Good morning. Up against Pakistan’s mass deportations – and Canada’s convoluted immigration system – four young Afghan refugees managed to evade being sent back to the Taliban. More on that below, along with Texas’ redistricting standoff and Air Canada’s financial hit. But first:

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In Islamabad, the knock on the door came late in the morning: five military police, sent to bring 23-year-old Wazhma Hamidi and her three teenage siblings to a detention camp on the outskirts of town. Since 2023, as part of its crackdown on Afghan migrants, Pakistan has expelled some one million people who fled to the country seeking refuge from poverty, repression and the Taliban. Hamidi and her siblings spent years evading this mass deportation campaign – but two months ago, they were herded onto a convoy of buses headed through the Khyber Pass to the Afghan border.

In Toronto, the text arrived at 3:42 a.m.: “We need your help, Doug, they identified us in the apartment.” In those predawn hours, Doug Saunders, The Globe and Mail’s international affairs columnist, immediately began working the phones, enlisting a vast network of diplomats, consular staff and concerned Canadians to help the young Hamidis get out in time.

Saunders and Hamidi recently wrote a remarkable account of those days in early June. I spoke with Saunders about what the siblings went through, why they were a target for the Taliban, and how – in its bid to rescue Afghans – Canada’s immigration system works to fracture families instead.

You met Wazhma Hamidi in January of 2024. What were your first impressions of her?

I spent that month reporting on Afghans hiding in Pakistan in collaboration with Pakistani journalist Zia Rehman. We wanted to talk to Afghans in northern cities who were planning to be smuggled across Iran and Turkey to get out. Zia had heard about Wazhma, a young woman who knew a lot of them and who was fluent in English and the major Afghan languages. Of course, she had this knowledge because she was an Afghan who’d fled in 2021.

Wazhma became one of the most surprising people I’ve met in my reporting. She was very young and very professional and confident, but she was carrying a lot of emotional weight, and it was immediately clear that she had a secret.

On our first day of reporting, Wazhma mentioned her relatives in Mississauga. That itself wasn’t surprising – you can go to the most remote corners of the Earth and someone will tell you about a cousin in the suburbs of Toronto. But after a couple days, she quietly revealed that those relatives were her only surviving parent and her older sister, and that she was the 21-year-old head of a household living underground in Islamabad, whose three other members were all teenagers. They were in considerable danger.

When I visited her and her siblings in the little Islamabad apartment they were hiding in, I was hugely impressed. I saw a very well-run household containing very young people who managed to protect each other, get educations, earn a living and prepare to become Canadians, all while being hunted by both the Pakistani military and Taliban-linked figures.

Why was her family a target for the Taliban?

The first big tragedy in Wazhma’s life was the death of her father to COVID-19 in 2020, in Kabul. They’d been very close, and she nursed him in his last days. Then a second tragedy happened: the Taliban takeover in the summer of 2021. Since all the males in the household were at that point under 18, the Taliban saw them as a family run by women – independent women who had jobs and had worked for Western organizations. That was intolerable to the Taliban.

On top of that, relatives of the Hamidi family who were loyal to the Taliban wanted to force Wazhma into marriage to one of their sons. They found out the Hamidi kids’ address in Islamabad, forcing the four of them to move to a new apartment in the summer of 2024.

Wazhma’s older sister and mother were both legal residents of Canada. Why couldn’t she and her siblings join them?

Canada’s immigration system is meant to put a premium on bringing over intact families rather than individuals – as it should, since families integrate better, start more businesses and have more successful outcomes. But there are strict limits on who is considered family. And there are big delays and disconnects in the system that mean many families end up separated for years, sometimes forever.

The first member of the Hamidi family to become Canadian was Wazhma’s older sister, Yalda, because she had married Phillip, a Canadian. Yalda brought their mom over in 2023, on a super visa that allows parents to come for five years. There’s no visa like that for siblings. So, the younger brothers and sisters had to stay behind.

Nafisa, the mother, filed a refugee claim upon landing, and it took two years to be approved, making her a permanent resident. Nafisa could have eventually sponsored her dependent children. But a dependent, in immigration rules, means under the age of 22. Wazhma would not qualify.

During 2024 and early 2025, we found a number of refugee routes for Wazhma to come to Canada. Most would have taken a couple years. None of them allowed a refugee to bring along siblings, even if they were children. And Wazhma wasn’t going to leave her siblings alone facing deportation in Pakistan.

So they faced a very dark paradox: With a lot of effort and years of waiting, they could get the three younger siblings to Canada but not Wazhma, or Wazhma but not the children.

Because of all that, it fell to well-connected Canadians to get the Hamidis out of Pakistan. Who intervened in this case?

Once I’d returned from Pakistan last year, I got to know Yalda, Phillip and Nafisa in Mississauga. I also turned to Canadians who’d helped get other endangered Afghans into Canada. The list includes my colleagues Mark MacKinnon and Janice Dickson; many people from organizations that help Afghans and journalists; lawyers who offered to launch court interventions; and Senator Ratna Omidvar, an immigration-policy expert and former refugee herself. Mellissa Fung, the CBC journalist and author, found a rare form of sponsorship that could get three of the four Hamidi kids out. Adeena Niazi, the head of the Afghan Women’s Organization, helped turn those three Hamidi kids into recognized refugees.

On June 3, after Wazhma texted to tell me she and her siblings were being brought to a mass-detention camp to be deported, another large group of people stepped in. Most decisive was Luke Myers, the acting head of the Canadian diplomatic mission in Islamabad, who immediately sent a large number of staff to the camp and to liaise with top officials in the Pakistani government.