July 8, 2025
With Trump’s New Travel Ban, 2 Afghan Sisters Wait in Limbo
By Nic Wong
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.
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.
