A group of Democratic senators on Thursday accused President Donald Trump of stranding more than 155,000 Afghans who joined the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, detailing findings in a new, 161-page report obtained by MS NOW.

They said the administration had halted issuing Afghan Special Immigrant Visas under a bipartisan program created by Congress. The report found that the State Department had issued only three visas to Afghan allies between January and March of this year.

“Afghan SIV issuances have effectively stopped, the office responsible for coordinating Afghan relocation has been eliminated and more than 155,000 applicants remain in the pipeline,” the senators said in an an introductory letter to the report. “These actions have left Afghan allies stranded and risk undermining the credibility of U.S. commitments to partners in future conflicts.”

The report said 160,000 Afghan allies have safely entered the U.S. under the Afghan SIV program. Seventeen years after its creation, the majority of the Afghans still awaiting approval remain in Afghanistan, where they face potential retaliation from the Taliban.

“The Trump Administration has chosen to politicize a program that has enjoyed strong bipartisan support since its inception,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., told MS NOW, citing her previous work on the issue with the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Trump took multiple steps to limit Afghans entering the U.S. after taking office, the report says. He also accelerated the effort after an Afghan national who had worked with the CIA entered the U.S. under the program and was charged with shooting two National Guard troops — killing one and severely wounding another — in Washington, D.C., last year.

Trump has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of not properly vetting the Afghans who were allowed to enter the U.S. after the Taliban regained power in 2021.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. But a State Department spokesman defended the administration’s “full travel ban from Afghanistan,” attributing the policy to the “horrific attack on a national guardsman.”

“The United States has kept its promise to those Afghans who risked their lives to support the U.S. government during our attempts to help Afghans build a better country for themselves,” the spokesman added. “It is now more than four and a half years since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan. It is long past time to move past this decades-long conflict and look ahead to the future.”

Shaheen, who commissioned the report and is retiring from the Senate, condemned the shooting but said it was an outlier.

“For nearly two decades, the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program has reflected a bipartisan commitment to stand by the Afghans who stood with us in our hour of need,” she said. “For years, Republicans and Democrats understood that keeping our word to these allies was a bipartisan matter of American credibility and national security.”

A Department of Homeland Security inspector general report released last week found a 40% error rate in the adjudication of visa applications from Afghan allies who were flown to U.S. military bases after the fall of Kabul.

Most of the errors involved the failure of asylum officers to include all possible aliases for Afghans or spellings of their names. The report only found two cases that “related to potential inadmissability on terrorism-related grounds.”

A spokesperson for Shaheen called the inspector general’s report “a distraction” and said it was based on an examination of a separate program involving Afghans, not the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the vetting process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the report was “picking nits.” The official said the vetting of Afghans by U.S. officials had been thorough, explaining that Afghanistan’s tumultuous history resulted in Afghans having a range of identity documents under various regimes. But it was possible for U.S. officials to substantiate who the Afghans actually were by relying on individual Americans to identify the Afghans they worked with.

“The work was done with rigor by people who knew the country,” the U.S. official said.

Shaheen’s report calls for the U.S. to create a permanent program that would allow foreign nationals who join U.S. overseas war efforts to apply for American visas. It also called for the program to have enough resources to thoroughly vet applicants and be properly administered over the long term.

“Turning our backs on people who risked their lives alongside American service members does not make America safer, stronger and more prosperous,” Shaheen said. ”In fact, it sends exactly the wrong message to anyone we may ask to stand with us in the future.”

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