidari, Khalili, and Akbari landed at Duluth’s tiny airport. “We were terrified,” Halima said. “We didn’t know who would be waiting.” Eight older people stood holding neon signs that read “Welcome to Duluth.” They smiled but held back, afraid that Afghan custom might bar them from touching the women. But Akbari rushed forward to hug Shannon. “We could tell by their faces that these were kind people,” Akbari told me. A group of Benedictine sisters had agreed to house the women temporarily in a retreat center. Frantz and a colleague, along with the sisters, had scoured the bedrooms, removing crosses and icons of saints so the newcomers would feel welcome. Late the first evening, the women arrived at the center and found four deer outside in the snow. The volunteers pointed them out in hushed tones, but Halima and the others grew concerned and asked if the deer were dangerous. “We didn’t know if they might attack us,” Akbari said.
The women weren’t allowed to work until their paperwork was sorted out, so they spent their days padding around the retreat center in slippers crocheted by the sisters. The women began calling Shannon “Grandmother.” One afternoon, Halima invited her over to speak with her mother on FaceTime, and both older women started to cry. “I swore a sacred promise to her that I would take care of her daughter,” Shannon told me. The young women were polite and quick to smile, but any mention of life at home made them grow grim. They worried about the women they had left behind. “We want so badly for them to find a way out, too,” Akbari said. They wanted to send the pocket money they received from the Sponsor Circle—fifteen dollars a week—home to their relatives, some of whom were near starvation owing to an ongoing famine. But the volunteers worried that too much financial support would muddy the scope of their commitment to the women. Frantz, who had adopted a son from Guatemala and had experience with the complexity of distant entanglements, said, “We could set up a dependency we really can’t sustain.” In the end, though, the volunteers helped Haidari wire money home to her father, who was sick.
Frustrations mounted. For Halima, Haidari, Khalili, and Akbari, life as a high-ranking student or professional was over. “We really don’t fit in here yet, and we don’t know the language,” Akbari said. The women had been given donated computers that were nearly useless. They needed to apply for public assistance, but the system was byzantine. They had entered the country on “humanitarian parole,” which, unlike refugee status, did not guarantee that, among other things, they could stay indefinitely, and meant that they still needed to apply for asylum. But many private immigration lawyers were overwhelmed and increasingly expensive. “They are charging exorbitant rates to the most vulnerable people,” Frantz said.
Still, the women found fun where they could. They went clothes shopping, and, after months of washing their hair with dish soap in the safe houses, they each chose their own shampoo. They went to a potluck dinner at the only mosque in northeastern Minnesota. They baked bread and sang songs with the sisters. They played volleyball in the driveway and tried out snowshoeing. One weekend, members of the Sponsor Circle offered to take the four women on a church snow-tubing trip. The night before, however, when a volunteer read them the waivers that they’d need to sign, the women decided not to go. Why, after risking their lives to escape Afghanistan, would they volunteer to do something that might break their legs? “We thought it must be something very dangerous,” Khalili told me.
Earlier this year, I worked with several friends to set up a Sponsor Circle to help resettle five Afghan siblings and their families—all relatives of a journalist I had worked with while reporting in Afghanistan. The siblings were stuck at Fort McCoy, in Wisconsin, and were told that no resettlement agency could take all of them. To insure that they wouldn’t be separated, my friends—including Maria Aini, an Afghan American doctor who had come to Pennsylvania as a refugee when she was eight—agreed to help. The siblings’ aging mother speaks only Pashto, so it was important that they be within walking distance of a community of Pashto speakers. We found them temporary housing at the Virginia Theological Seminary, in a professor’s empty home, which was large and sunny. One of our volunteers, an attorney, helped them with the process of seeking asylum. Three of the siblings now have jobs in customer service, and one of them recently had a baby. But every victory is tinged with a larger sadness for their relatives who remain in Afghanistan. “I feel like a bird whose nest has been snatched away,” the siblings’ mother told me. “I’ve been made to fly far away and leave two of my children behind.”
One of the most critical factors in the successful integration of immigrants is their ability to find a community, and Sponsor Circles help to create local bonds. “It’s proven to make a difference in whether or not refugees succeed,” David Miliband, the president and C.E.O. of the International Rescue Committee, told me. Maniatis, from the Open Society Foundations, told me that he hopes that involving Americans directly in resettlement efforts will help to combat anti-immigrant sentiment: “This is infrastructure that engages a community in social issues and places people at the center of the solution.” Following the success of the Sponsor Circle program, the Biden Administration has decided to launch a larger sponsorship program, which will be implemented later this year. The Administration recently committed to welcoming a hundred thousand refugees from Ukraine, and some of them will be resettled through the new sponsorship program. “The Sponsor Circle Program for Afghans has shown that everyday Americans and community groups across the country are willing and able to step up in extraordinary ways,” a State Department spokesperson told me. “The experience to date demonstrates the powerful and impactful role that Americans from all walks of life can play as they seek to welcome Afghans and now Ukrainians arriving in their communities.”
But Sponsor Circles also face challenges. The program requires that volunteers raise at least two thousand two hundred and seventy-five dollars per newcomer, and pledge to help out for a minimum of three months. “It’s nowhere near enough,” Embry Howell, a health-policy expert and a member of a Sponsor Circle in the D.C. area, told me. Sponsor Circles also lack the experience of government agencies, including knowledge about how to access social workers and how to navigate the labyrinthine systems that govern Social Security and other benefits. Howell told me that one woman she works with experiences severe anxiety when using the elevator in their building—which makes it difficult for her to leave the house. “She doesn’t speak English, all of her family is in Afghanistan, and mental health is really the missing piece.”
In Duluth, Halima and the others soon found work in the kitchen of an assisted-living and health-care center associated with the Benedictine sisters. The jobs paid only thirteen dollars and thirty-three cents an hour, but they came with a signing bonus of five hundred dollars. “As soon as I get that, I’m sending the money home,” Halima told me. Within three weeks, the Sponsor Circle had found them a place to live, at a house that was formerly a rental property, and sent over a team of volunteer builders to renovate it. The night before they moved in, the Sponsor Circle held a last pizza party at the retreat center. (Some of the volunteers were surprised to find that the women, cosmopolitan Kabulis, had had pizza many times before.) The room was warm and cozy. Shannon had sewn the girls cloth bags as presents, and drew numbers to determine a fair order in which each could pick a bag. “We’re just thrilled that you chose Duluth,” Shannon said. Halima replied, “We are really happy that you are friendly people.”
It was eight degrees below zero the next morning, as the women packed the last of their duffels and drove several miles to their new home. All four set to work making their beds, unpacking newly acquired knickknacks, including Christmas ornaments, pieces of costumes, and a sparkly magic wand that Halima had collected at a church rummage sale. Akbari hung the Christmas ornaments from a light pull in her room. Halima unpacked her sketches. Flipping through them, she stopped at the faces of women she’d left behind in the safe house. “They’ve moved now,” she told me. “We text with them on Facebook, and every time they text with us asking our sponsors to help them.” She pulled out one painting she’d done at Fort Dix, a portrait of her father, and propped it on her bedside table, behind her magic wand.
