The UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi’s recent visit to Pakistan is said to have prompted the decision.

Grandi conducted discussions with high-ranking officials, including Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and Afghan refugees in Peshawar and Haripur, while here.

With reference to humanitarian considerations, the head of UNHCR asked the Pakistani government to halt the return of undocumented immigrants.

Until June 22, 620,981 Afghan nationals who were in the country illegally resumed their return home as a result of this decision.

Thirteen,815 Afghans, comprising five,014 men, four,087 women, and four,714 children, returned home between the eleventh and the twenty-first of September.

This is a good time to point out that on October 3, 2023, the National Action Plan’s (NAP) upper committee met under the chair of Anwaarul Haq Kakar, the country’s caretaker prime minister at the time. The committee gave all foreign nationals living in the country illegally until October 31 to leave voluntarily or risk deportation.

Through the frontiers of Torkham and Chaman, more than 500,000 illegal Afghans have returned home since the deadline expired.

Other nations, such as the US and the UK, as well as Afghanistan, also criticised Pakistan, but the country denied all of the accusations and insisted that the only people being deported were illegal Afghan residents in order to reduce the country’s rising crime rate.