An Afghan father of six who spent years working alongside U.S. Special Forces is dead — and he died in an immigration detention facility in Texas, less than a day after federal agents took him into custody.
Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 13, 2026, and pronounced dead at 9:10 a.m. the following morning at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. His family says he had no known health issues going into that detention. He never came home.
A Former Ally, An Expired Parole
Paktiawal’s connection to the United States wasn’t incidental — it was forged in a war zone. He had worked with U.S. Army Special Forces in Paktika province, Afghanistan, starting in 2005, the kind of service that puts a target on your back for the rest of your life if you stay. When the Taliban retook Kabul in 2021, he was among the thousands evacuated. He was paroled into the U.S. that same year under a humanitarian program designed for people exactly like him.
That parole expired in August 2025. He had a pending asylum case — the legal machinery of his situation still grinding forward — when ICE arrested him in March. ICE has since confirmed that Paktiawal had a SNAP fraud charge from September 2025 and a theft arrest from November 2025 on his record. Neither charge, it’s worth noting, carried a conviction at the time of his death.
What Happened Inside Custody
It moved fast. After his arrest on March 13, Paktiawal began complaining of shortness of breath and chest pain while in ICE custody. He received medical treatment — including epinephrine for a swollen tongue, a detail that raises its own uncomfortable questions — but his condition deteriorated. CPR was performed. It didn’t work. He was declared dead the next morning.
His family’s statement, shared by the advocacy group AfghanEvac, was brief and devastating. “Right now our family is trying to comfort six children who have lost their father,” they said. Six kids. That’s the number you keep coming back to.
One Death in a Troubling Pattern
How bad has it gotten? Paktiawal’s death was the 12th in ICE custody in 2026 — a rate of roughly one person dying every six days since January, according to data tracked by immigration researchers. That pace, if it holds, would make this one of the deadliest years in the modern history of immigration detention.
Still, context matters, and the government will point to its own. ICE noted Paktiawal’s criminal history as part of its public response — the fraud charge, the theft arrest — framing his detention as legally justified. That’s not nothing. But it also doesn’t fully explain a 41-year-old man with no known health problems dying inside a detention facility within 24 hours of arriving.
The Bigger Question
There’s an uncomfortable irony sitting at the center of this story that’s hard to ignore. The United States spent two decades asking Afghans like Paktiawal to risk their lives in service of American military objectives. He did. He relocated his family. He filed his asylum case. And then, while that case was still pending, he died in U.S. government custody — not in Paktika province, but in Dallas, Texas.
Advocates for Afghan evacuees have been sounding alarms about parole expirations and the legal limbo that thousands of former allies now find themselves in. Paktiawal’s case is, in the most brutal sense, what that limbo can look like at its worst.
Six children are waiting for answers that, at the moment, no one seems to be rushing to provide.
