Month: January 2026

Only 33 of Colorado’s 64 counties have an emergency shelter program specifically for survivors of domestic violence. In the greater Denver area, which includes Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas and Jefferson counties, there are only five shelter programs for survivors.

I study the policies and programs that serve survivors of domestic violence. In 2020, I created the most up-to-date registry of domestic violence shelter programs in the U.S. These programs are hugely impactful for their clients, but not every survivor in need is able to find an open shelter bed. In fact, most U.S. counties lack a specific shelter for victims of domestic violence.

One in three women in the United States experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Every day, thousands of survivors are not able to get the housing assistance they need at existing programs due to funding and resource limitations, according to the annual Domestic Violence Counts Report.

Domestic violence survivors regularly cite safe and secure housing as one of their most pressing needs. Women who experience intimate partner violence are four times as likely to be housing unstable as women who have not been abused by a partner.

Yet, housing-insecure survivors face a startling lack of options for safe places to turn. One of the most well-known and longest-standing service options are what are known as emergency domestic violence shelters. These front-line service providers can house survivors safely for between 30 and 60 days. In addition to emergency housing, shelter programs often offer complementary services such as counseling and legal aid. But these shelters are limited, and so is affordable housing.

Limited housing for survivors

The biggest arm of the federal social safety net for long-term housing is the Housing Choice Voucher, often called Section 8. These vouchers help low-income, disabled and elderly beneficiaries to rent housing up to a predefined fair market amount.

With a voucher, households pay about 30% of their income in rent, and the voucher covers the remainder. For domestic violence survivors who need long-term housing, subsidized housing vouchers can provide support beyond a short-term shelter stay. Long-term housing helps set up survivors for successful and affordable independent living.

In many U.S. communities, however, demand for vouchers is far greater than supply. Roughly half of people who ultimately receive a voucher wait at least two years to get one. In Colorado, the average wait time was 14 months as of 2024. Most public housing authorities in Colorado open their waitlists for only a few days each year, leaving potential applicants waiting months just to get in line.

Even when service providers such as shelter advocates or housing navigators have access to money, it can be difficult to spend on behalf of their clients. High housing costs and landlord bias against survivors can make it challenging to place survivors in long-term housing that survivors can afford in the long run, even when they do have a Housing Choice Voucher.

In Denver, the fair market rent defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for a two-bedroom apartment is US$2,089. In order to afford that apartment independently without being rent burdened – defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as spending no more than 30% of total household income on rent – a survivor would need to earn $6,963 per month, or more than $83,000 per year. For a single-income household, this would mean earning more than $40 per hour while working full time.

For housing-insecure victims of domestic violence, many of whom are fleeing with children, this is an untenable housing cost. In a survey of 3,400 residents at 215 emergency domestic violence shelters conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut and the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, 78% had a child under age 18 and 68% had a child with them in the shelter. The same survey found that the majority of sheltered residents had, at most, a high school education.

Barriers to safe housing

When there isn’t an emergency shelter in their area, or if the local shelter is full, many domestic violence shelter programs are still able to offer survivors nonresidential services such as legal assistance and safety planning. Nonshelter programs like the Rose Andom Center in Denver also support survivors who need help connecting to resources, but their ability to support victims at risk of homelessness beyond a few days is limited.

Other types of housing supports introduce new problems for survivors. Emergency homelessness shelters often have restrictions to entry. The restrictions include not allowing clients to bring all of their belongings or requiring sobriety. Many of these organizations, including the Denver Rescue Mission, are open only to men or women without children and operate only overnight, leaving folks with nowhere to go during the day.

Domestic violence service providers may be able to pay for a survivor to stay in a hotel for a few days, but hotels can be unsafe, unclean and retraumatizing. For example, hotels lack the kinds of security systems and cameras that are common at emergency domestic violence shelters to prevent abusers from contacting survivors staying there.

Survivors of domestic violence also face the same general housing challenges as those not fleeing violence: an affordability crisis in rentals, necessary time to find a place, and security deposits and moving costs. Yet the nature of domestic violence means these challenges are more intractable.

For example, survivors who share custody of children with their abusers must get permission from the child’s other parent, and often the court, in order to move. Domestic violence makes it more likely that survivors will have a history of evictions, making finding housing even more challenging.

With limited shelter availability and long waits for long-term housing assistance such as Section 8, housing-insecure survivors of domestic violence can find themselves with few safe, stable options. This can mean that survivors looking to separate from their abusers are not able to leave – subjecting them, and their children, to further violence.

Kaitlyn M. Sims receives funding from the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, the Arnold Ventures Foundation, and the Institute for Humane Studies.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In January 2025, Seema received an email from the International Organization for Migration saying that her flight from Pakistan to the United States, which she and her family were booked on after months of extensive interviewing and background checks by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, had been canceled.

“We had sold our TV and refrigerator,” her husband, Samir, told me during an interview for my dissertation project on Afghan migration to America after the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. “We had told our landlord that we were vacating our apartment. Then it was all canceled.”

The U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 triggered a rapid political collapse that left millions of Afghan civilians in limbo. As the Taliban swept across the country and reclaimed power, Afghans who had worked alongside U.S. forces and international NGOs faced immediate danger.

Women, minorities and human rights advocates feared the loss of basic freedoms and possible Taliban reprisals. With evacuation pathways unclear and protections unevenly applied, panic spread as families tried to escape before they were cut off entirely.

Seema, Samir – pseudonyms to protect their identity – and their children are among tens of thousands of Afghan refugee families who immediately fled to neighboring Pakistan in late 2021 on the U.S. government’s recommendation for Afghans to process their immigration cases in third countries. However, many Afghans soon encountered Pakistan’s mass deportation campaign, underway since 2023, as they awaited U.S. resettlement.

Following the fall of Kabul in 2021, President Joe Biden directed the federal government to launch Operation Allies Welcome and other immigration pathways in an effort to resettle Afghans who had worked for U.S. forces and were at risk of being targeted by the Taliban. Beginning in early 2025, however, the U.S. refugee system retreated from the commitments U.S. leaders once made to protect Afghan civilians.

The costs of suspension

Until recently, some Afghans waiting in Pakistan hoped they would eventually be resettled in the United States through the few humanitarian pathways still open to them. However, that hope has dimmed.

The suspension of U.S. refugee resettlement during the first days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, along with additional immigration restrictions issued after the November 2025 shooting of National Guard personnel in Washington, D.C., have frozen the processing of all Afghan cases – including those already approved.

The Trump administration has justified these measures as necessary to protect U.S. safety and national interests.

For families like Seema’s, U.S. policy decisions have left them insecure and abandoned. As a scholar focused on international migration, I believe Seema’s story highlights a common thread among many Afghans stranded in Pakistan: Many of those who supported the U.S. are questioning the worth of the U.S.’s decades-long mission for promoting security, democracy and human rights in Afghanistan.

Exposed to the Taliban’s retaliation, regional deportation regimes and a collapsing refugee protection system, Afghans are holding the U.S. and other international governments responsible for abandoning them.

Caught between abandonment and deportation

Trained as a gynecologist, Seema worked at a private clinic in Afghanistan. And alongside her husband Samir, she served as managing director of an organization that led U.S.-funded projects for women and children.

“We took two projects from the U.S. Embassy,” she told me. “We established a resource center, bought computers, gave girls internet access and trained them in digital literacy.”

That work, funded and promoted by the U.S. government, made Seema and Samir targets. Even before 2021, they received threats from the Taliban. After the Taliban takeover in 2021, the threats escalated.

Fearing for their lives, they fled their home and attempted but failed to enter the Kabul airport multiple times during the chaotic U.S. evacuation in 2021. They ultimately escaped to Pakistan.

In Pakistan, a former colleague at the U.S. embassy recommended Seema for a Priority 2 visa – an immigration pathway created specifically for Afghans who supported U.S.-funded programs.

But when she and Samir tried to follow up with the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan in 2022, they received no response. A few months later they learned that changes to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in early 2022 likely caused their referral to be lost.

As U.S. processing stalled, Pakistan’s stance toward Afghan refugees hardened. Since late 2023, the Pakistani government has accelerated deportations under its “Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan” that targets both undocumented Afghans and those who once held legal refugee status. More than 1 million Afghans have already been deported.

Human rights groups warn that these removals violate the principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits returning people to countries where they face serious harm. Under Taliban rule, women’s rights, employment opportunities and personal safety in Afghanistan have been systematically diminished.

Yet while Pakistan deports, the U.S. and other countries where Afghan refugees had once been able to resettle, including Germany, continue to close their doors.

A promise made, then suspended

In 2024, the U.S government accepted Seema’s refugee resettlement case, which she submitted in late 2022 with the assistance of SHARP, a local organization in Pakistan that works to protect Afghan refugees amid the country’s intensifying immigration crackdown. After several rounds of interviews, background checks, biometrics and medical exams, she and her family were told they would soon leave for the U.S.

Then the cancellation email arrived.

Seema and her family fear for their safety and their children’s future. Their children can no longer go to a school in Pakistan, as many Pakistani schools refuse to enroll Afghan students.

Police raids across major cities have also forced Afghan families to stay indoors, afraid to work or move freely. With no stable income, Seema and Samir struggle to meet basic needs.

“When I came to Pakistan, I was 40 years old,” Samir said. “Now I’m 44. Four years of my life have gone waiting for the U.S. case.” His voice hardened with anger. “We worked with the U.S. for 20 years. We fought terrorism. We supported democracy. What was the benefit?”

For decades, the U.S. government relied on the critical leadership of Afghan civilians like Seema and Samir to promote peace, security and women’s empowerment.

These partnerships were not symbolic. They were deeply embedded in everyday Afghan life.

With a smile on her face, Seema said that before 2021 “it never crossed my mind to leave Afghanistan because we were helping people in our country.”

Seema now fears being forced to return to Afghanistan, where her work and identity place her at grave risk of being targeted by the Taliban. Her request is modest. “At least let those whose cases were approved, whose flights were booked, resettle in the U.S.,” she said.

Her plea echoes across Pakistan, where thousands of Afghan families remain stranded.

Their lives now hinge on policy choices that will determine whether the United States honors the obligations it made during two decades of intervention that reshaped Afghan lives and livelihoods.

Mehr Mumtaz receives funding from the Russell Sage Foundation Dissertation Grant, and the Mershon Center for International Security’s Graduate Research Grant.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation