Although the United States and its allies evacuated some 80,000 Afghans before the fall of Kabul, many thousands more were left behind. According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, about 19,000 Afghans applied for asylum between 2021 and October 2023. By many accounts, most have not received it.

Many fled to refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran, where they faced threats of expulsion before they fled again to Latin America and ultimately the US-Mexico border.

The scope of the crisis is unclear, because the United States does not have statistics on the number of Afghans crossing the southern border in search of asylum. But Afghan support organizations and migrant advocacy groups estimate that as many as 15,000 Afghans have crossed the border since August 2021. One San Diego-based migrant advocacy group, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (PANA), says it assists several hundred Afghans every month after they have crossed from Tijuana into California.

Those support groups estimate that thousands more Afghans are stranded on the Mexico side of the border. At just one migrant shelter in Tijuana, run by a nonprofit called the Latino Muslim Foundation, the majority of the 180 occupants are Afghans, aid workers say.

“We are talking about around 100 Afghans at any given point,” says Arash Azizzada of Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, an Afghan American nonprofit based in New York that provides legal and resettlement assistance to Afghan migrants. The migrants include “families, children, women police officers, ex-soldiers, prosecutors — it is a cross section of the society,” he adds.

Migrants who have some money may stay in Tijuana for months, waiting for interview appointments with US Customs and Border Protection. Advocates note that CBP One, the US government app migrants can use to apply for asylum, is difficult to navigate and does not include options in Dari or Pashtun, the main languages spoken by Afghans.

Many more migrants are thought to cross illegally into the United States, where they turn themselves over to the border patrol and request asylum. Some Afghans are detained by the border patrol despite having documents to show their association with the US forces in Afghanistan. Maria Chavez, an immigration attorney with PANA, says several of her Afghan clients are currently languishing in the Otay Mesa Detention Center in El Cajon, Calif., awaiting security clearance for their release.

Once released, they may seek out Afghan American communities in places like New York City and begin the hunt for housing while they await CPB’s decision, a process than can take many months. If all goes to plan, they can receive work permits six months after applying for asylum.

Their stories sound much like the stories of thousands of other migrants who have been flooding across the Mexico border from Latin America, China, and Africa. But the Afghan migrants are unique because their plight is the direct result of American policies. They are the soldiers, interpreters, lawyers, clerks, drivers, and cooks who worked for or fought beside Americans during our 20-year war against the Taliban. And now their lives, and the lives of their families, are in peril.

Bills have been floating around Congress that would allow qualified Afghans to obtain green cards and establish a pathway to citizenship. Yet despite bipartisan support, these have been shelved amid political gamesmanship over immigration policy. Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump has threatened to deport undocumented migrants and tighten up asylum rules — actions that would imperil the safety of the Afghan migrants.

For Aslam, 35, the wounds from bullets and shrapnel have healed, but his mental scars from years of war persist. He suffers from symptoms of acute PTSD. These days he’s living in a shelter in New York while waiting for his application to be processed. Azizzada says Aslam will often complain that Americans asked him to fight against the Taliban for democracy — and that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was a profound personal betrayal.

From the time he left college about a decade ago, the man I’m calling Mohammed, who is 30, had one mission: to improve the civil rights of Afghan women. A lawyer who was trained in part by Western nongovernmental organizations, he helped women in rural Baghlan Province in northern Afghanistan bring cases against abusive men, work that put him in direct and sometimes violent conflict with the Taliban, its supporters, and much of traditional Afghan society. Anonymous threats demanding that he stop promoting “anti-Islamic ideas” were part of his life.

“These were unforgivable sins in the eyes of the Taliban,” he told me.

One evening in March 2021 while Mohammed was driving to Kabul with two associates, a vehicle filled with gun-toting men cut off their car and opened fire, he said. The assailants killed one of his companions and severely wounded him and the other man. Bleeding from gunshots to his stomach, he survived by pretending to be dead.

As American troops departed in August 2021 and Taliban forces closed in on Kabul, Mohammed knew he had to escape. Four times he went to the Kabul airport, carrying papers he says showed he worked for the government court system. Each time, he was turned away by security guards or was unable to fight through the crowds of panicked fellow Afghans trying to board planes. He and his wife and their two small daughters went into hiding as he continued to petition the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other Western governments for asylum. No one responded.

He had believed “that America will help us rebuild Afghanistan into a modern nation where women can play an equal role.” But now he felt betrayed. “We worked with them (Americans) for over 20 years. Then on a fine day, they handed over the country and people like us to the Taliban.”

Finally, in 2023, he received a humanitarian visa to enter Brazil. Leaving his family behind, he traveled to Sao Paolo, where he paid $5,000 to a trafficker who helped him journey roughly 6,000 miles to reach the US border with Mexico. In Tijuana, he found the Afghan shelter, applied for an asylum hearing with the Customs and Border Patrol agency, and then crossed the border into Southern California. Today, he lives in El Cajon, working as a cashier at a supermarket, while he awaits a decision on his application.

The man I’m calling Nadir, 40, still speaks in a hushed tone as though someone were watching him. For 15 years, he worked for the Afghan military, most recently collecting and analyzing intelligence used by Afghan and US forces to combat Taliban forces. He is the kind of soldier the Taliban would imprison or execute if they could catch him.

Like Mohammed, he tried repeatedly to reach the Kabul airport as American forces fled in 2021, but he was turned away each time. In dismay, he later learned, he says, that people who had not fought for the military or worked with the US government succeeded in escaping on those last flights out of Kabul. “Every baker, tailor, and taxi driver was trying to flee the country,” Nadir says. “We were the ones fighting the Taliban. We were at risk. Yet we were abandoned.”

For more than a year, he too fruitlessly petitioned Western governments for a visa; none responded. Leaving behind his six children, wife, and parents, he traveled to a refugee camp in Pakistan and obtained a visa to Brazil. There he joined eight other Afghans and started the arduous journey on foot through nine countries to the United States.

Days blurred into nights as they navigated dense forests and treacherous terrain, surviving at times on meager rations like two dates a day. They stumbled on corpses and saw fellow migrants fall to their deaths off steep cliffs. It took his group seven days just to cross the jungles of Panama’s Darién Gap, facing constant threats from smugglers.

To Nadir, the trek was more dangerous than fighting the Taliban. “It almost felt like all the milk I drank from my mother went dry,” he says, using a traditional Afghan saying to refer to an experience that he felt would kill him.

At last, with a ladder provided by a trafficker, he climbed over the wall at the US border. “I slid down the wall into American soil,” he says. “Finally, I was safe.”

Like Mohammed, he now awaits adjudication of his asylum application in El Cajon, where he shares a small apartment with other Afghan migrants. He works odd jobs to pay for food while waiting for an official work permit that could take months more to arrive.

Afghanistan may be lost, he told me, but the US government should not give up on Afghans like him. “I am tired of all the wars,” he says. “I just want to live in peace. We deserve that.”

Three months before the United States completed the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan, David Helvey, an acting assistant secretary of defense, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “We have a moral obligation to help those that have helped us over the past 20 years of our presence and work in Afghanistan.”

But for most of the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who worked with or fought alongside the United States, that help is yet to arrive. They are trapped in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Or languishing in refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran. Or wandering as refugees in the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. Or living in a liminal state in the United States, where their uncertain immigration status makes them unable to work legally, plan their futures, or rescue their families from Afghanistan.

Beyond the 80,000 or so Afghans who were airlifted from Kabul in the fall of 2021, aid groups estimate that at least 150,000 more Afghans could qualify for asylum in the United States because they face retribution by the Taliban. That number does not include their families, who are also living in fear of reprisal. A senior UN official reported in March 2023 that Afghanistan “remains the most repressive country in the world for women’s rights” and noted a pattern by the Taliban of “arbitrary arrests, killing and torture of former government officials and security forces.”

The answer for these Afghans is legislation stuck in Congress known as the Afghan Adjustment Act. Similar to legislation passed in the 1970s and 1980s to help Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees following the Vietnam war, it would create a pathway to citizenship for those Afghans under humanitarian parole, which allows them temporarily to work and live in the United States. The bill also expands eligibility for special immigrant visas to people who worked for the Afghan military and their families. To be approved, the applicants would have to prove their identities and pass security background checks to ensure they were not criminals and do not have ties to terrorist groups.

The bill would go well beyond the Special Immigrant Visa program that has helped thousands of Afghan refugees come to the United States. The cap of nearly 39,000 visas under that program has been reached, and so far Congress has failed to approve the Biden administration’s request to expand it by 20,000 more visas.

Though the bill has gained 130 cosponsors in the House, bipartisan support in the Senate, and the backing of veterans’ groups, Congress has repeatedly failed to pass it. “Our dysfunctional immigration system is still failing the thousands of Afghans who fled the Taliban — stuck in administrative limbo here in America waiting to start their new lives for good,” Representative Seth Moulton, a Salem Democrat, told the Globe.

Moulton asserted that there is, however, strong support for the bill in Congress if partisan gamesmanship over immigration, intensified by the 2024 presidential race, ends. “Veterans in Congress especially know that it’s our duty to help our Afghan allies, so we’ll continue advocating for its passage,” he said.

While lawmakers dither, nongovernmental groups are trying to fill the void. Among them, the Association of Wartime Allies, a veteran advocacy group, recently helped two Afghan ex-soldiers cross the southern border. “We do not advise anyone to break the law. We knew about these two men, and we wanted to be there for them,” says Kim Staffieri, the group’s cofounder and executive director.

The plight of the Afghans who were hastily evacuated by the US forces in 2021 is only marginally better. They came to the US on humanitarian parole, but this was intended to expire on Nov. 20, 2023. The Department of Homeland Security has extended its Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Afghanistan until May 2025 to cover Afghans who were residing in the United States as of March 2022.

More than 18,200 Afghans currently on parole in the United States have applied for TPS.

Parole gives no legal guarantee to permanent residency and could be revoked by the next president. Trump did just that with other groups under humanitarian parole after he was elected in 2016.

However, many fear that a new executive order by President Biden could harm Afghans seeking asylum, as it allows the government to turn away migrants at the border when there is a high volume of daily border crossings. Migrant rights activists say the rule may force migrants, including Afghans, to remain in shelters in Mexico as they await narrowing opportunities to enter the United States through the southern border.

One thing seems clear: As the United States continues to delay help, Afghans will resort to dangerous ways of entering the country. Their increasing numbers at the southern border are proof of their desperation and a broken American promise.

Our country may be divided about the unregulated migration across the southern border and its economic and social repercussions. But the Afghan ex-soldiers, lawyers, and human rights defenders and their families adding to those numbers are proof of our moral failure. They once served the American interest in Afghanistan, and now it is our turn to return the favor. As Mohammed asks, “What is our fault in all this?”

He lives in perpetual fear for his family in Afghanistan, though he is grateful to be safe in California. “We do not deserve this,” he says.

Anjana Sankar was a recent IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow with Boston Globe Opinion.