 "Police conduct a search and verification drive for undocumented Afghan nationals, on the outskirts of Karachi. Reuters file")
Months after Pakistan deported millions of undocumented Afghans, the government is charting out a plan to begin the second phase of repatriation aimed at sending back one million people to Afghanistan.
According to a report by Dawn, the Interior Ministry has already issued directives to district authorities and police to expedite the mapping, and collecting data on the whereabouts of the Afghan Citizen Card (ACC) holders before the March 25 deadline.
The first such drive was launched in November 2023. Officials familiar with the matter said that although no date has been set to launch the next phase of the exercise, hundreds of thousands of ACC holders could be sent back to Afghanistan by mid-summer following approval from the federal government.
“We have already started the mapping process, Abid Majeed, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s additional chief secretary,” told the newspaper.
“It will pick up the pace after Ramazan and we hope to complete the survey before April 30,” he added.
According to UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, there are 2.18 million documented Afghan refugees in Pakistan. This includes the 1.3 million refugees holding Proof of Registration (PoR) cards as per the census carried out in 2006-07, as well as an additional 8,80,000 refugees granted ACCs following a registration drive in 2017.
Amid mounting pressure to speed up the repatriation of undocumented Afghans in the face of a low exit headcount, officials approached the Ministry of Interior soon afterward wondering about the origin of the 1.7m undocumented Afghans’ claim and sought revalidation of the figure.
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More ShortsNo one knows how many of the 8,80,000 ACC holders remain in the country, or how many of them have opted to return to Afghanistan voluntarily.
With inputs from PTI