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250,000 Afghan children need homes, food, education after returning from Pakistan
In the wake of an announcement by Pakistan that it intends to start Phase Two of deportations of Afghans, Save the Children said Thursday that almost a quarter of a million Afghan children need proper homes, food, and access to education after returning from Pakistan in the past seven months.
In a statement issued by the organization, Save the Children said more than 520,000 Afghans have returned from Pakistan since September last year, after Pakistan said all undocumented foreigners must leave the country voluntarily or face deportation.
Nearly half of all the returnees are children.
A survey by Save the Children of families who have returned to Afghanistan – and the communities who are hosting them – found that nearly all (99%) do not have enough food for the next one to two months.
About three-quarters of returnees and families in host communities reduced portion sizes or restricted the food consumption of adults so small children could eat.
About 40% of returnees and host families surveyed had to borrow food or rely on friends and relatives for at least three days a week – with 13% of returnees and 9% of host families saying they had to get food from others every day.
Almost 8 million children in Afghanistan – or one in three – are facing crisis levels of hunger.
Nearly one in six families live in tents, according to the survey, with most returnees having little or no means to support themselves.
Only a third had managed to bring assets back with them from Pakistan.
Nearly half (47%) said there were no jobs available in Afghanistan, with 81% saying that they do not have any skills that could lead to employment.
Almost two thirds (65%) of children who have returned to Afghanistan have not been enrolled in school. The majority (85%) told Save the Children that they don’t have the necessary documents to register and enroll in school.
In Pakistan, more than two thirds of these children had been attending school.
Arshad Malik, Country Director for Save the Children in Afghanistan, said: “Families are returning to Afghanistan with virtually nothing. Most are relying on relatives or friends to support them – and these communities already have little to support themselves.
“The return of so many people is creating an additional strain on already overstretched resources. Children need support and stability. Many undocumented Afghan children were born in Pakistan – Afghanistan is not the place they call home,” he said.
He added that in addition to the returns from Pakistan, 600,000 Afghans arrived from Iran last year. Also, “families have been forced from their homes by multiple disasters, including the series of earthquakes in Herat and the ongoing drought. Afghanistan is also now home to the second largest number of internally displaced people in the world – or roughly 1 in 7 people,” Malik said.
According to him, Afghanistan not only needs urgent funding from international donors and governments – but also needs long term, community-based solutions to help all displaced Afghans rebuild their lives.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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