Saturday marks five years since the Taliban retook Kabul. In Fremont, home to the largest Afghan community in the United States, the date arrives as a double bind: relatives are trapped under a regime that bars girls from school past sixth grade, while the American haven that took evacuees in has spent the past year turning colder.

For the Bay Area — which absorbed many of the tens of thousands flown out during the frantic August 2021 airlift — the five-year anniversary is not only a story about somewhere else. Fremont's "Little Kabul" carries two crises at once: relatives still living under a girls' education ban with no end in sight, and a diaspora here squeezed by parole terminations, ICE door-knocks and a federal freeze on Afghan immigration cases. The refuge and the emergency it once answered are tightening in the same grip.

Nicknamed "Little Kabul," Fremont's Afghan enclave has for decades been among the biggest concentrations of Afghans anywhere in the U.S. (external source, opens in a new tab), with estimates running to 25,000 or 30,000 residents. It is where a large share of the region's recent arrivals resettled after the collapse — the students, interpreters and embassy workers who got a seat on a plane while classmates and cousins did not.

Inside Afghanistan, the picture keeps darkening. UN Women (external source, opens in a new tab) counts more than 100 Taliban decrees restricting women's lives and reports that most women now rarely step outside — roughly half only once or twice in a given month — with seven in 10 rating their mental health "bad" or "very bad." UNESCO puts the number of girls shut out of classrooms at 2.4 million; Afghanistan remains the only nation on earth that formally bans them beyond primary grades, an order that has now held long enough for an entire cohort to age out of adolescence without a day of secondary school.

John Sopko, who ran the federal watchdog office that spent two decades tracking U.S. reconstruction money in Afghanistan, put it bluntly in an interview with CNN (external source, opens in a new tab) this week: "it's hell if you're a woman in Afghanistan," and neither the international community nor the Trump administration was "doing anything at all about it." The network reported that Washington canceled nearly all USAID work in the country in early 2025, erasing more than $1.7 billion in planned aid — a cut that has fallen hardest on the women and girls those programs were meant to reach.

The local charge in the anniversary comes from what has unfolded here. Fremont's community has been targeted repeatedly: in spring, Afghans holding humanitarian parole received Department of Homeland Security letters instructing them to depart, and ABC7 documented (external source, opens in a new tab) ICE agents knocking on doors in a heavily Afghan neighborhood. After a November shooting in Washington attributed to an Afghan national, the government said it would halt all immigration processing for Afghans "indefinitely."

Harris Mojadedi, a longtime Bay Area Afghan activist, called that response "collective punishment based on identity or nationality," telling ABC7 it amounted to "xenophobia" and "racism," and describing neighbors afraid to shop at an Afghan grocery or attend a mosque. State Sen. Aisha Wahab — whose district takes in part of Fremont, and who ranks among the highest-placed Afghan Americans in office — vowed to "hold every elected official accountable" for turning the moment to political advantage, arguing that a community with roots in this country going back decades was being scapegoated. The Bay Area legal nonprofit Project ANAR warned that the processing freeze wastes resources re-screening refugees who have already cleared the most exhaustive vetting the government runs.

Five years on, the numbers that define this anniversary aren't only Kabul's. They are also the parole cases, the vetting freezes and the door-knocks that will decide whether the ones who made it out get to stay.