By Jeanine Santucci
There are 24 students and 16 parents from a school district near San Diego, California, stranded in Afghanistan after traveling there to visit family over the summer, school officials said.
They are among about 1,500 Americans still stuck in Afghanistan amid a desperate surge to escape the country since the Taliban took control.
“Many of them were stranded because they couldn’t get to the airport,” Cajon Valley Union School District Director of Family And Community Engagement Mike Serban said.
President Joe Biden said Tuesday that the U.S. is on track to evacuate all American and allied citizens by a deadline of Aug. 31. In order to meet that deadline, U.S. military forces will need to stop evacuating people out of the airport days before their final troop withdrawal, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Tuesday.
That means the window for evacuating refugees and others is even closer than the official end of American presence on the ground.
The Cajon Valley Union School District said in a statement that it first learned students were stuck on Aug. 16, when a family reached out to alert the school that their student would not be present for the first day of classes on Aug. 17 and asked to hold a spot for them.
Since then, the district said: “Students and their parents who traveled to Afghanistan this summer to visit their extended family reached out to their community liaisons for assistance when the crisis in Afghanistan started.”
The students and their families are part of a large community of refugees in El Cajon, California, and went abroad on trips to visit relatives, according to Serban. Serban told USA TODAY that the families are all refugees, all with legal status in the U.S., and some could have gotten their citizenship.
The 28-school district is home to a large resettlement community with origins in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, Serban said. According to The Los Angeles Times, the families from El Cajon trapped in Afghanistan are on a class of immigrant visas that make them allies to the State Department. They attend several different schools within the district.
Serban said the families who resettle in El Cajon are nuclear families with extended relatives remaining in their home countries.
