Texas Is Trying to Overturn Roe v. Wade All by Itself

Sept. 1, 2021

Sergio Flores/Getty Images

“Texas has always prided itself on respect for its womenfolk. Perhaps that’s why the state’s latest effort to restrict their abortion rights presumes they’re all perfectly capable of both determining they’re pregnant and arranging for an abortion within the first six weeks of pregnancy.

Really. No more abortions after six weeks. The lawmakers’ theory is that that’s when a fetal heartbeat begins — something that perplexed many in the medical community, where people seem to believe a six-week-old embryo is a tiny speck that doesn’t yet have a real heart. In fact, it isn’t even a fetus until week 9.

But you already know, people, that this sort of argument is not going to get you anywhere. The legislators passing these laws don’t seem nearly as interested in medicine as they are in making it to the Supreme Court for the big Roe v. Wade decision most observers feel is coming around the bend.

They’ve got lots of company. Mississippi’s new 15-week abortion limit got on the launchpad first.

Texas came later, but it did manage to pass a law that’s more than twice as restrictive when it comes to the time a woman has to decide whether to proceed with a pregnancy. Imagine the new border signs: Welcome to Texas! The Place That Makes Mississippi Look Reasonable.

The Texas law is really … creative. It puts enforcement in the hands of private citizens, who can sue abortion providers and those involved in “aiding and abetting” abortions. This could include anyone from the staff at Planned Parenthood to an Uber driver who provided a ride to the abortion clinic. The penalty, if an aider or abettor loses, is $10,000.

I believe I speak for many Americans of all political persuasions when I say: Leave the Uber driver out of it. These people have a miserable enough existence as it is.

There’s no question that these are perilous times for women’s right to choose. Sixteen other states have passed laws to ban or drastically limit abortions — they’re just lying dormant on the books, waiting for the Supreme Court to make a new ruling that sharply limits the scope of Roe v. Wade.

But you always have to give special attention to Texas, which can be described as innovative only when it comes to sex issues. Remember the school curriculum that required a teacher to construct an 18-foot model of “Speedy the Sperm” to demonstrate the unreliability of condoms? Or when, as governor, Rick Perry defended abstinence-only birth control by saying he knew it worked “from my own personal life.”

Of course, when Texas clamps down on abortion, politicians are comfortably aware that their well-heeled constituents can eliminate an unwanted pregnancy with a quick hop to the airport and a flight to L.A.

On the other hand, more than 1.7 million female Texans live in what one nonprofit calls “contraceptive deserts,” where simply finding a range of options is, at the very minimum, difficult. A pregnant woman who lives in the region around Big Bend National Park in West Texas, for instance, has access to one hospital (and seven doctors) in a patch of land that takes up more than 12,000 square miles.

Just to make things as difficult as possible for the women who don’t have lots of frequent-flier miles, Texas has also barred Planned Parenthood — one of the leading providers of contraceptives in the state — from getting funding through Medicaid.

“That’s making it harder for the most low-income folks,” said Dr. Bhavik Kumar, a physician at the Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston. He spent the first day of September telling patients who came in search of an abortion that anything past week 6 didn’t qualify. “They could have yesterday, but they couldn’t now,” he explained.

We will pause here to note that the vast majority of women who obtain abortions in Texas are past that new six-week deadline. And from now on, they have three choices: continue an unwanted pregnancy, get out of their very large state or go somewhere illegal and very possibly dangerous.

The best option, of course, is to avoid the pregnancy entirely. How many of you would be shocked to hear that many Texas schools are terrible at sex education?

“Texas has an abstinence-plus curriculum at best,” said Dr. Kumar. It reminded me of a brief foray I took through the Texas system about a decade ago. One of the more popular sex education textbooks listed “8 Steps to Protect Yourself from STDs,” none of which involved using a condom. Instead, one was, “Get plenty of rest.”

Texas, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is one of the fastest-growing states in the Union and a power center of increasing political wattage. It also has one of the highest rates of residents without health insurance in the country, including about a quarter of the women of childbearing age.

Now there’s a problem, Texans. Let the State Legislature work on that for a while. Take the lead in something useful.

We’ve all heard “Don’t Mess With Texas,” but right now a lot of us are thinking more along the lines of, “Texas, Don’t Make Another Mess.”

Supreme Court Fails to Defend A Woman's Right To Choose

Opinion | The Texas Abortion Law That Dealt a Blow to Roe v. Wade - The New York Times

Is This How Roe v. Wade Dies?

Sept. 1, 2021, 11:20 a.m. ET

Tom Brenner/Reuters

By Lauren Kelley

"Ms. Kelley is a member of the editorial board.

In May, the Supreme Court agreed to take its first major abortion case since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, out of Mississippi. That news induced nausea in abortion-rights advocates around the country, as they waited to see what the court’s newly turbocharged conservative majority would do after oral arguments in the case expected to be heard this fall.

Three months later, it would be almost a relief if that case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, were the most immediate threat to American reproductive rights. On Tuesday night, the Supreme Court got away with something much more insidious: It all but ended abortion access in Texas, at least for now. It simultaneously dealt a blow to Roe v. Wade that could hasten its demise — by saying nothing and thus quietly allowing a state anti-abortion law, now the most restrictive one in the nation, to go into effect.

The law, SB8, bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy — so early that many people don’t know they’re pregnant, and before some doctors will even provide an abortion.

Several states have already passed six-week abortion bans, sometimes called heartbeat bills, and other abortion restrictions with very early limits. A wave of such laws swept through several states in 2019, prompting calls for boycottsagainst doing business in those states. None of those laws are being enforced today because they’re obviously unconstitutional: Roe v. Wade guarantees the right to abortion until the point of fetal viability, or about 22 weeks of pregnancy. So while the laws created a splash, they didn’t affect many people’s lives. Until this week.

But SB8 is much more diabolical than the average six-week abortion ban. The law would allow just about anyone — truly, almost any person, anywhere — to sue people or entities who “abet” or even allegedly intend to “abet” abortions in Texas after six weeks of pregnancy. What does it mean to “abet” an abortion? The law isn’t entirely clear on that. But it’s easy to think of ways it could be interpreted: a friend gives a woman money for a procedure, a taxi driver drops someone off at an abortion clinic, a receptionist is stationed inside the front door. Plaintiffs who win their cases would get at least $10,000 each — a provision that seems destined to create a state full of abortion bounty hunters.

What, as they say, could go wrong?

The law was also written in such a way that it’s very difficult to fight in court. Because SB8 is supposed to be enforced by everyday citizens, there’s no single Texas official whom abortion rights advocates can sue to block the law, as they typically would in such cases. This issue was supposed to be heard last week by a Federal District Court, which could have issued an injunction blocking the law. But in a move that baffled many legal experts, a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit canceled that hearing at the last minute, paving the way for the law to go into effect this week.

The only option reproductive rights advocates had left was to go to the Supreme Court — the court that’s now dominated by anti-abortion justices, including three appointed by Donald Trump specifically to end legal abortion in America. So the advocates did just that, and then waited as the clock ticked past midnight Central time, with no word from the court to stop the law from taking effect.

What happens now? The Texas law could still be temporarily blocked by the Supreme Court. But for now abortion access in the state is in chaos. On Tuesday night, Whole Woman’s Health, which operates abortion clinics in Texas and elsewhere, tweeted that its Texas waiting rooms were full with patients desperate to get abortions in the hours and minutes before the law went into effect.

It now seems likely that more laws like SB8 will pass, as other anti-abortion state leaders will surely try to follow Texas’ lead. Why wouldn’t they? The Supreme Court may not yet have ruled on the merits of Texas’ law, as some anti-abortion campaigners would no doubt prefer, but the state’s wild ploy was clearly successful in threatening the future of clinics across the state. In that way, the court gave a green light to lawmakers everywhere who have been itching for decades to overturn Roe v. Wade.

As for the people of Texas, many of them will get abortions despite SB8, either by crossing borders or by purchasing abortion pills on the internet. This is a certainty. Abortion foes have long claimed that their aim isn’t to punish individual women, who they say are merely victims of dastardly abortion providers. But it is clear what happens in countries where abortions are outlawed: Women end up in jail.

As the court’s conservatives have chipped away at reproductive rights in recent decades, the central fear among supporters of those rights was that an emboldened hard-right majority would eventually overturn Roe v. Wade. What became painfully clear after Tuesday night is that it may not have to. Without even lifting a finger, the court showed what may well be America’s near future: a country in which Roe v. Wade is not only hobbled, but a dead letter altogether."

Opinion | The Texas Abortion Law That Dealt a Blow to Roe v. Wade - The New York Times

Supreme Court Does Not Act on Texas' Near-Total Abortion Ban - The New York Times. Pure American Barbarism and Savagery.

After Silence From Supreme Court, Texas Clinics Confront Near-Total Abortion Ban

The law, which prohibits abortions after six weeks and went into effect on Wednesday, was drafted by Texas lawmakers with the goal of frustrating efforts to challenge it in federal court.

Sept. 1, 2021Updated 6:41 p.m. ET

A “Bans Off Our Bodies” protest at the Texas State Capitol in Austin on Wednesday.Montinique Monroe for The New York Times

HOUSTON — A Texas law prohibiting most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy went into effect on Wednesday after the Supreme Court did not act on a request to block it, ushering in the most restrictive abortion measure in the nation and prompting clinics in the state to turn away women seeking the procedure.

The justices may still rule on the request, which is an early step in what is expected to be an extended legal battle. In the meantime, though, access to abortion in Texas has become extremely limited, the latest example of a Republican-led state imposing new constraints on ending pregnancies.

The law, known as Senate Bill 8, amounts to a nearly complete ban on abortion in Texas because 85 to 90 percent of procedures in the state happen after the sixth week of pregnancy, according to lawyers for several clinics. On Tuesday night, clinics were scrambling to see patients until the minute the law went into effect, with six-hour waits for procedures in some places. By Wednesday, the patient lists had shrunk, clinic workers said in interviews.

The developments were a victory for the anti-abortion movement, which has found success in recent years. Many who oppose abortion said they were cautiously optimistic that the Supreme Court might allow the law to stand for now and were awaiting word from Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who oversees the federal appeals court in question.

“We’re not fully celebrating until we officially hear from Alito,” said John Seago, legislative director for Texas Right to Life, the largest anti-abortion organization in the state. “The motion is still pending. He has to do something with it. He can’t just ignore it.”

He added: “But in the meantime, it seems like the industry is going to comply and that’s definitely a victory for us.”

The Supreme Court justices may still rule on the request. In the meantime, access to abortion in Texas has become extremely limited.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

The Texas law is the latest battle over abortion rights in the United States, a legal fight that began in 1973, with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to the procedure. But in recent years, anti-abortion advocates have found success through laws in state legislatures, and a broad swath of the South and the Midwest now has limited access to abortions.

Texas has about 24 abortion clinics, down from roughly 40 before 2013, when the State Legislature imposed a previous round of restrictions. It was not immediately clear on Wednesday if every one of them was complying with the law, which the Republican governor signed in May, but many, in interviews, said they were.

In the emergency application they wrote urging the justices to intervene, abortion providers in the state said the new law “would immediately and catastrophically reduce abortion access in Texas,” and most likely force “many abortion clinics ultimately to close.”

Supreme Court precedents prohibit states from banning abortion before fetal viability, the point at which fetuses can sustain life outside the womb, or about 22 to 24 weeks into a pregnancy. The law in Texas says doctors cannot perform abortions if a heartbeat is detected, activity that starts at around six weeks, before many women are even aware they are pregnant.

Many states have passed such bans, but the law in Texas is different. It was drafted to make it difficult to challenge in court.

Usually, a lawsuit seeking to block a law because it is unconstitutional would name state officials as defendants. However, the Texas law, which makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape, bars state officials from enforcing it and instead deputizes private individuals to sue anyone who performs the procedure or “aids and abets” it.

Anti-abortion protesters near the gate of the Texas State Capitol in May. Sergio Flores/Getty Images

The patient may not be sued, but doctors, staff members at clinics, counselors, people who help pay for the procedure, and even an Uber driver taking a patient to an abortion clinic are all potential defendants. Plaintiffs, who do not need to live in Texas, have any connection to the abortion or show any injury from it, are entitled to $10,000 and their legal fees recovered if they win. Prevailing defendants are not entitled to legal fees.

That novel formulation has sent clinics scrambling.

Dr. Jessica Rubino, a doctor at Austin Women’s Health Center, a small, independent clinic in the state capital, said that at first, she wanted to defy what appeared to be an unconstitutional law. But she said she concluded that doing so would put her staff at risk.

“If this was a criminal ban, we’d know what this is and what we can and cannot do,” Dr. Rubino said. “But this ban has civil implications. It requires a lawyer to go to court. It requires lawyers’ fees. And then $10,000 if we don’t win. What happens if everybody is sued, not just me?”

She added: “My staff is nervous. They’ve been asking, ‘What about our families?’”

Dr. Rubino said her clinic had “struggled so much to come up with any plan to take care of anyone” under the new law, and on Wednesday was sorting out what the new policies would be. For example, she wondered, if someone knows they are more than six or seven weeks pregnant — roughly the new legal limit — should the clinic advise them to go out of state and not waste money on an ultrasound?

Clinics in Texas have struggled to understand the ban and to continue caring for patients.Montinique Monroe for The New York Times

Doctors who are sued, even if the suit is dismissed, have to report the lawsuits when they renew licenses or obtain hospital admitting privileges, according to Amy Hagstrom Miller, the chief executive at Whole Woman’s Health, which operates four clinics in Texas.

There was little indication of the shifting legal ground outside the Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston, the group’s only location in the city that provides abortion services. A blue bus offering free pregnancy tests from an anti-abortion group, a regular presence, sat across the street. But inside, the effect was clear: Dr. Bhavik Kumar, a staff physician, said he had seen six patients by Wednesday afternoon, down from his usual 30.

The immediate question for the justices is not whether the Texas law is constitutional, but whether it may be challenged in federal court. The law’s defenders say that, given the way the law is structured, only Texas courts can rule on the matter and only in the context of suits against abortion providers for violating the law.

Some legal scholars argued that the situation was still fluid and that abortion rights activists were overinterpreting the case.

“The case has been overhyped,” William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said on Wednesday. “The idea that unless the court acted by last night it was de facto overruling Roe v. Wade is not true.”

The challenge to the law remains pending in the lower federal courts, he said, and they are poised to sort through the complex issues in the case.

Still, abortion access has narrowed considerably across the state. At Whole Woman’s Health of Fort Worth, the last patient appointment was completed at 11:56 p.m. on Tuesday, said Marva Sadler, the organization’s senior director of clinic services. She said doctors started early on Tuesday morning and treated 117 patients, far more than usual.

Understand the Texas Abortion Law

---

Citizens, not the state, will enforce the law. The law effectively deputizes ordinary citizens — including those from outside Texas — allowing them to sue clinics and others who violate the law. It awards them at least $10,000 per illegal abortion if they are successful.

The Supreme Court’s silence. The law restricting abortions in Texas went into effect on Wednesday after the Supreme Court did not act on a request to block it, prompting clinics in the state to turn away women seeking the procedure.

“It was absolutely organized chaos,” said Ms. Sadler, who had come from San Antonio to help out. “Patients were waiting upward of five and six hours to have their procedures done.”

She said patients were waiting in their cars, and also in the waiting room. Some were told to come back later. On Wednesday, she said, the clinic was in uncharted waters. Of the 79 people on the schedule, she estimated that about 20 would be able to eventually complete their procedures. Many, she said, would be too far along in their pregnancies to be treated under the new law.

“People are confused,” she said. “They don’t know where to go. They don’t know what this law is.”

As the law came into force, Democrats assailed it and pledged to fight to retain abortion rights in Texas and nationwide. In a statement, President Biden said the measure “blatantly violates” the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade.

Texas state representatives who opposed the bill banning abortions as early as six weeks.Eric Gay/Associated Press

In its next term, which starts in October, the Supreme Court is set to decide whether Roe v. Wade should be overruled in a case from Mississippi concerning a state law banning most abortions after 15 weeks that has been blocked by the courts.

The Texas case, which was on the court’s “shadow docket” without a full briefing or oral arguments, leapfrogged the one from Mississippi.

The Texas and Mississippi laws are among many measures enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures intended to test the durability of Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that affirmed Roe’s core holding and said states may not impose an “undue burden” on the right to abortion before fetal viability.

The lawmakers behind the various state-based measures are betting that the Supreme Court’s recent shift to the right will lead it to sustain the new laws. The court now includes three members appointed by President Donald J. Trump, who had vowed to name justices prepared to overrule Roe v. Wade.

One of them, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, replaced Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a cautious supporter of abortion rights. Another, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who viewed access to abortion as essential to women’s autonomy and equality.

Concern spread on Wednesday not only among doctors who provide abortions but also to organizations and volunteers who help women get to their appointments. The law created a new worry that a difficult environment in Texas had become legally perilous, even if every aspect of the new regulations was followed.

“Every single incentive to file these frivolous lawsuits is written into the bill,” said a board member at Clinic Access, a Houston-based nonprofit group that provides practical support — including transportation and paying for a hotel stay or child care — for anyone seeking abortion access in the Houston area.

Two months after Senate Bill 8 was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, abortion providers in Texas filed suit in federal court, naming, among others, every state trial court judge and county court clerk in Texas.

The defendants responded that they were not proper parties and were, in any event, immune from being sued.

A federal trial judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case and scheduled a hearing on whether to block the law. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, canceled the hearing.

The challengers said they were at minimum entitled to a decision on their request for the law to be temporarily suspended."

Supreme Court Does Not Act on Texas' Near-Total Abortion Ban - The New York Times

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Fear and uncertainty for Americans and their Afghan partners stranded in Afghanistan - The Washington Post

Fear and uncertainty for Americans and their Afghan partners stranded in Afghanistan

A commercial airplane is seen at Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 31, a day after U.S troops left the country. (Reuters)

"The family, on the run from Taliban fighters Mike once helped the Americans battle, spent 36 hours at the Kabul airport earlier this week, desperately trying to get on a plane out of the country. Zach Disbrow, a former Army captain and his company commander in 2012, had arranged passage on a U.S. military flight, but the family never made it through the crowds before the last flights left early Tuesday.

“There is really no way out,” said Disbrow, who said Mike had returned to Afghanistan to help his family escape. “We should absolutely celebrate every single human being we got out of Afghanistan as an incredible victory, but the mission’s only halfway over. We’ve still got a moral responsibility to get these people out.”

More than 122,000 people were evacuated from Afghanistan in the frenzied final days of the longest war in U.S. history. Despite promises from President Biden, and a U.S. military doctrine of never leaving anyone behind, between 100 and 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan, the president said Tuesday.

Those people are U.S. citizens who want to leave but have been unable to get out. Officials have said they are distinct from a number of U.S. citizens who have chosen to remain in Afghanistan, often because they do not want to leave non-U.S. citizen family members behind. Thousands more, Afghans like Mike who may be targets for Taliban retribution, are also stranded.

Troops depart a dramatically changed Afghanistan

The Biden administration has come under intense criticism from Republicans, veterans and even some Democratic allies for its handling of Afghanistan. Many argued Biden should have extended the Aug. 31 deadline for leaving when it became clear that not all Americans who wanted to flee would be able to get out.

Mark Jacobson, a former member of the Obama administration and Afghanistan war veteran who has been assisting families to get out, said the Biden administration had been “disingenuous” about some of the Americans left behind.

He said officials often fail to note that some American citizens do not want to leave because it could mean leaving close family members behind.

“If we made it a decision that we can’t take that many, then what was the backup plan for the others, especially in families that we knew were high risk?” Jacobson said.

President Biden addressed the nation on Aug. 31, defending the U.S. evacuation effort in Afghanistan. (Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post)

Biden, in a televised address Tuesday, said the administration had been working since March to help Americans leave the country and had evacuated about 5,500. He said the United States also evacuated “thousands of citizens and diplomats from those countries that went to Afghanistan with us to get [Osama] bin Laden,” thousands of Afghan translators and interpreters and 2,500 Afghans who worked at the United States embassy and their families.

Declaring Afghan war over, Biden defends evacuation efforts

“We believe that about 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan with some intention to leave,” he said. “Most of those who remain are dual citizens, longtime residents, who had earlier decided to stay because of their family roots in Afghanistan. The bottom line, 90 percent of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave.”

The White House later clarified that 98 percent of Americans wishing to leave had been evacuated.

Biden stressed that for Americans still in Afghanistan: “There is no deadline. We remain committed to get them out if they want to come out.”

Three U.S. passport holders from the same family are counting on that promise. The three flew to Afghanistan in July to help pack and bring back a grandmother, who just had her U.S. visa approved. They’ve tried repeatedly over the last several weeks to board a flight out, with no luck. “I thought it would be good there because everything that Biden was saying, — especially like July, May, June — when he was saying that it’s impossible for [the Taliban] to take over so quickly,” said Mohsen, a family member who asked to be identified only by his first name because of concerns for his relatives.

Disbrow, who spends his days trying to figure out a solution for Mike and his family, said assigning blame for those left behind is not useful to the people who need help.

“I think we should measure success not by the people we get out, but by the people we leave behind,” he said, “and getting that number to zero.”

The situation looks so difficult for Mike and his family that Disbrow, from Chicago, and his fellow grass-roots volunteers are discussing whether to advise him to destroy his green card and wipe the call log and contacts from his phone. That might make it harder to leave, but it could give him a better chance of surviving if he is caught by the Taliban.

There is no exact count of people like Mike — Afghans with connections to the United States — but they are believed to number in the thousands. Many are green-card holders, or permanent U.S. residents. Others have entry visas for the United States, and many are applicants for the special immigrant visa (SIV) available to many who worked as translators and interpreters for U.S. soldiers and diplomats.

Many more are Afghans who worked for nongovernmental organizations, teachers, contractors and some who had worked for U.S.-funded development projects.

Taliban takeover propels tiny Qatar into an outsized role in Afghanistan

John, a former Army interpreter who asked to be identified by only his middle name, watched with alarm as Taliban fighters pressed toward Kabul, where he lived with his wife and 1-year-old. He knew his U.S. affiliation put him at risk.

A few days later, the Americans dangled salvation. John, who holds a special immigrant visa, got an email.

“They said to come to Hamid Karzai airport,” he said by phone from Afghanistan. “They said we could get on a plane.”

But getting on a plane meant getting into the airport, something he tried and failed to do day after day. Even after 12 hours of pressing, pushing and waiting the crowds were too great for him to reach the gate where he might show his email.

On Aug. 26, John and his family gave up and went home just hours before a suicide bomber at the airport entrance killed 170, including 13 U.S. service members.

After that attack, the flights stopped. John waited for a rescue mission that never came.

“They say they evacuated thousands of people,” John said, with clear bitterness in his voice. “Who were those people? I can tell you there are still people left behind.”

Now he lives in fear of the moment that Taliban fighters arrive at his three-room apartment.

“I’m staying 24 hours a day inside; it’s very hard,” he said, still hoping the Americans would help him. “I don’t think they had any program to get us out.”

Efforts to reach those remaining in Afghanistan have also been hampered by fear of endangering them further by making calls that the Taliban could track to locate them.

A young woman working in Kabul, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of the Taliban, said: “Our dreams were tearing into pieces, the 20 years achievements were reversed in days. Thousands of Afghans, who worked with the Americans, were left behind helplessly. The evacuation process has further added salt to the injuries of innocent people,” she said. “It was [a disorganized] and disrespectful way of evacuating people. . . . Many Afghans feel betrayed. There is anger and disappointment in Kabul. I am shattered.”

Daisy Pistey-Lyhne, a California-based volunteer with the Female and Free Speech Airlift, which is trying to relocate outspoken women, journalists, artists and scholars at risk, said her organization was aware of more than two dozen U.S. citizens and green-card holders who had tried to leave in the final days before the U.S. withdrawal but were blocked at the Kabul airport by U.S. and Taliban forces.

Pistey-Lyhne said American troops at the airport were prioritizing travelers with U.S. passports over green-card holders.

“In the final hours of the gate being open they said they wouldn’t let green-card holders and only blue passports could get through,” she said. “They’ve been very much differentiating between the two.”

“For now, at least, it has seemed that they are treating Americans okay,” she said.

Karoun Demirjian, Missy Ryan and Sammy Westfall in Washington, Steve Hendrix in Doha, Qatar, Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Jonathan Baran and Elizabeth Dwoskin in San Francisco contributed to this report."

Fear and uncertainty for Americans and their Afghan partners stranded in Afghanistan - The Washington Post

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Opinion | I Worked With the U.S. in Afghanistan. I Thought I Would Be Saved. - The New York Times

The Airlifts Have Stopped, and the Taliban Are Looking for Me

Aug. 31, 2021

Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

By Rasheed

"The writer is an Afghan who worked on U.S.-government-funded projects in Afghanistan for nearly three years. He and his family members remain in Afghanistan, and he is identified only by an abbreviated form of his first name out of concern for his safety.

When the last U.S. plane left Afghanistan, celebratory Taliban gunfire rang out through the night in Kabul. The sound told me that all hope was lost.

I am 38 years old; I remember life under the Taliban, the shock of that time. One day when I was young, we were visiting Kabul and staying with family. A young relative suggested we go to the sports stadium to see if we could catch a match.

A big crowd was waiting but there were no sports. A woman was taken out of a car in the middle of the stadium; she was covered by a big scarf. A man with a microphone described her crime. Then I heard the shots. The Taliban killed the woman. I was so scared, I was unable to sleep for many nights. I have never forgotten.

I was completely against the Taliban ideology and what they stood for. So the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 felt like the beginning of a new life. It gave me hope that there would be good days to come for my country. That’s the main reason I sought work with American organizations in Afghanistan.

As the U.S. withdrawal became imminent, I thought my service alongside the Americans meant I would be saved when they left. The last U.S. plane has departed, and the airport is in the hands of the Taliban. But I will not stop trying to find a way out of Afghanistan; the lives of myself, my family and so many others are in so much jeopardy.

When the Taliban entered Kabul on Aug. 15, fear overwhelmed the city. News that the United States would evacuate Afghan allies sent thousands of people rushing to the Kabul airport. I rushed to get home to my family.

My former employers submitted the paperwork for me to be evacuated. I waited and hoped to be put on a flight list. The call never came. I heard stories of people with no documents or improper documents making it onto planes. The erratic and mismanaged evacuation was disappointing and heartbreaking for me and many other Afghans who served in the toughest conditions with their U.S. partners.

Today people like me who worked with or on behalf of the U.S. government are in even greater danger. Many already have been threatened, beaten or even killed because of service to the United States. We know we will face bad days now that the U.S. withdrawal is complete.

When it was clear that Kabul had fallen, after checking on my family I fled my house and sought shelter with a neighbor because I feared the Taliban would come looking for me. And they did. That week, fighters came to my home.

A relative told me later by phone that she told the Taliban fighters who knocked on the door she was just a cleaner, that the family had left a week earlier. They came back an hour later, and my relative gave the same explanation. The fighters told her to pass along a message: They were looking for me and I needed to get in touch. If I didn’t, what happened next would be my own fault.

That encounter only reinforced my fear that I face imminent danger. I also come from a military family; my father was in the army and fought the Taliban. Working for transparency and democracy was my way of demonstrating the patriotism and morality my father taught me.

Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

I worked on USAID-funded projects to support and observe Afghanistan’s electoral process for nearly three years. I am now employed by an international nonprofit. My former employer submitted the paperwork for my special immigrant visa and then for the P-2 visa program, for Afghans who worked for American contractors, nonprofits and news outlets. A U.S. lawmaker wrote a letter urging that I be granted immediate access to the airport and put on a flight.

But that never happened. Now the airlifts have stopped.

With the Taliban takeover, Afghans are now in the same situation we were 20 years ago. All the work we did — and all the money, equipment and training paid for by the United States — was a waste.

Despite the many challenges that faced Afghanistan during the U.S. occupation, we had a normal life. We were optimistic about our children’s futures. Now, we see no future. My daughters most likely will not be able to complete their education. We will be forced to live under the Taliban’s ideological and cultural constraints, which we do not believe in.

We no longer feel safe and secure. The only hope we had was to leave and start a new life. That dream has become a nightmare. There is no life anymore; people are just breathing.

The Taliban have said that they will respect human rights and the rights of women, but we do not expect that to last. Their current tone is probably due to international pressure and the desire for international recognition of their rule. Once they achieve that, I believe they will switch their tune and their true ideology will emerge.

Already our daily lives have been disrupted. Food prices have surged and our currency has lost value. It’s no longer possible to get a passport, and without a passport, it will be impossible for many Afghans to move to third countries, as we’re now required, to await special humanitarian visas.

Afghanistan is no longer the country I loved. There is no guarantee that the Taliban will honor the assurances they gave the United States to allow eligible Afghans to leave the country.

Still, I will try any possible way to get me and my family out, even if it means losing my life in the process. I will do so for my children’s future."

Opinion | I Worked With the U.S. in Afghanistan. I Thought I Would Be Saved. - The New York Times