Dem Rep. Calls Biden’s New Afghan Refugee Policy ‘A Step Backwards’ While Our Allies Are Being ‘Hunted Down by the Taliban’

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who served multiple combat tours in Iraq with the Marines, was critical of a newly-announced Biden administration policy regarding resettlement of Afghan refugees, telling MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell it was a “step backwards.”

Mitchell introduced the segment by noting that 160,000 Afghans who had helped the U.S. were still stranded in the country, along with their families, after the “chaotic withdrawal” of American troops. Many of these people worked as translators for our military and State Department officials, “providing critical intelligence and cultural information.”

The MSNBC anchor mentioned to Moulton that she had been interviewing several of these Afghan refugees about their struggles to get out of the country and find work.

“Over 100,000 Afghans, allies of ours, are stuck there and being hunted down by the Taliban as we speak,” said Moulton, who has long been an outspoken advocate for assisting the Afghan translators who assisted our troops.

“This is very personal for veterans,” he added. “Also for the press who served in Afghanistan and used many of these translators as well, the aid workers who put their lives in the hands of the Afghan allies. The deal we made with them was that they could put their lives in our hands. We would have their backs and get them out to safety if the time came. And we have yet to live up to that promise.”

“In your service in Iraq, how important would the translators be to you?” Mitchell asked. “Did you have personal experience where they may have literally saved you from danger?”

“Oh, my gosh, it felt like almost every day,” Moulton replied, saying these translators were “critical elements of our team” and “became like brothers and sisters to us.”

It was important to keep the promises we made to these translators, Moulton continued, because future American troops would have to continue to put their lives in the hands of local allies, and “we need to be able to prove to them that they can trust us.”

“There’s new reporting that the Biden administration is changing the resettlement policy,” said Mitchell, to “focus on reuniting immediate family members with pathways to permanent residency. Is this an improvement? Will this leave some more people
stranded? I’m not clear exactly how it’s going to play out.”

Moulton answered that it was “breaking news” and he was “still trying to understand the details,” but he had serious concerns.

“From everything I have seen so far, this is a step backwards,” the congressman continued, “because the administration is throwing up a new bureaucratic roadblock when they can’t get their existing bureaucracy to work fast enough to save lives. So many Afghans are still stuck…[and] throwing up new bureaucratic roadblocks is not going to help.”

Mitchell commented that she had been told that “part of the problem” was that the program was “not set up for this kind of emergency evacuation” and then had been “completely dismantled” during former President Donald Trump’s term and had to be reestablished by the State Department, but “it never had the infrastructure to deal with this and they are still using that rather than trying to adjust.”

This new program, Mitchell added “does sound like they are going to make it harder to get out,” even though “these are people with targets on their backs.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.