Michael D. ShearVerified account

Many refugees waited for hours at Dulles as customs officers struggled to process them. “The majority of flights have waited in excess of 12 hours,” according to government documents — longer than the flight from overseas.

Zainullah Zaki and his family arrived in Qatar on Aug. 18, where they remain at the military base. There is one small bed where his daughter sleeps, but the rest of his family — he and his wife and three other children — sleep on the floor without blankets or pillows.

A 25-year veteran of the State Department was told to “work the gate” in Kabul. She described being sandwiched between security forces at all times while Afghan security forces swung sticks studded with nails at the crowd.

Aug. 29, 13 flights landed at Dulles carrying 3,842 people, including six refugees who tested positive for the coronavirus and six unaccompanied boys: four teenagers, one younger school-age boy and one toddler. Flight CMB 581, which landed that day, carried 240 passengers.

A 19-month-old child, who arrived from Kabul with “pre-existing conditions,” died at the air base amid ongoing concerns about dehydration, norovirus and cholera among the refugees.

A private charter plane from Mazar-i-Sharif arrived at the air base in Doha with no notice, carrying no American citizens but hundreds of Afghans. The manifest for the plane, apparently chartered by an ex-Marine’s law firm, offered “no clarity” about its passengers.

Two hundred and twenty-nine unaccompanied children were being held in Qatar, including teenage boys who bullied younger children. There were a “large number of pregnant women,” some of whom needed medical attention, and increasing reports of “gastrointestinal issues.”

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The effort is designed to help people, but also to quell an angry rebellion among progressive Democrats who had blamed the president for letting the previous moratorium expire without find a new solution.

“This moratorium is the right thing to do to keep people in their homes and out of congregate settings where COVID-19 spreads,” Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director said. “Such mass evictions and the attendant public health consequences would be very difficult to reverse.”