Tolkkinen: Minnesota benefactor runs out of funds and energy to help Afghan families who aided U.S.

Caroline Clarin is tired.

The 58-year-old Otter Tail County woman, who has helped 10 Afghan families find refuge in the United States, has ended her support for three remaining Afghan refugee families waiting in Pakistan to enter the United States.

“I went to Afghanistan in February 2009 and I’ve literally been in a fight-or-flight state about at least 60 percent of the time since then,” she said. “I just, I don’t have anything anymore.”

In a good-hearted country, we would say, “Hey, Caroline, take a well-deserved break. We’ve got this.”

We have the money to do it. We have the space. We have the need. For years, Caroline and her wife, Sheril Raymond, spent their own money to help “Caroline’s guys” — men she worked with on a U.S. agriculture program in Afghanistan — come to the U.S.

At first, the couple did it on their own, determined that the men and their families who worked with her in a U.S. agriculture program in Afghanistan should not be left behind to the not-so-tender mercies of the Taliban. Two families even lived with the couple in their rural Minnesota home. Caroline personally met one man at the Chicago airport to ensure he made it through customs. She took particular pleasure in how the women, deprived of their rights by the Taliban, learned to drive in the U.S. One of them, who had never received an education, learned to read and write and then to speak English. Caroline taught four refugees to drive, herself.

After the Associated Press wrote about Caroline and Sheril’s efforts in 2021, compassionate readers sent them tens of thousands of dollars. But time passed. Donations dwindled. Caroline, who works full time, began to run out of steam. And money.

Up to the last day of 2024, she helped financially support the three families in Pakistan.

One, a provincial official who worked for the government of Afghanistan, has seven children. His wife worked for women’s rights and was a teacher. His sister was a university math teacher. Under the Taliban, the women would have no rights. Caroline said she met them in 2022 when she visited Islamabad, and the man has been unable to find work to support his family.

She was also supporting a family of four. Their father was on her team in Paktika Province in Afghanistan. After the Taliban began taking over, they captured and tortured the man’s nephew in an attempt to learn his location. The nephew didn’t tell them and was killed, and his killers sent pictures to her colleague. He has kept that information from his immediate family, Caroline said.

She said she never worked directly with the father of the third family, but he worked for the same U.S. program after she returned home in 2011. Later, he worked as an agricultural extension agent for a province in Afghanistan.

None of these families have much future in Pakistan, which has been forcibly returning Afghan refugees to Afghanistan. Any work they find pays a pittance, she said. She wishes, desperately, for them to get to the U.S. They have already gone through background checks and health exams and are waiting for final approval.

For months, she has been warning these families that their chances of getting into the U.S. were getting slimmer. They were still surprised this week when she sent them an article about President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for 90 days. Loopholes in his order allow the secretary of state and the secretary of Homeland Security to admit refugees on a case-by-case basis as long as doing so is in the national interest and does not threaten the country’s security or welfare.

Admitting well-vetted refugees is always in our nation’s best interest, especially when they have been our allies and friends. Turning them away hurts us, not only because we lose whatever skills they bring to our economy, and not only because it weakens our allies’ trust in us, but because it hardens us, makes us less compassionate. But anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric has resonated with great swaths of our people.

Maybe, like Caroline, Americans are tired. The constant infighting wears us out. Endless wars have drained our compassion. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few leaves the rest of us feeling like we can never get ahead. But instead of passing fiscal policies that would spread the wealth — such as providing tax breaks to employers who increase worker wages — our country’s leaders blame our problems on the most powerless people.

Four of the families Caroline brought to the U.S. live in west-central Minnesota — two in Fergus Falls, one in Pelican Rapids and one in Moorhead. They have found jobs, they have vehicles, and their kids are doing well in school, she said.

Maybe those three families in Pakistan will end up here someday as well.

I hope so.