1. United States
2. Iowa
3. Letter

I am writing to you as one of your constituents, and I need you to hear me clearly: what the Trump administration is planning to do to our Afghan allies is a betrayal of everything this country is supposed to stand for, and I am demanding that you oppose it. More than 1,000 Afghan refugees — interpreters, intelligence partners, and battlefield allies who served alongside American soldiers for twenty years — have been stranded at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar for over a year. More than 400 of them are children. These are not strangers to America's cause. These are people who risked their lives, and the lives of their families, to support our troops in Afghanistan. They were promised a path to the United States. Now this administration is planning to send them to the Democratic Republic of Congo — a country they have never been to, where they have no language, no family, and no ties — in the middle of one of the deadliest wars on the planet. I want you to sit with that for a moment. Our government made a promise to these people. They kept their end of it under fire. And now we are preparing to break ours. The State Department's own travel advisory for the DRC is Do Not Travel — the highest warning level issued. The DRC is already overwhelmed, hosting over 600,000 refugees from surrounding conflicts it cannot support. Advocates with direct knowledge of this situation have said plainly that any Afghan sent back to Afghanistan faces one outcome: they will be killed. According to officials briefed directly by the State Department, the administration's strategy is to make the Congo option so unbearable that Afghans choose to return to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan on their own. That is not a policy. That is a trap. The justification for freezing the Special Immigrant Visa program was a murder committed in Washington by an Afghan national in November 2025. That individual was not an SIV holder. The people sitting in Qatar had absolutely nothing to do with it. My government used one person's crime to void a promise made to hundreds of people who bled for this country. I find that unconscionable, and I believe you should too. I understand that politics are complicated. I understand there are pressures on both sides of these issues. But some things should not be complicated. You do not abandon the people who stood beside your soldiers. You do not send families — including hundreds of children — to a war zone in a country they have never seen. You do not use collective punishment to void a debt of honor. This is not who we are. Americans stand behind those who stand with us. That is not a partisan value — it is a foundational one. And what is being done to these families right now is simply wrong. Every future ally watching how America treats the people who helped us in Afghanistan is drawing their own conclusions right now. The long-term damage to this country's credibility and our ability to recruit local partners in any future conflict will be real and lasting. I am asking you to act. Oppose the deportation of Afghan allies to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Demand that the Special Immigrant Visa program be reinstated and protected. Use your voice and your vote to make clear that the United States keeps its word to the people who fought beside our troops. These men and women earned the right to be here. They are waiting. Please do not let this country's silence become their sentence. A constituent who is watching, and who will remember.