Politics / StudentNation / With Trump’s New Travel Ban, 2 Afghan Sisters Wait in Limbo Split by the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s education in Afghanistan, the sisters hoped to reunite in the US. But new travel limits could jeopardize their plans.

Afghan female students arrive for their lessons at a madrassa, or an Islamic school, on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif on April 8, 2025. (Atif Aryan / Getty)

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When Afsana, a 22-year-old woman from Kabul, received a scholarship to study in the United States, she kept it a secret from her father. For the previous two years, she and her younger sister, Nora, had been searching for a way to leave Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban barred women from secondary school and college (Nora and Afsana are pseudonyms used to protect their identities). In the summer of 2023, the opportunity arose for Afsana to enroll as a junior at a private day and boarding school in New Jersey. Afsana was sure her father would disapprove of her leaving home, but also sure that she could change his mind.

One evening in mid-July 2023, one month before she planned to leave, Afsana joined her father in the living room for teatime and prepared to break the news as her siblings played. Nora, sitting far from her sister, feigned obliviousness, listening carefully as she spoke. “I got a good opportunity,” Afsana told her father. She mentioned how much the scholarship was worth: $73,000 a year. “I’m not going to allow you to go,” he said, and told his daughter not to bring it up again. Afsana told Seth Holm, former chair of the Modern Languages Department at the school where Afsana got a scholarship, about her father’s concerns. Dr. Holm, who had been teaching Afsana English online, sent a video of the school’s closed campus, assuring Afsana’s father that his daughter would be safe.

On August 18, 2023, Afsana’s family took her to the airport in Kabul. Nora held back tears as she said goodbye, harboring hopes to reunite with her sister in the United States. Afsana hugged her mother and siblings, kissed her father’s hand, and took her first-ever flight to Pakistan for her visa interview, traveling with her brother (under Taliban rule, women cannot leave the country alone.) There, she met another Afghan girl, also Holm’s student, who would attend school in New Jersey with her. A month later, the pair flew through Qatar before taking a 14-hour flight to Philadelphia, where they met Holm and a representative of AGFAF, the organization that helped arrange travel for the two women. Afsana settled into her dorm, where she would live alone, a recent high school graduate starting over again.

Since the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, girls in Afghanistan have been finding creative, often clandestine ways to continue their education. Some attend secret schools, equipped with their Qur’ans to pretend they are in madrassa—Islamic school—if the Taliban breaks in. Some girls take classes online with international NGOs. Some, like Afsana, find ways to leave. Many have turned to America as a beacon of educational opportunity.

The two-decade US occupation of Afghanistan helped forge this association. In 2001, American-led coalition forces entered Kabul, taking power from the Taliban and striking bans on girls’ schooling. Four years later, nearly 1.7 million girls were enrolled in primary and secondary school, according to a UNESCO report. By 2018, this figure was 3.6 million. Literacy rates soared, nearly doubling from 2011 to 2018. The narrative Western media sources told in these years was a hopeful one; photos documenting the return to school featured rows of heads in white hijabs, trained toward blackboards, and young girls beaming at their desks. The girls in these stories wanted to be astronauts, engineers, and teachers themselves. As the tale went, Americans had ushered Afghan women and girls out of their oppressed state, into an age of equality. But that wasn’t the whole story.

The return to school for girls was sometimes lethal. In 2008, men on motorcycles threw acid at 11 students and four teachers at the Mirwais School for Girls. From 2006 to 2008, there were 1,153 reported attacks on teachers, students, and schools, with girls targeted disproportionately.

Education centers in Dasht-e Barchi, the neighborhood in Western Kabul where Afsana and her siblings grew up, were especially vulnerable to attack. The area is home to many of the city’s ethnic Hazaras, who fit into the Shi’a Muslim minority in Afghanistan, where about 89 percent of the population is Sunni, according to World Religion Database estimates. Historically persecuted, Hazaras seized new opportunities, especially with regards to education, after the Taliban fell in 2001. But a rise in violence ran parallel to gains in education. Since 2016, Islamic State, a transnational Sunni insurgent group, has targeted Dasht-e Barchi in a series of suicide attacks. Dasht-e Barchi, once a symbol of opportunity for Hazara students like Afsana and her siblings, has turned into Kabul’s most dangerous neighborhood. Afsana’s sister Nora recalls fearing attacks as she boarded the bus to class.

To Afsana, there’s a depraved logic to jihadist attacks on Hazaras. “They don’t see them as human,” she said. “They say, ‘We have to erase these people.’” During her upbringing, this intolerance was palpable. Attackers targeted Hazara students, Afsana said, to suppress the growing influence of Hazaras in Afghan society. Children in Dasht-e Barchi confronted the threat of danger and death with an attitude of resilience. Growing up, Afsana attended classes at the Kaaj Educational Center with many other Hazara students. As she studied, armed guards stood outside and on the roof of the building.

On the morning of August 15, 2021, Afsana left home to collect her high school diploma at the Ministry of Education. She saw people rushing past her and felt strange as she walked through the streets of Kabul. One woman stopped her and said the Taliban had entered the city. Terrified, she recalled stories her mother had told her about the Taliban whipping women and barring them from school. Afsana went home that morning, leaving her diploma sitting at the office in central Kabul. Later, she watched on TV as people stormed the airport, desperate to leave the country. The Taliban had seized Kabul as the former president, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, fled. The new regime banned girls from secondary school. Four months later, women were banned from universities. Nida Mohammad Nadim, Taliban minister of higher education, said the Taliban wouldn’t reverse its stance on women’s education “even if they drop a bomb on us.”

Afsana’s search for opportunities abroad, which she had started even before Kabul fell, grew urgent. She connected with nonprofit organizations and joined Facebook groups, sharing everything she found with Nora, who was equally desperate to continue her education. At 6:30 one morning in June 2022 in Afghanistan, Afsana joined 19 other Afghan girls and women on a video call for their first English class with Holm (These classes have grown into the Afghan Education Student Outreach Program, or AESOP, which offers online classes, mentoring, and financial support to around 500 students a semester.) Motivated by the commitment of his students, Holm convinced the New Jersey school where he taught to sponsor a scholarship for two of his students. Afsana was a clear candidate.