WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is in discussions to potentially send more than 1,000 Afghans who assisted America’s war effort and relatives of U.S. service members stuck in Qatar to a third country, the U.S. government and an advocacy group said. Congo is an option, the group said.
Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and head of the #AfghanEvac coalition, which supports Afghan resettlement efforts, said Wednesday that U.S. officials informed
him and other groups that discussions have taken place between the United States and Congo about taking the Afghan refugees who have been in limbo at a U.S. base in Doha for the past year.
The 1,100 refugees at Camp As-Sayliyah include Afghans who served as interpreters and with Special Operations Forces, as well as the immediate families of more than 150 active duty U.S. military members.
The State Department said it is working to identify options to “voluntarily” resettle the refugees in a third country, but it did not confirm which nations were being discussed.
An alternative provided to the refugees, VanDiver said, is to return to Afghanistan, where they face likely reprisal or even death at the hands of the Taliban for working alongside the U.S. during the two-decade war.
“You cannot call a choice voluntary when the two options are Congo and the Taliban, civil war or an oppressor who wants to kill you,” VanDiver said at a virtual press conference. “That is not a choice. That is a confession extracted under duress.”
The discussions — which were reported earlier by The New York Times — come more than a year after President Donald Trump paused his predecessor’s Afghan resettlement program as part of a series of executive orders cracking down on immigration.
That policy left thousands of refugees who fled war and persecution, and had gone through a sometimes yearslong vetting process to start new lives in America, stranded at places worldwide, including the base in Qatar.
The base in Doha “was always intended as a transit platform. It was never designed to hold families for months or years, which is the situation that people are currently in,” said Jon Finer, who was deputy national security adviser to then-President Joe Biden. “What I want to emphasize is that this was intended to honor a wartime commitment.”
Finer and other former U.S. officials and refugee advocates warned of the risk of resettling Afghans in Congo, a country that U.N. officials say is facing “one of the most acute humanitarian emergencies in the world."
The African country has been battered by decades-long fighting between government forces and Rwanda-backed rebels in its eastern region.
Congolese authorities did not immediately respond to AP’s request for comment on the discussions, which did not come as a surprise to some in the country. Congo is one of at least eight African nations that were paid millions in controversial deals with the Trump administration to receive migrants deported from the U.S. to countries other than their own.
Like most other African nations involved in the deportation program, Congo is also among the worst hit by the Trump administration’s policies on aid and trade. At least 70% of the country’s humanitarian aid came from the U.S. before Trump's second term, and aid workers say American aid cuts have led to avoidable deaths in the conflict-hit region.
Sean Jamshidi — an Afghan American who served in the U.S. military, including a stint in Congo — said he was deeply concerned about his brother possibly being sent from the Doha base to the war-torn country.
“I saw the security situation and what it looked like there. I saw the displacement camps. ... I stood in places where the United Nations has counted the dead,” Jamshidi said. “I’m telling you, as someone who has been in uniform, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is not a place you send vetted Afghan allies and their children to live.”
Negina Khalili, a former prosecutor in Afghanistan who fled during the 2021 U.S. withdrawal, has been waiting to hear about the resettlement status of her father, brother and stepmother since they arrived at the Doha base in January 2025. That was just days before Trump suspended the refugee program soon after he returned to the White House.
Khalili told The Associated Press on Wednesday that she spoke to her family about reports that they could be sent to Congo.
“They are not giving them any information or updates regarding which countries they will go to,” she said. “They were so stressed and worried about it and said that Congo is not a safe place either. They don’t know if it’s a temporary location for them there or a permanent location. They are worried.”
She said U.S. officials at the camp have been suggesting to refugees that they go back to Afghanistan and offering them money to do so.
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Amiri reported from New York and Asadu from Abuja, Nigeria. Associated Press writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.
