Afghan Refugees in Pakistan Face an Uncertain Future: The Crackdown Explained, From 2023 to 2026

Who the Afghans in Pakistan are

Not all Afghans in Pakistan have the same status. The crackdown reached each group in turn.

Three facts about these people are often overlooked.

• Most were born in Pakistan. The first families came in 1979. Their children and grandchildren have known no other home.
• They are part of the economy. Afghans run transport companies, carpet workshops, restaurants and market stalls, and do much of the hardest manual work in Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi.
• They have never had a path to citizenship, whatever their papers said.

For forty-five years Pakistan gave millions of Afghans a place to live and never a place to belong. The cards were always temporary. In 2025 the word was taken literally.

Forty-five years in five steps

Throughout, Pakistan hosted these people with no refugee law of its own and without signing the international refugee convention. Their stay rested on government decisions that could be, and were, changed.

The crackdown, step by step

By the end of that sequence, the only Afghans lawfully in Pakistan were those holding a visa.

The numbers

Figures differ between the Pakistani government, the Taliban authorities and the United Nations agencies, and even between one UN report and the next. Treat them as approximate.

One distinction matters. Only a minority are formally deported, meaning arrested and taken to the border. Most are counted as returning. But people who leave because their landlord has been told to evict them, their card is void and the police are at the door are not leaving freely. The UN describes such departures as returns under adverse circumstances.

At the same time Iran has been expelling Afghans in even larger numbers. Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on earth, has had to absorb several million people in three years.

Why Pakistan is doing it

The government has given several reasons.

1. Security. Militant attacks have risen every year since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul. Pakistan says the attackers are sheltered in Afghanistan and that Afghan nationals have taken part in a number of bombings. One analysis linked the July 2026 deadline to an attack in Karachi the month before.

2. Pressure on Kabul. Relations with the Taliban government have collapsed over its refusal to act against the Pakistani Taliban. Sending back its citizens is one of the few levers Islamabad has.

3. The law. Every country, officials say, has the right to decide who may live within its borders, and those without valid papers are in breach of the Foreigners Act.

4. The economy. Pakistan argues that it has carried this burden for four decades with dwindling international help, and can no longer afford to.

5. Public opinion. The policy is popular with many Pakistanis, particularly in cities where Afghans are blamed, fairly or not, for crime and for competition over jobs and housing.

What the critics say

1. It punishes the innocent. No evidence has been offered that the families being removed had any part in violence. Rights groups call it collective punishment.

2. It sends people into danger. Afghanistan under the Taliban bars girls from secondary school and women from most work. Journalists, former officials, musicians, members of minority sects and women activists are at particular risk.

3. It breaks international law. Although Pakistan has not signed the refugee convention, the rule against returning people to a place where they face persecution or torture binds every state, and Pakistan is a party to the convention against torture. A UN committee raised this in 2026.

4. It is being abused. Afghans and Pakistani rights organisations have reported extortion by police, demolition of homes, seizure of property and the separation of families. People with valid documents have been detained.

5. It will not work. Militants do not cross at official border posts with their families. And many of those removed will come back, as they did after earlier drives.

6. It harms Pakistan. Businesses lose workers and customers, and a generation that grew up in Pakistan is being sent across the border with a grievance.

How it works on the ground

Policy is made in Islamabad. It is carried out in neighbourhoods, and accounts from those neighbourhoods fill in what the announcements leave out.

Mapping. Before each deadline, police and local officials went from street to street listing Afghan households and businesses. Landlords were told they would be held responsible for tenants without papers.

Notice. Families were given days or weeks to leave. Many sold what they owned, shops, vehicles, livestock and household goods, at a fraction of its value, because buyers knew they had to sell.

Holding centres. Those picked up without papers were taken to transit camps set up in each province, and from there by bus to the border.

The crossings. At Torkham and Chaman the returnees are registered on the Pakistani side and again on the Afghan side. In busy weeks tens of thousands crossed, with trucks piled with beds, doors and window frames queuing for kilometres.

What may be taken. There have been limits on the cash a family may carry out, and reports of livestock and goods being stopped. Money in Pakistani banks and property in other people’s names is harder still to bring away.

School and hospital. Children were taken out of school in the middle of the year, and patients out of treatment.

Pakistani officials say the process has been orderly and that those who leave voluntarily are treated with respect. They point out that no other country has hosted so many refugees for so long. Afghan families and rights monitors describe night raids, bribes demanded to delay arrest and the detention of people whose cards were valid on the day.

The effect on Pakistan itself

The departure of two to three million people in three years has consequences for those who remain.

The provinces have not agreed with the centre. The government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where most Afghans lived, has said openly that it will not take part in forced removals of people who have lived there for generations, while the federal government insists the policy applies everywhere.

Economists have pointed out a simple irony. Pakistan is short of dollars and exports its own workers to the Gulf to earn them. It has now expelled a large, hard-working population that paid rent, bought goods and, in many cases, ran businesses that employed Pakistanis.

Those caught in between

Several groups face particular difficulty.

• Those born in Pakistan. Pakistan’s citizenship law of 1951 says that a person born in the country is a citizen. Successive governments have not applied it to the children of Afghans, and the courts have given conflicting rulings.
• Mixed families. Afghans married to Pakistanis, and their children.
• Those promised a new home abroad. Tens of thousands who worked with American and other foreign forces came to Pakistan to wait for visas. Many were still waiting, years later, when the American refugee programme was suspended in January 2025.
• Girls in school and women in work. For them the border is the end of both.
• The sick, in the middle of treatment.

The UN asked Pakistan to exempt students and people with medical needs. Some concessions were made, case by case.

What Afghans in Pakistan can do

General information only, and not legal advice. Rules change quickly.

What happens on the other side

Those who cross at Torkham or Chaman arrive in a country with:

• one of the world’s lowest incomes, cut further by the loss of most foreign aid since 2021;
• little housing for the newcomers, many of whom have no village to go back to;
• winters that kill in the highlands;
• drought across much of the south and west;
• an administration that has welcomed them in words and has little to give.

Aid agencies report families living in tents, children out of school and men unable to find work. Some, inevitably, try to return to Pakistan.

Words used in this article

Timeline

For how such decisions are taken in Pakistan, read our explainer on the caretaker government, which launched the policy in 2023, and our guide to Pakistan’s politics.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• UNHCR, Pakistan operational update, February 2026 — via ReliefWeb.
• UNHCR, Pakistan operational update, January 2026 — via ReliefWeb.
• Al Jazeera, “Pakistan accelerates deportation of Afghans: UN” — 15 April 2025.
• Arab News, “Pakistan warns Afghan Citizen Card holders of legal action as expulsion deadline expires” — April 2025.
• Pajhwok Afghan News, “Pakistan holds deportation of Afghan refugees with PoR cards” — 5 July 2025.
• ARY News, “Pakistan sets July 10 deadline for illegal Afghan nationals, orders nationwide crackdown” — 2026.
• The Express Tribune, “Undocumented Afghans to face immediate arrest” — 2026.
• UNHCR data portal, Pakistan — for current figures.