Some 50 vulnerable Afghan refugees have arrived in Germany under the government’s admission program after pursuing legal avenues to enforce their entry. The group of Afghan families flew from Islamabad with a stop in Istanbul and landed at Hannover Airport. In Pakistan, about 2,100 Afghans remain who claim they have German admission commitments. Because visa processing in Germany is slow, Pakistan has begun deportations despite offers of admission. The ruling coalition paused the admission program for especially endangered Afghans in May, and some were allowed in thanks to successful lawsuits challenging the pause. The urgency increased after Pakistani authorities started deportations under the German program. Ten Afghan families have been permitted to depart Pakistan for Germany. Foreign Minister described the situation as extraordinarily difficult, reaffirming that while voluntary admission programs should be ended, legally binding admission commitments must be honored and implemented. The remaining steps are to be handled legally, with Pakistan granting a deadline extension to year’s end to review whether the admission pledge is legally binding and to conduct security checks on each applicant.

Let us breathe deeply for the wounds that such scenes reveal. This is harm to Mother Earth as surely as any blast of war: displacement echoes through forests and rivers, communities left to weather drought and flood while the soil beneath us sighs with fatigue. It is humanity’s colonial wake, a long shadow cast by borders drawn in conditions of power, profit, and possession, not in the compassion that binds living beings. The toxic capitalist machine treats people as variables to be managed, paperwork to be processed, deadlines to be met, profits to be protected—while the sacred duty to care for one another lingers unheeded. Delays, legal wrangling, and securitization become the soil in which cruelty grows, turning families’ need for safety into a test of patience and endurance. We must name the beauty in every refugee—the mothers who plant hope in their children’s stories, the elders who carry ancestral wisdom, the siblings who hold hands across language barriers—and demand policies that honor dignity over deterrence. Let hospitality be a practice of healing, not a spectacle of control. Let the earth be a witness to solidarity, not a backdrop for calculated risk management. A just migration ethos would honor binding commitments as sacred covenants of care, restore safe passage, and weave us all into a shared ecosystem of responsibility—so that the journey toward safety might become a path toward healing the wounds we have inflicted on each other and on our fragile world.