The story of Samir Ahmadi’s journey to America could have been written by Charles Dickens. But its author is the 14-year-old Afghan boy who, one week after the Taliban walked into Kabul, found himself walking away from it, jammed with his family and tens of thousands of others on the road leading to Hamid Karzai International Airport. The U.S. government, having pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, had announced that it would airlift two groups: Anyone holding a U.S. passport, and anyone who had worked for the Americans during the previous 20 years. But most of the throng was—like Samir, his parents, his older brother, his younger brother, and their 7-year-old sister—simply terrified of staying behind.
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Then armed men in black turbans, as if to justify their fear, opened fire into the crowd. Samir was still with his parents when they saw a girl fall into a ditch, then a mass of people fall onto the same spot. When they climbed out, she lay dead. This was when, fearing for their own daughter, Samir’s parents decided to turn back.
Samir did not see them go. Only when he paused in the rush and scanned the faces surrounding him did Samir realize that his family was no longer in sight. He considered going back the way he had come, but someone said the Taliban was beating Afghans who came that way. When he finally reached the long line outside the airport gate, Samir approached an American soldier guarding it. He told the soldier’s interpreter that he could not find his family. They could be inside, he said. The soldier asked his age, and, hearing 14, moved him to another entrance. There, Samir began talking with an Afghan family with U.S. passports. When they went inside, so did he.
“Because Americans were taking their families, I made myself look like I was part of that family and I just kind of tagged along,” Samir says.
He had left home with his family at 10 a.m. Now, at midnight, he unwrapped the clothes he had bundled around his phone, saw that his battery was dead, borrowed a charger, and dialed his family. That’s when they told him they had gone home.
The plane he boarded carried Samir from the place that produced the iconic images of the American withdrawal—desperate young men dropping to their deaths after clinging to departing airplanes; the suicide bombing that Donald Trump invoked in the Presidential campaign, for the death of 13 U.S. service members (179 Afghans also perished). But after the chaos at Kabul, the places Samir went next proved, if anything, too ordered.
Of the 122,000 people evacuated from Kabul over 16 days that August, about 1,400 were children without an adult relative. Most of those, 1,200, either were reunited with family in the U.S., or placed in foster care. The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement took the rest—200 children—to live at children’s shelters that had government contracts to house unaccompanied minors. Today, two years later, more than half of those 200 have been reunited with family or fostered. The rest have aged out of the program without family.
The process was not smooth. Though their physical needs were being met, many endured psychological distress. The trauma of their experience was aggravated, on the one hand, by frequent moves between shelters, and on the other, by the rules of those shelters—especially the severe restrictions limiting phone contact with the families they have left behind, according to the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.
Samir’s flight out of Kabul landed in Qatar, the Persian Gulf kingdom where all evacuees were taken into U.S. government custody. After two months and 20 days, he was flown with other young people to Chicago. He remembers watching the snow fall from the window of bus that took him to Albion, Mich., and the 350-acres of Starr Commonwealth shelter.
At the Michigan shelter, Samir was taken to one of the residential cottages where 13 Afghan children were already staying. As soon as he walked in, the staff took his belongings and gave him new clothes to wear. “The clothes felt like clothes from jail. Like for prisoners,” he says.
Starr Commonwealth was founded as a home for runaway boys in 1913. It later become a residential behavioral and treatment facility for children aged 12 to 18. In the spring of 2021, the federal government began leasing the campus to accommodate Central American children who were then crossing the border in large numbers. Starr shifted to housing Afghan children after the fall of Kabul. “In 2021, our campus served as an emergency intake site,” Starr said in a statement to TIME, “but the Office of Refugee Resettlement ran the programming, including staffing, meals and direct care of the children. Starr only served as the landlord and had no role in or responsibility for the ORR program.”
Samir says that in his first week at Starr, staff prevented him from calling his family at all. After that, they allowed him two 10-minute calls and one 15-minute call a week. He focused on his emptiness without his family, as there was little stimulation. The children’s days consisted of breakfast, a Netflix movie, lunch, playing cards, then another movie. They were offered no schooling and allowed outside for just an hour a day.
Samir was anxious to be with his family again. But his older brother, Najib, was the only one with a passport of any kind. Under U.S. policy, he could enter the U.S. because Samir was already living there, and Najib met the criteria of being 21 or younger and unmarried. The process involved four months of interviews with the Department of State. Najib had to propose a plan to support Samir in the U.S. as his legal guardian.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban was threatening to kill anyone who had worked for organizations linked to the U.S. or to the former government. Before it collapsed, Samir’s father had been employed at the Ministry of Interior Affairs. On one of Samir’s rare calls with his parents, wanting to know that his family was safe, Samir stayed on the call for three extra minutes beyond the allotted 10. For the rest of the week, Samir waited anxiously to speak to his parents again. When his turn finally came, the staff forbade him from calling because he had exceeded his allocation the last time.
To understand the rationale for the phone restrictions, the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights interviewed dozens of unaccompanied Afghan minors and shelter staff. What they found, according to Abena Hutchful, the center’s Policy and Litigation Attorney, was that children who had been placed in custody because the U.S. government had failed to ensure that evacuated families remained together, had, upon arrival in America, entered a culture of control and criminalization. “Punishing Trauma” was the title of Young Center report.
Policies for the children were made by former corrections officers or child welfare workers employed by the Office For Refugee Resettlement. “They have worked within cultures of punitive approaches to discipline,” Hutchful said.
Harsh punishment for traumatized children took its toll. Samir and other boys would run away from Starr four or five times a week, sometimes twice a day. When Samir felt most scared about being separated from his family, he would abscond to a lake or hill where he could sit alone and think. His return hours later was usually prompted by a police officer questioning him.
In January 2022, Starr was shut down after abuse allegations. One case involved a 16-year-old who said two workers shoved and yelled at him. Another worker was accused of kicking a boy while he was praying. No charges were brought in either case.
Meanwhile, Samir had been moved to another shelter. In October, he arrived at Samaritas, in Grand Rapids, Mich., which had taken in 19 unaccompanied Afghan minors. Sad to leave the 13 boys at Starr who were his first friends after leaving Kabul, Samir felt reassured when the Samaritas staff told him that all the children there could talk to their families for 10 minutes each and every day.
To make the calls, the staff gave the boys two iPhone 7s. It wasn’t enough. Desperate to connect with their families, the boys fought over phones. “There were a lot of broken noses,” Samir says. “Sometimes they would get mad and they would just take the phone, hit it on the floor and break it.”
The dynamic was understandable to Fatima Rahmati, a youth advocate for unaccompanied Afghan children in New York. She is among dozens of Afghan-Americans, most of whom fled Afghanistan in the 1980s, who have helped the Afghan children in the U.S. shelter system to feel more at home in the absence of their families. One teenager had been through seven different shelters in 10 months, Rahmati says.
“How can we ask a 15-year-old boy, who fled everything he knows, to ‘behave’ when he is angry? Control his anger to the point of docility and if he doesn’t comply, the clock resets on when he has the opportunity to be moved to a less restrictive setting?” she asks.
At Samaritas, Grand Rapids police responded nearly every other day to calls for incidents like missing persons, suicide threats, fights and assaults. Samir stayed for less than three months. After he left, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services began an investigation into reports of Afghan minors being mistreated. Samaritas also was cleared of any abuse allegations by the state and reopened the facility. Samaritas did not respond to requests for comment.
Samir’s third and final shelter was different. At David and Margaret Youth and Family Services in La Verne, Calif., he played football and volleyball, and swam. He cooked meals and walked outdoors.
He had been there six months when the State Department finally gave Najib a visa and a week’s notice to leave Afghanistan. It was July 2022. But during his own stop in Qatar, he tested positive for tuberculosis. The brothers waited another nine months to be reunited, when Najib finally tested negative and traveled onward to the U.S.
Two shelter staffers took Samir to LAX at 1 a.m. to meet Najib’s plane. Afterward, they returned Samir to David and Margaret, where he had to remain until his brother had a full-time job and had officially become Samir’s guardian. That would take another five months. But the minute Najib touched down, on April 4, 2023, Samir felt part of his emptiness disappear.
“I felt relief because finally there was somebody with me,” Samir said. “All this time I was in the huge United States alone.”
Today their lives look American. Three years after the fall of Kabul, the brothers live in a one-bedroom apartment in Anaheim, home of Disneyland. Samir, now 17, attends Magnolia High School; his hair is cut close on the sides and bushy on the top in the fashion known as alpaca. Najib, 23, works nights filling boxes at Amazon.
But at home they speak Dari, and sit on the floor to eat. Every morning before school, Samir calls Afghanistan. Fear of the Taliban is only one of the reasons the first names of his parents and siblings are not in this article. Torpekai Momand, an Afghan immigrant who looks in on the boys, explained that there are thugs in Afghanistan who have kidnapped the relatives of someone who now lives in the U.S., and demanded ransom. His parents, after seeing Najib make his way, acquired passports of their own. But they no longer hear from U.S. officials.
The uncertainty is a new point of stress. One night, Samir cried out in his sleep. In a dream, his mother had died. Four in the morning in California is 3:30 p.m. in Afghanistan, and he reached for his phone. His mother picked right up.
“I just want to see my mom and dad,” Samir says. “I don’t want anything more.”