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June 24, 2025
Split by the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s education in Afghanistan, the sisters hoped to reunite in the US. But new travel limits could jeopardize their plans.
Afghan female students arrive for their lessons at a madrassa, or an Islamic school, on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif on April 8, 2025.
(Atif Aryan / Getty)
When Afsana, a 22-year-old woman from Kabul, received a scholarship to study in the United States, she kept it a secret from her father. For the previous two years, she and her younger sister, Nora, had been searching for a way to leave Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban barred women from secondary school and college (Nora and Afsana are pseudonyms used to protect their identities). In the summer of 2023, the opportunity arose for Afsana to enroll as a junior at a private day and boarding school in New Jersey. Afsana was sure her father would disapprove of her leaving home, but also sure that she could change his mind.
One evening in mid-July 2023, one month before she planned to leave, Afsana joined her father in the living room for teatime and prepared to break the news as her siblings played. Nora, sitting far from her sister, feigned obliviousness, listening carefully as she spoke. “I got a good opportunity,” Afsana told her father. She mentioned how much the scholarship was worth: $73,000 a year. “I’m not going to allow you to go,” he said, and told his daughter not to bring it up again. Afsana told Seth Holm, former chair of the Modern Languages Department at the school where Afsana got a scholarship, about her father’s concerns. Dr. Holm, who had been teaching Afsana English online, sent a video of the school’s closed campus, assuring Afsana’s father that his daughter would be safe.
On August 18, 2023, Afsana’s family took her to the airport in Kabul. Nora held back tears as she said goodbye, harboring hopes to reunite with her sister in the United States. Afsana hugged her mother and siblings, kissed her father’s hand, and took her first-ever flight to Pakistan for her visa interview, traveling with her brother (under Taliban rule, women cannot leave the country alone.) There, she met another Afghan girl, also Holm’s student, who would attend school in New Jersey with her. A month later, the pair flew through Qatar before taking a 14-hour flight to Philadelphia, where they met Holm and a representative of AGFAF, the organization that helped arrange travel for the two women. Afsana settled into her dorm, where she would live alone, a recent high school graduate starting over again.
Since the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, girls in Afghanistan have been finding creative, often clandestine ways to continue their education. Some attend secret schools, equipped with their Qur’ans to pretend they are in madrassa—Islamic school—if the Taliban breaks in. Some girls take classes online with international NGOs. Some, like Afsana, find ways to leave. Many have turned to America as a beacon of educational opportunity.
The two-decade US occupation of Afghanistan helped forge this association. In 2001, American-led coalition forces entered Kabul, taking power from the Taliban and striking bans on girls’ schooling. Four years later, nearly 1.7 million girls were enrolled in primary and secondary school, according to a UNESCO report. By 2018, this figure was 3.6 million. Literacy rates soared, nearly doubling from 2011 to 2018. The narrative Western media sources told in these years was a hopeful one; photos documenting the return to school featured rows of heads in white hijabs, trained toward blackboards, and young girls beaming at their desks. The girls in these stories wanted to be astronauts, engineers, and teachers themselves. As the tale went, Americans had ushered Afghan women and girls out of their oppressed state, into an age of equality. But that wasn’t the whole story.
The return to school for girls was sometimes lethal. In 2008, men on motorcycles threw acid at 11 students and four teachers at the Mirwais School for Girls. From 2006 to 2008, there were 1,153 reported attacks on teachers, students, and schools, with girls targeted disproportionately.
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Education centers in Dasht-e Barchi, the neighborhood in Western Kabul where Afsana and her siblings grew up, were especially vulnerable to attack. The area is home to many of the city’s ethnic Hazaras, who fit into the Shi’a Muslim minority in Afghanistan, where about 89 percent of the population is Sunni, according to World Religion Database estimates. Historically persecuted, Hazaras seized new opportunities, especially with regards to education, after the Taliban fell in 2001. But a rise in violence ran parallel to gains in education. Since 2016, Islamic State, a transnational Sunni insurgent group, has targeted Dasht-e Barchi in a series of suicide attacks. Dasht-e Barchi, once a symbol of opportunity for Hazara students like Afsana and her siblings, has turned into Kabul’s most dangerous neighborhood. Afsana’s sister Nora recalls fearing attacks as she boarded the bus to class.
To Afsana, there’s a depraved logic to jihadist attacks on Hazaras. “They don’t see them as human,” she said. “They say, ‘We have to erase these people.’” During her upbringing, this intolerance was palpable. Attackers targeted Hazara students, Afsana said, to suppress the growing influence of Hazaras in Afghan society. Children in Dasht-e Barchi confronted the threat of danger and death with an attitude of resilience. Growing up, Afsana attended classes at the Kaaj Educational Center with many other Hazara students. As she studied, armed guards stood outside and on the roof of the building.
On the morning of August 15, 2021, Afsana left home to collect her high school diploma at the Ministry of Education. She saw people rushing past her and felt strange as she walked through the streets of Kabul. One woman stopped her and said the Taliban had entered the city. Terrified, she recalled stories her mother had told her about the Taliban whipping women and barring them from school. Afsana went home that morning, leaving her diploma sitting at the office in central Kabul. Later, she watched on TV as people stormed the airport, desperate to leave the country. The Taliban had seized Kabul as the former president, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, fled. The new regime banned girls from secondary school. Four months later, women were banned from universities. Nida Mohammad Nadim, Taliban minister of higher education, said the Taliban wouldn’t reverse its stance on women’s education “even if they drop a bomb on us.”
Afsana’s search for opportunities abroad, which she had started even before Kabul fell, grew urgent. She connected with nonprofit organizations and joined Facebook groups, sharing everything she found with Nora, who was equally desperate to continue her education. At 6:30 one morning in June 2022 in Afghanistan, Afsana joined 19 other Afghan girls and women on a video call for their first English class with Holm (These classes have grown into the Afghan Education Student Outreach Program, or AESOP, which offers online classes, mentoring, and financial support to around 500 students a semester.) Motivated by the commitment of his students, Holm convinced the New Jersey school where he taught to sponsor a scholarship for two of his students. Afsana was a clear candidate.
Having witnessed the risks his students faced, Holm knew how much a scholarship abroad meant. “Getting them into a scholarship isn’t just about continuing their education,” he told me. “It’s about bringing them to safety.” One morning during his class, Afsana was giving a presentation about Sema, a whirling Sufi dance, when a suicide bombing took place at Kaaj Education Center in Dasht-e-Barchi, killing 54 girls. As news of the attack flooded social media, students reacted in the chat. It wasn’t until Afsana finished presenting that she learned what happened. Nora was a student at Kaaj Education Center. She was supposed to go to class that morning but had overslept.
Afghan emigration, historically male-dominated, has more than doubled among women since the Taliban took over, with the amount of female refugees soaring to 3.1 million in 2023, according to data from the UN Refugee Agency. A small portion of Afghan migrants go to the United States, with most going to Iran and Pakistan, but those who do face an increasingly repressive environment.
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In an executive order from January 20, President Trump called for enhanced vetting and screening of visa applicants and foreign residents. Hundreds of visa revocations, and thousands of terminations in SEVIS, a digital dataset of international students, followed. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had revoked at least 300 visas, claiming to have targeted criminals and campus protesters. “If they’re taking activities that are counter to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa,” Rubio told The New York Times. By April 24, the State Department had terminated the SEVIS status of 1,879 international students, in some cases for no clear reason, according to a database published by Inside Higher Ed. Changes in SEVIS spurred at least 65 lawsuits and motivated some students to self-deport. On April 25, the Trump administration abruptly reversed course and promised to restore terminated protections. Such back and forth exacerbated confusion for many international students, contributing to the growing sense that their legal status answers to the whims of those in power. On May 22, Trump halted Harvard’s enrollment of international students. Five days later, Marco Rubio signed a cable ordering US embassies to stop scheduling visa interviews for students while the administration expands social media vetting procedures.
As the process of obtaining a visa seemed increasingly labyrinthine—if not impossible—Afghans resided in a limbo of their own. In the executive order from inauguration day (the same one mandating a visa crackdown) Trump ordered the secretary of state, attorney general, secretary of homeland security, and director of national intelligence to compile a list of countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries.” The drafted list, which the Times published in March, grouped 43 countries into three categories. Afghanistan was in the “Red” tier, meaning the ban would keep Afghans from entering the country altogether.
It was just past midnight in Kabul on December 14 when Nora logged onto her application portal for a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where both she and Afsana applied for early decision. Alone in her room, with Holm on the phone, she opened the decision letter. Speechless, she shared her screen with Holm, who teared up as he read the letter of acceptance. Nora called Afsana and learned that she, too, had been accepted.
Nora and Afsana’s family had reason to celebrate: Two of their children would have the opportunity to continue their education at a prestigious school. At the same time, as the US cracked down on international students and visa applicants, the dream became increasingly elusive. Nora still clung to the hope of joining her sister in the US, but it was unclear how much of the Trump administration’s scrutiny of international students, its visa revocations en masse, and its plans for a new inflexible travel ban were bluster. The restrictions on foreign nationals and immigrants were generating a kind of vertigo that made it impossible for students like Nora to plan ahead. “If I don’t get the visa,” she had asked in April, “what will happen?”
On June 5, Nora opened WhatsApp and discovered that Trump had restricted travel from 19 countries, including Afghanistan. At first, she thought little of the news. She told no one and spent the day studying for her final exams at AUAF, the American University of Afghanistan, where she takes five classes online. In the afternoon, she texted an official from AGFAF, the organization helping her apply for a visa, and asked if the travel restrictions would affect her application. The official responded with as much information as the confusing circumstances afforded: She told Nora that the ban might affect student visas, but would hopefully be challenged in court.
Trump’s first travel ban, which he announced in 2017, faced legal scrutiny. But the Supreme Court upheld a version of the ban, keeping citizens from seven countries, five of them predominantly Muslim, out of the United States (Afghanistan, where US troops were allied with the Kabul government, was exempted from the order.) The most recent ban announced it would bar entry to citizens of twelve countries, including Afghanistan, and limit entry to citizens of seven others. One of the ban’s few exceptions applies to Afghans who helped the US in the war, which ended when Afsana was 18 and Nora, 15.
Late at night, Nora spoke on the phone with Holm. He reassured her that the college that admitted her and Afsana, as well as government officials, were fighting against the ban. The conversation, difficult for both of them, lasted less than 15 minutes. Nora went to bed and lay awake, unable to quiet her anxious mind, until Friday’s early hours. The feeling took her back to the day four years before, when the Taliban banned women’s education. “I couldn’t see any difference,” Nora told me recently, tearing up, “between Taliban and Trump. They do the same for Afghan girls.”
Nora refrained from talking to her family, even to Afsana, about the travel ban. The next day, Afsana would graduate, and she didn’t want to sour the moment. Meanwhile, a friend, meant to travel to Pakistan that week for her visa interview, told Nora she was unable to sign into her visa application site. Nora tried to open her portal, but it was blocked.
The day of Afsana’s graduation was humid, and her red robe, capped with a stole the colors of Afghanistan’s flag, felt heavy. Her ankles wobbled in high heels as she tamed nerves before walking across the stage. Her aunt and a friend, who both live in Chicago, were in the audience, as was Holm. In Kabul, Nora called her siblings and parents into her bedroom to watch Afsana receive her leatherette-padded diploma.
In the days leading up to her graduation, Afsana wrote thank-you cards, paid visits to her teachers, and put off contacting Nora, waiting until she had enough time for a proper phone call. On the evening of June 7, she flew to Chicago, where she would live with her aunt for the summer. In the morning, she unpacked and called Nora around midday. It was the second day of Eid. Nora told Afsana about the celebration. Afsana asked Nora about her classes and her work at AESOP, where she has been tutoring twice a week. She sent Nora pictures from graduation. And the sisters spoke about the travel ban. “Did you hear the news that they banned the visa?” Afsana recalls asking. She encouraged Nora to keep studying, regardless of the shifting circumstances beyond her control. Before, Nora’s classes at AUAF signaled hope. Now the school, which received over half of its funding from USAID, faces the prospect of a shutdown as the Trump administration dismantles foreign aid programs around the world. In February, classes were suspended for two months and grants for online education were pulled. On their recent phone call, Nora told Afsana that her teachers, facing layoffs, were looking for jobs elsewhere. Afsana countered private despair with a show of strength. “You can always be the best,” Afsana recalls telling Nora. “It doesn’t matter where you are.”
The travel ban, Afsana told me, did not come as a surprise. Still, the sisters have no choice but to wait for better news. “I really, really hope and I really prayed we would start college together,” Nora told me. “And I’m still hoping for that.”
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