Why Do People Move?

Host: Why do people move? Why do people pick up their lives and their belongings, and move from a place where they have friends and family and know exactly where to catch the bus and how to walk home if they missed it …  to a place where… they might not know anyone? 

Two big reasons come to mind. You move like, to go to school, for a better job, to be with someone who lives in a different part of the world. You move because you want to, you know, for some sort of opportunity. Or… 

Archival/PBS/10/9/2024: The western city of Asheville, in particular, has been devastated ...   

Archival/7NewsAustralia/1/19/25: The flames roaring into the most destructive fires in California’s history.  . . 

Host: Or, because you have to…    

Archival/NBC News/9/21/23: Turmoil in Venezuela, driving millions from the country as refugees, battling a struggling economy, food insecurity .  .  . 

Host: Sometimes you move because you just can’t survive anymore where you live.  

Archival/CBS/3/20/22: The Western borders of Ukraine have become a sieve ....   

Host: The economy has collapsed, maybe there’s famine or war.  

Archival/Al Jazeera/1/5/25: Getting out of Gaza for medical help is a process rights groups say should be simpler.. . . 

Host: And your only chance is to move to a place where there might be safety, or work. 

Sometimes, you move because of persecution. Like, you’re the enemy of those in power, those with guns, and you’ll be killed or imprisoned if you stay. I feel like we forget that.    

There’s lots of reasons people move. And my goodness are people moving. At this moment, there are more displaced people in the world than at any time in history.  

At the same time, the options for this flood of humanity are dwindling. I’m thinking mainly of Europe and the United States… governments are tightening their borders. They’re saying louder and louder to the world’s persecuted and desperate, enough. We don’t want you. 

Archival/Face the Nation/1/21/25: .  .  . those orders aimed at boosting military presence to secure the Mexico/US border and shutting down refugee admissions.  .  .   

Host: We don’t want you. 

Archival/France 24/4/10/24: One by one, members of the European Parliament approved a sweeping new pact on migration that has been years in the making.  .  .   

Host: We don't want you.   

Archival/ABC News/5/30/24: For some years now, Australian authorities have tried to deport him back to Iran .  .  .   

Host: Sorry, we don't want you.   

Archival/The Telegraph/10/12/23: Poland’s referendum will likely serve as a firm rejection of the liberal border policies that have led to conflict and division across the continent. 

Host: Now, we’re not going to jump into the politics of migration policy. We’re going to get to what gets lost in all the talk about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. We’re going to talk about the stakes for the people. And in this episode, we talk about one person… 

Hannah: [Farsi] 

Host: We’re going to hear the story of one Afghan refugee now in the U.S. Her story is instructive and wild. 

This is Rights & Wrongs, a podcast from Human Rights Watch. I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. I am a writer, a lawyer, and a radio producer. Human Rights Watch asked me to look at human rights hotspots around the world through the eyes and ears of people on the front lines of history.  

This week, one Afghan refugee. 

Hannah: Ok, so I’m ready… 

Host: … “Hanaa Rahimi.”  That’s not her real name. She’s got people back in Afghanistan and she fears for their safety for saying what she’s about to tell us. 

Hanaa:  is it okay if I say this, uh, in, in Farsi? Because, uh, 

Ngofeen: yeah, yeah yeah.  

Host: Hanaa’s English is pretty good, but she was a little unsure of it at first… so early on we’re going to hear her switch between English and Farsi… .  

Hanaa: [Farsi, fade under…] 

Host: I wanted to understand what Hanaa’s life was like before she came to the U.S., before the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021. The life she had to flee from.  

Just a few years ago, when American troops were still fighting in Afghanistan, Hanaa worked for the Afghan National Police. Before that, she was a women's rights activist, and she says she was very vocal…  

Hanaa/translated:  Uh, I used to do lots of media interviews on these topics, and people used to warn me that this is not safe, women and men are not equal to each other, so you better stop doing media interviews, but I never really cared about it, because I believe that debt will come when it's time, and for that, um, I used to stand to speak for women's rights. 

Ngofeen: What made you want to do the activism in the first place? 

Hanaa:  So maybe from the beginning, I learned from my family, first of all, my mom, because she was also a social activist and she was a very strong and brave woman. And she always speak and she always wants, uh, what she wants and she always ask about what's wrong. [Switches to Farsi, fade under…] 

Hanaa/translated:  Um, I lived in Iran for, uh, around eight to 10 years when I was a child and the people around me, my friends, my relatives, we all, uh, kind of felt responsible to return back to Afghanistan and to make a change in the new government. 

So that's what pushed me to become an activist.   

Ngofeen: And why did you join the Afghan National Police? 

Hanaa: It was my childhood dream. I don't know why. I, I, I thought like if I became a police, I can defend my, myself. I can defend my country. I can defend everyone, everyone. I can bring a big change. It was like a dream came true. 

Host: Before the Taliban takeover, the Afghan National Police did both traditional police work and had a role in counterinsurgency operations. The Americans and its NATO allies had been trying to get more women on the force, as Hanaa explained through our interpreter…   

Hanaa/translated:  one of the main reasons for the U. S. to come to Afghanistan was to make sure that women are granted equal rights with men. So this was a huge thing for them to make sure that women of Afghanistan are part of everything.   

Host: So there was that very idealistic goal. But as Hanaa told me there were also very practical reasons to have women police officers… cultural reasons… 

Hanaa: Okay. So in US, it's very normal or natural. You can touch other women's or kiss or hug, but in Afghanistan, you cannot do this. A man cannot touch a woman.  

That's why we need to have a police officer so they can touch women and see if something happened.  

Hanaa: Farsi 

Hanaa/translated:  The international forces, including the U. S. military used to get into the houses and search, um, women as well. And there were lots of criticism on why international men or even the Afghan police forces who are male security officers are touching women's body when they're doing the searches. So for that reason, it was important for the Afghanistan police forces to have women so they could do or carry out the searches  in those houses. 

Hanaa: [farsi] 

 Hanaa/translated: And you may not believe that there were suicide bombers who are trying to explode themselves and get into the governmental buildings in women's clothes. So many of them had been caught by these female police officers who were at the entrance gate and could protect the whole office. 

Hanaa: [farsi] 

Host: Also, says Hanaa, women police officers were important when women were victims of crimes… or even perpetrators…  

 Hanaa/translated: it was quite, um, usual in Afghanistan for women to be beaten by their in laws, uh, by their husbands, and at some points even their, um, children, because when the elders in the family do not respect women, it's easier for the younger ones, uh, to, to lose that respect when these women used to come to the police station and file a complaint. 

Usually the men in the station would say that there is something wrong with this woman. Maybe she didn't listen to her husband. Maybe she has done something wrong and that's why she's been beaten. We were the ones who would check the body and find out what has happened. We could see that these women are injured. 

We could see that the, uh, the woman's bodies are turned to black because they have been beaten really bad. Um, but in most of these cases, one of the things that used to make me very angry was that they were being advised to be a good woman not to be beaten for not to be beaten. 

Hanaa: [farsi] 

Hanaa/translated:  seeing the presence of women in, in, in those offices helped them to, to speak, uh, um, more comfortably with these women and explain the process. Says of what exactly had happened. 

Ngofeen: From your perspective, did having women police officers end up helping Afghan women? 

Hanaa: Yes. They did. All the time. Yeah. 

Host: Hanaa said she trained to be a police woman in Turkey, with international trainers. In Afghanistan she met with Americans on a few occasions, but otherwise had little contact with them. She became the head of recruitment for women police in the one station in Afghanistan. And there she took note of a problem within the Afghan National Police, that was making recruitment difficult… 

Hanaa/translated:  I have, uh, witnessed cases of women being raped. By their male colleagues. In some of these cases, these women were forced to have sex with their colleagues because otherwise they could have been fired from their position. There were examples of women being fired simply because they didn't have sex with their male colleagues.  It was easy also for men to touch women or, or to sexually harass them against, uh, these police officers. Uh, well, during the working hours, um, and you needed to be very brave and a person who could argue to not to be subject to these, um, harassment. For example, I was very vocal and I used to be loud, so that's why they couldn't do anything to me. 

Host: So, a tough job to begin with, that male police officers made intolerable. That was one reason the goal of having 15,000 women on the force was never reached.  

Ngofeen:  what do you remember about when the  when the Taliban took over in 2021?  

Hanaa: Uh, my province was one of the first , uh, provinces or places that Taliban took. 

Me and my family, we was stuck at home. My friends, my colleagues, they call me and they say, please just move. Just save yourself because they start to, uh, start to searching that, uh, the police officers.  It doesn't matter if they are women or men. So, uh, My dad, he was worried about me because I was also a police officer and  we move, uh, we had a car. So we are all, uh, together. We moved to my cousin house. We was hiding for one one or two days, and then they say that, uh, you have to, uh, they call me, they always report me, please move, please move, they starting here, they going there. Uh, so, we move to the Kabul. and we hide somewhere in Kabul. We rent a house, very expensive, somewhere no one understands who we are.  Then after like one week, Kabul also finished, like the Taliban took over Kabul, we were shocked  

and I wanted to return, return home. I said, maybe they're, they're not going to say anything now, everything is calm, but, but, uh, they call me and they say, Oh, they killed Zarifa. One of my colleagues, I just saw her like two, two days ago.  Oh, they shot her in front of her children and husband. 

So, my dad said, no, we cannot return.  I don't want to lose you. They'll kill you because you was very active and you're,  so yeah. 

Okay, sorry. 

Ngofeen: Yeah, no, don't be sorry at all. There's nothing to be sorry for at all.   

Hanaa: And, uh, and, uh, when they took the police station, they opened my office.  They, they, uh, broke the lock I had and they find my, all of my information and they find my number. 

I had just one number. I used that. And they send me text by WhatsApp by, they called me. They call me and they say, you have to come back. And we, we are not gonna kill you. You, you will work with us. But I know they,  they're lying. They, they just lying. I know I cannot trust them.  They say, we know your mom, we know your family, I know you, it's better for you to come back. You have to surrender yourself. It will be better for you.  But my dad and all of my family, they say, no, we cannot go back because they already killed like two, three or more than women. 

Uh, we, we, we are. Every day by the news, by my colleagues, they call me. 

Host: Meanwhile, Hanaa and her family applied for visas. But then… 

Archival/BBC: Carnage in Afghanistan after twin explosions at Kabul airport killed at least 60 people according to a health officials, and injured dozens more... 

Host: So forget that option. The family then decided to buy very expensive visas to be admitted into Iran, the country next-door. Problem was, the two youngest members of the family, Hanaa’s little sister and brother, didn’t have passports. So they sent them on ahead, with a relative, to try to enter Iran illegally… 

 Hanaa: They so suffered. They get so skinny. One time they lost each other. We was in Afghanistan. We don't want it to move before them because we want to understand after they arrive, then we will move. So after 15 day, when they arrive in Iran, my Uncle, uh, he called me.  Hey, they are here. Don't worry. So then we buy our ticket very expensive and we just escape. 

Host: Hanaa lived for several months in Iran, and while there she got married, to a fellow Afghan. But Iran, she said, was not welcoming.  

Hanaa:  I cannot stay in Iran, they, anytime they can deport me and they, they are not good with Afghans. They don't respect us. They don't know even we are a human. They look at like we are animal, unfortunately, most of the time, and I cannot go Afghanistan also. No choice. These two countries, I cannot stay. So I say. I'm gonna go.  I don't care what will happen for me. I'm gonna go. 

Host: But go where? This is when her story takes a random turn. Back in Afghanistan she’d heard from a friend that Brazil was offering humanitarian visas for Afghans, and she’d applied. After six months in Iran, she got that visa there at the Brazilian embassy. But the family had sold everything to get out of Afghanistan, and there wasn’t enough money for all of them to go. And besides, they wouldn’t be able to get visas for Hanaa’s younger siblings because they didn’t have passports, and the family couldn’t abandon them in Iran. 

Hanaa:  So, they say please, you have to go, you're the one save us, you're the one, you can go and build your life and help us. Because, uh, yeah, I'm the first child of my family. They are all smaller than me. I was the one always support my family. So I borrow some money from my friends and buy the ticket for Brazil. I just fly in Brazil.  The country, I don't know the culture. No language, no friend, no family. 

Host: Yet there she was, in a shelter or or homeless on the streets.  And not long after she arrived, she realized she would not be able to meet the requirements for her family to join her in Brazil. So, she was stuck. 

Hanaa:  It was so bad experience in Brazil for me. I know they are very kind people. I love Brazil. They are very kind.They are very respectful. But the economy, the situation for an Afghan girl or for an immigrant girl. With hijab, it was not too fun. 

Host: So not fun that she thought of returning to Iran or even going back to Afghanistan. But some of her friends who had also escaped Afghanistan and were dispersed in various countries said no, Iran will deport you, and wAfghanistan.... 

Hanaa: In Afghanistan they will find you and kill you. What are you doing? I said, so what? What? What? What's the next step? They said, we will give you money. Please go in U. S.  

Host: After about 9 months in Brazil, Hanaa borrowed money from friends, and headed towards the U.S. With some families she’d met in Brazil, she flew to Nicaragua, then they took cars and boats and walked when they had to, until they made it into Mexico. From there they took a plane north, then walked toward the U.S. border.  

 Hanaa: One time they catch us, the police, and they put us in the jail for, for three days.  And then they give us a permission for 20 days. They say, if you want to stay here, so stay. If you don't want to stay before 20 days, you have to leave our country and go wherever you want.  

Host: So a group of them, they were about 35 migrants by this time, walked to the border. It was night, and the group lost touch with each other and broke up into separate groups… 

Hanaa: We separate together. Me and a girl, uh, she was my friend. We introduced when we was on way. And a man, he was Arab and he was very old. We three was together.  And we walked for like seven hour. And then we enter in U. S.   

Ngofeen: That is wild.   

Hanaa: Yeah.  

Host:  When we come back, what happened to Hanaa after she arrived in the U.S… 

[HRW ad] 

Host: Hanaa crossed into the U.S. in 2023. She did not try to evade authorities. She turned herself in and spent about 18 hours in a police station on the border, where she asked for asylum. Immigration officials paroled her. In other words, she could stay in the country and apply for asylum, at which point she would be told whether or not she could remain. So there she was, free in Texas, no money, no working papers. But she did have something very important: a court date… November 22, 2023, in Virginia. Some friends lent her more money and eventually she flew from Texas to Virginia, where she knew some people… 

Hanaa:  When I came to Virginia, I, uh, Sammy, my friend, I gave his number, but I cannot live with him because he is a man. I cannot live with him.  He come to airport and we went together on Richmond. I was like for one, one or two months in that house on Richmond that, uh, they rent us for refugees... 

Host: This was a house rented by a group of Afghan women helping other Afghan women...  

Hanaa: And then the owners say you have to find another house for yourself. 

Host: In the meantime, she got free help doing her application for asylum from a non-profit organization that supplied an immigration lawyer. She also stayed a few months with an American family in Pennsylvania… 

Hanaa:  My American family, and we are still family. I'm so proud and so happy to have them because they helped me after I, I know them and they, we meet each other. They know we are part of our family. 

Host: But she needed to be back for that all-important court date, so she moved in with an Afghan family in Virginia for about six months. She had two court dates actually, and at the second one she learned if she could stay in the country. 

Hanaa:  It was on March,  March 18, 2024. Uh, so my second court, they, uh, approved my asylum and they say, Oh my gosh, how you came here? What?  Like we never hear like this journey, how a lonely girl, how you did all of this? I say no choice. 

Host: Hanaa got papers allowing her to stay in the U.S. as a refugee. She got a work permit, a social security number. She applied for a job and a week later she landed one. She now lives alone in her own place. And she’s paying off those debts to her friends…. 

Hanaa: I still have like $10,000 I have to give them. [laughs] 

******** 

Host: Now all of this story, from the Taliban takeover to Hanaa’s journey into the U.S. and what happened once she got here -- all of this took place when Biden was president. As soon as Trump took office, things changed. Trump declared a national emergency and signed a blitz of executive orders on border security, asylum, and the U.S.’s refugee program. 

I wanted to understand, how would these changes affect someone like Hanaa seeking asylum right now? So I talked to an expert… 

 Bill: My name is Bill Frelick, and I'm the director of Human Rights Watch's Refugee and Migrant Rights Division. 

Host: First thing I wanted to know: If someone seeking asylum manages to cross the U.S. border, as Hanaa did when Biden was president, what would happen to that person now, under Trump? Would they be caught, released and given a court date, as Hanaa was? 

Frelick:  One of the things that the Trump administration has done. is to say that, uh, because there's supposedly an invasion at the, of the United States by aliens, um, that people will not be allowed to apply for asylum here, if that would mean that they would stay in this country. 

Host: In other words, no. Migrants presenting themselves at the border seeking asylum, as Hanaa did, are no longer allowed to apply for asylum to stay in the U.S. This executive order is a kind of Catch-22. 

Frelick: It explicitly says you can't use asylum if that would mean that you, as one of these invading aliens, would, would, um, stay in the country. On its face, I think it's illegal, but it's, it completely contradicts what's written in the law, but it actually cites the very law that it says you're not allowed to use. 

Host: Another question. What happens to people who show up at the border anyway and turn themselves in to immigration officials. For them, Bill says, it’s now mandatory detention… 

Frelick: What mandatory detention means, what is said in the orders is that, basically from that point of arrest until the conclusion of your processing or removal from the country, you are to be in detention that whole time. 

Host: So, no more letting asylum-seekers free as they wait for their cases to move forward, as with Hanaa.  It’s now “catch and detain.” 

But what if you’re an Afghan already in the country? You belong to a nationality group with “parole,” which means you have legal status to stay in the U.S. while your case is in process. Afghans, Venezuelans, Haitians, Ukrainians, Cubans, these nationalities have parole. What happens to those people now? 

Frelick:  so if you were, you know, an Afghan that was paroled in, if you were a Venezuelan that was paroled in,  whatever it might be, you're now going to be subjected to expedited removal, which is something that really had only applied in the border area, um, prior to this. 

Host: “Expedited removal.” Removal used to be called deportation. The jargon comes fast and furious in immigration policy! Expedited removal means that ICE officials can deport non-citizens without a hearing before an immigration judge. Under Biden, expedited removal was only applied near the border. Now, it can be applied anywhere in the U.S. So you have tens of thousands of Haitians, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Cubans, Afghans and others, who have been legally paroled into the U.S., in danger of being deported without so much as a hearing before a judge. 

Frelick:  It's a chaotic framework that basically is attempting to close every avenue, closing refugee resettlement, closing parole, closing asylum, blocking physical entry, making people inadmissible, extending the most expedited way of removing people, and then other elements to this, including making mandatory detention. And now we've already seen the use of the military, both to deport people and to take people to Guantanamo, a military base on Cuba, that has a history of torture and, and, and ill treatment, to put people again indefinitely into detention where they will be isolated from human rights monitors, from lawyers, from family, whatever it might be, and punishes people for, in many cases, for seeking the protection of the United States. 

Host: So let’s get back to Hanaa. What do all of these recent changes mean for her and her situation?  

Hanaa:  Um, so when I asked my lawyer, she say you're not in danger now because you're legally in US and judge accepted you to be here.  

Host: In other words, since she has already been granted asylum, the recent changes under Trump shouldn’t affect her. So she has applied for a green card, which would give her permanent legal residence and put her on a path towards citizenship. Yet in spite of her relative good fortune, her life, on a deeper level, many levels, is difficult.  

First of all, there are the betrayals. Those allegations of sexual abuse experienced by Afghan policewomen that Hanaa described earlier? They were never investigated.   which led to the death or exile of her neighboring countries. And the U.S. government has refused failed to resettle the vast majority of them. Currently there’s no program for these women. 

Then there are the personal difficulties. 

Her husband’s still in Iran but her parents… snuck back into Afghanistan… 

Hanaa: I was so worried when they decide they wanted to return to Afghanistan.  How  can I live here? My mind will be with you. If Taliban came, if they shoot on you, if they ask me to come, if I don't return, they will kill you. 

What I'm gonna do? My mom and dad say, you never come back. If they want to kill us, they can do it. But please, you never come back here.  We are old. If we die, it doesn't matter. But you're young. We don't want you to die. But we want to return. Now they are in Afghanistan. Thanks God they are not in trouble. But I still scared. I still worried. My husband is in Iran. My family, they are in Afghanistan. 

One of my sister, she went to the Yunnan, we call Yunnan, you say Greece. She also went illegally because she doesn't have any choice. She was reporter when she was in Afghanistan. 

She was in danger also. And  it's really hard when I wake up in the morning. Okay. My body is here in US, but my soul, my mind, my everything, my thought is everywhere. I think about everyone. .   

I'm living. I'm alive, but I'm not enjoying. 

***** 

Host: So what is the human rights angle on all this? Well, says Bill Frelick, it starts with international law… 

Frelick:  it's a treaty obligation for parties to the Refugee Convention and the Refugee Protocol, which U. S. is, is a party to the Protocol, that you cannot send a refugee back to a place where their life or freedom would be threatened. 

Host: Countries are not obliged to admit refugees or asylum seekers. Their legal obligation is to not send them back to the place they fled from if it’s likely they will be killed or imprisoned.  

Frelick:  We focus on the need for protection. We focus on people who are at risk of being pushed back to places where they'd be persecuted. And whether that's the United States directly sending someone back to Haiti, where they're going to be subjected to gang violence, or whether it is cutting off aid that will push refugees back into a conflict zone. You know, if you, if you cut off aid to the refugee camps in Thailand or Bangladesh, will those countries push refugees back into Myanmar? This is a real threat and it's a real worry. And so we, we will be looking at that and are looking at that every step of the way. We'll look at that in terms of, you know, what's happening inside Myanmar, what's happening in Bangladesh, what's happening in Thailand, but also what's happening in Washington, D. C., what's happening at the European Union level, and work to try to maintain asylum, in those, those, countries of first arrival,  but also to provide and advocate for safe and legal pathways for people that are in need of protection. 

Host: Safe and legal pathways. It seems so simple! Yet the politics of migrants and refugees is roiling the world, not just the U.S. Yet… for normal people, Bill says, there are things we can do… 

Frelick:  there are many opportunities for people to work closely, you know, if, if, if it's through a faith based connection or otherwise for people in the United States or anywhere really in the world,  there are opportunities to, to assist, to help people, you know, to reach out, um, to, to lend a hand. By your actions you're demonstrating, um, a, a, an interest in protecting people and that is essential I think to holding governments accountable as well. It just can't be Human Rights Watch wagging a finger in the face of an official. It needs to have sort of this organic component of people that care. 

Host: Bill Frelick is director of Human Rights Watch's Refugee and Migrant Rights Division. Thanks to Hanaa Rahimi for sharing her story with us. Fereshta Abbasi,   Afghanistan Researcher in the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, translated Hanaa’s Farsi into English. 

You can read more about refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan and elsewhere on Human Rights Watch’s website, h-r-w dot o-r-g. 

The archival clips in this episode are from PBS NewsHour, 7 News Australia, NBC News, CBS, Al Jazeera, Face the Nation, France 24, ABC News, The Telegraph and the BBC. 

We’ve been doing this show for 12 episodes now and our goal is a billion listeners! Which we haven't gotten yet. Which means – we need you to spread the word! If you want to keep hearing from people like Hanaa, you can subscribe to the show, leave a review, spread the word on social media, tell people. It really helps. You can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts.  

You’ve been listening to Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Our associate producer is Sophie Soloway. Thanks also to Ifé Fatunase, Stacy Sullivan, and Anthony Gale.  

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. Talk to you again in two weeks.