Immigration agents appear to be increasingly arresting and detaining Afghan asylum seekers, especially men, who have arrived in the US recently and are awaiting court hearings to decide their cases.

Amir – an asylum seeker who came to the US via Mexico in 2024 – was driving home from his English class in Bloomington, Indiana just after noon on Monday, when he was pulled over by an unmarked police vehicle. Minutes later, the asylum seeker from Afghanistan was cuffed and driven to a detention center.

In New York, another Afghan asylum seeker was detained after complying with a request from immigration authorities to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. In northern California – home to one of the largest Afghan immigrant communities in the US – attorneys said nearly two dozen Afghan asylum seekers had been arrested – either out in the community, or at check-ins over the past two weeks.

Most of the Afghan asylum seekers who’ve been detained had requested asylum at the US-Mexico border over the last two years, attorneys said. Others have entered under Operation Allies Welcome – a Biden-era program to help resettle Afghans fleeing the Taliban following the US’s withdrawal of the US from their country in 2021. Many had been granted humanitarian parole – a temporary legal status that allowed them to live and work in the US while their asylum claims were processed.

The recent arrests “have created a huge chilling effect,” said Shala Gafary, managing director of the Afghan Legal Assistance program at Human Rights First. “People just don’t feel safe to leave their home. People are asking all the time what the process is for going to Canada, or going to another country.”

In the two weeks after an Afghan man was accused of shooting two national guard members, the Trump administration announced major policy changes – radically restricting legal pathways to immigration by pausing asylum decisions for nearly 1.5m people, and halting the processing of applications for green cards, citizenship, or asylum from immigrants from 19 countries.

Despite these policy changes, asylum seekers with removal orders making a case to remain in the US in the justice department immigration courts are still entitled to hearings.

But, in recent weeks, ICE appears to be increasingly arresting Afghans awaiting hearings – forcing them to remain detained until their cases are decided.

Many of those arrested had been complying with requirements to check in with ICE regularly, or wear electronic monitoring devices, attorneys said, and did not have any criminal histories, their attorneys said.

“Clients have expressed to me that they’re feeling deeply unsettled and very fearful of what may happen to them next,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, whose Afghan client – an Afghan asylum seeker – was detained after complying with a request to report to ICE offices in New York City.

“Without any notice or warning, he was cuffed. He was completely shocked and didn’t understand what was happening. And then for some period of time, we didn’t know where he was. His family didn’t know where he was.”

Eventually, Mukherjee said, she was able to figure out he’d been transferred to a detention facility in New Jersey. Neither she nor her client have received any explanation as to why he was arrested, she said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

Amir, who was arrested in Bloomington, hasn’t been told why he was arrested either, his brother-in-law Shamsullah said. “The big question for our family is: for what reason was he arrested? He didn’t have a speeding ticket, anything.” The Guardian is not using their full names in order to protect their privacy and safety.

Rearview camera footage from Amir’s car, reviewed by the Guardian, captured three agents wearing FBI vests approaching his vehicle from behind. “You don’t have lawful status to be here. Your visa expired,” an agent told him.

Amir, who was in the car with his mother-in-law, repeatedly asked the agents if he could call his lawyer. “I’m going to let you call them,” one agent told him, before they cuffed his hands behind his back. He wasn’t allowed to call his lawyer on the way, nor was he able to speak with his wife. An agent took his mother-in-law, who couldn’t drive, back to her home.

Amir, who had spoken with the Guardian last week prior to his detention, had fled Afghanistan – where he had been detained by the Taliban due to his family ties to the former government – a year and a half ago. He entered the US via the southern border, using the now defunct CBP One app to schedule an appointment with an immigration officer, and was granted humanitarian parole. He applied for asylum in December last year.

After receiving his work permits in the US, the former electrical engineer had been working in a cafeteria by day and as ride-share driver in the evenings. He had been wearing an ankle monitor as required by ICE.

His detention came as a shock to his family and for the broader Afghan community in Bloomington. “People call me and they ask me: what should we do, what happened?” Shamsullah said. “I tell them I don’t know. I don’t know what we should do.” Amir’s wife, who is pregnant, has been especially struggling, he added.

If he were to return to Afghanistan, the family fears, Amir would be immediately detained. The family is also part of the Hazara Shia minority in Afghanistan, a group that has faced escalating violence and persecution since 2021. “There is no safe place for us in Afghanistan,” Amir told the Guardian last week. “The Taliban without any reason, they arrest people and they kill people.”

Attorneys said they were often at a loss for what to tell clients, many who have fled political prosecution, torture and threats on their lives in Afghanistan after the Taliban retook the country in 2021. “They are afraid, even though they have complied with every provision of US law, even though they have extremely strong cases and we have extensive documentation of their past persecution, whether through medical evaluations or mental health evaluations or photographs of their scars and their burns and other harms that they’ve experienced.”

Attorneys told the Guardian they are still unclear on how various policy changes will play out, if the administration will try to terminate the legal status for Afghans with humanitarian parole, or how long the pause on processing various immigration petitions will last.

“The honest answer is, I do not know, and the administration has not indicated what’s going to happen to those cases,” said Gregory Chen is Senior Director of Government Relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). “The administration has used terms such as indefinite pause, which is, of course, a contradictory oxymoron.”

The arrests and other policy changes have sparked panic, said Wahida Noorzad, an immigration attorney in the Bay Area who has seen two clients arrested and detained at the California City detention center, in the high desert east of Los Angeles. A third Afghan client was detained four weeks ago, prior to the shooting on 26 November.

Noorzad – who herself is Afghan American – said she has started receiving calls from across the region and the US, because she is one of the few immigration attorneys who speaks Dari. “I have many clients that are Afghan in the court system. I don’t know if they’re all going to be picked up,” she said.

Already, she added, it is proving challenging for her to help detained clients who have been transferred to the major ICE detention facility in California city, more than 5 hours drive away from her offices in the Bay Area. It’s also unclear when her detained clients will receive court dates to challenge their detention, and assess their asylum claims, given that about 90 immigration judges have been fired this year and a ballooning immigration court backlong.

For individual attorneys like Noorzad, filing federal habeas corpus petitions to challenge clients’ detention is also logistically challenging and prohibitively expensive.

“I still try to give my clients hope that they’ll hopefully win their cases eventually,” she said. “Because they are really in danger. Nobody leaves home unless they are really fearful.”