100000 Afghans leave Pakistan in April, the ministry of interior said on Tuesday, April 22, 2025, after Islamabad announced the cancellation of residence permits on a vast level. This drive is a part of a huge campaign of 2023 started by the government to repatriate all illegal foreigners. Under this campaign, all unregistered Afghans and those who did not have any proof of identity were deported.
Experts commented that the expulsions are designed to pressurize neighboring Afghan Taliban authorities, which Islamabad blames for the rise in border attacks.
“100,529” Afghans have left in April,” the interior ministry told AFP. Caravans of Afghan families have been going to the border since the start of April, when the deadline expired, entering into the country stuck in a humanitarian crisis. A 27-year-old Allah Rahman told AFP at the Torkham Border that he was born in Pakistan and had never been in Afghanistan before. He was afraid the police might humiliate him and his family. Now they are heading to Afghanistan out of sheer helplessness.
Many people are leaving voluntarily, but the UNHCR (United Nations refugee agency) said that only in the month of April, more than 12,948 Afghans were arrested and deported in Pakistan than in all of last year. Pakistan security forces are under intense pressure along the border with Afghanistan. In southwest Balochistan, the battle against insurgency and terrorism is increasing, and also in northwest Pakistan, the Taliban and its affiliates are causing trouble.
The government has constantly said that Afghan nations take part in attacks and blames Kabul for letting terrorists take refuge in their country , a charge Taliban leaders deny. Millions of Afghans have entered Pakistan over the past several decades, fleeing successfully from wars, as well as thousands since 2021 with the return of the Taliban government.
Many Pakistanis have grown weary of hosting a large number of Afghans as security and economic suffering deepen, and the deportation campaign has huge support. “They came here for refuge but ended up taking jobs and opening businesses. They took jobs from Pakistanis who are already suffering,” 41-year-old hairdresser Tanveer Ahmed told AFP.
More than hundreds of Afghans being deported were children, the UNHCR said on the Friday. The women and girls are among those entering a country where their education is banned beyond secondary school and they are prohibited from working in many sectors. In the first phase of deportation in 2023, millions of Afghans were forced across the border in the space of a few weeks.
However, Afghanistan’s prime minister, Hasan Akhund, on Saturday criticized the “unilateral measure” taken by its neighbor after Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Ishaq Dar, flew for a day-long visit to Kabul to discuss the returns. Akhund persuaded the Pakistani government to “ facilitate the dignified return of Afghan refugees.”
