New York Times Editor Says Biden Administration Was Absent in Evacuation of Afghan Employees

A New York Times editor said Thursday that the Biden administration was “of no help” in securing visas for her team as they planned their evacuation from Afghanistan during the 2021 withdrawal of United States forces.

Rebecca Blumenstein, the deputy managing editor who oversaw the newsroom’s evacuation, said during an Institute of Politics forum that the Times tried for several weeks to get visas for 124 Afghan employees and their relatives as the troop withdrawal date loomed — but did so without assistance from the U.S.

“It was such a chaotic moment that we were on our own. There’s no other way to put it,” Blumenstein said during the talk, a preview of her forthcoming book with journalist Dianna Kapp on the evacuation and resettlement effort of the Times’ Afghan bureau.

Blumenstein said she turned to unexpected sources for help with the evacuation effort, including former Trump administration official Matt Pottinger, Qatar’s deputy foreign minister, and Mexico’s foreign minister. She was eventually able to get the refugees to Qatar and Mexico City, and then redirected to Houston, Texas through a process called humanitarian parole.

“We have to find a way to get them out. We have to find a country that’s going to accept them,” Blumenstein recalled thinking at the time. “It could not be the U.S. And it was clear that they were going to be of no help.”

Blumenstein and Kapp described the lead-up to and aftermath of harrowing withdrawal on a Thursday panel alongside Marshal Raim, a brother of a Times employee and one of the Afghan refugees who relocated to the U.S. in 2021. It was moderated by Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Ellen Nakashima.

The Biden administration’s chaotic handling of the withdrawal was widely panned at the time and is the subject of a forthcoming Defense Department review. Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, fell to the Taliban days before the final withdrawal date of U.S. and NATO trips, leaving thousands of refugees desperate to escape the country. Blumenstein said Times employees were among them.

“It was a mad dash do-it-yourself scramble to get them out,” Blumenstein said. “They went to the airport two nights, two days in freezing conditions, and then searing heat. And we were trying so hard to get the U.S. military to let us onto the side of the airport.”

The panelists said the speed of the Taliban takeover shocked those in the Times bureau. Raim said that she had 30 minutes to pack her backpack before her brother came to take her to the airport.

“We left our country without saying goodbye to our loved ones,” Raim said. “It’s not only my family who left in the same way. It’s the story of thousands of Afghans who had to rush to the airport and leave everything that they had known for their whole life behind just to be safe.”

Raim and the other refugees received green cards to rebuild their lives in the U.S. But the Trump administration stopped processing asylum applications and visas for Afghans late last year, and Kapp said many still live in fear of harsh immigration enforcement.

Kapp said the support network provided by local Americans filled in for the lack of assistance from the federal government.

“It does not mean that there aren’t many individuals, many more than you could imagine, that are doing the right thing, and they continue to lean in, and it’s such a hopeful part of America,” Kapp said.

“It’s the efforts of individuals, I really believe, more than government programs, that are going to help us move forward,” she added.