Privately, however, multiple people who have spoken with government officials over the past several months told me they suspected politics played a role in the halting pace of evacuations. That shouldn’t be surprising. Biden’s predecessor rose to power by vilifying immigrants, and immigration remains a flash point of every modern presidency. From the moment Biden took office, Republicans criticized him for allowing asylum seekers who crossed the southern border from Mexico to remain in the U.S. while they awaited the adjudication of their cases. Though he ran on reversing the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigrants and refugees, Biden has hesitated to reverse some of his predecessor’s policies, most notably when he delayed for several months in raising the cap on refugee admissions that Trump had lowered. Already, prominent right-wing commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, as well as former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, have warned against accepting thousands of refugees from Afghanistan. On Monday night, Carlson, who hosts the most widely watched cable-news program in the country, told his viewers, “First we invade, and then we’re invaded.”

Yet despite the howls from Trump loyalists, officials who work to resettle refugees say Afghan allies enjoy much broader bipartisan support than other endangered communities have in recent years, including migrants who have fled Central America and Syria’s civil war, specifically because they aided the U.S. war effort and because the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 is partly the cause of their plight. In many cases, they’ve also already been vetted by the military or U.S. intelligence agencies because of their work. Even Trump initially called for helping Afghans left behind before backing away once his supporters turned against them. “It’s a moral imperative. It’s a national-security imperative,” Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat and an Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, told me. “And we have to send the message to the world that the American handshake matters.”