Organisers of a flight claimed that the Department of Homeland Security denied US landing rights for a charter plane carrying over 100 Americans and US green card holders coming from Afghanistan after evacuating the Taliban seized country. 

“They will not allow a charter on an international flight into a US port of entry,” Bryan Stern, a founder of non-profit group Project Dynamo, talked about the department’s Customs and Border Protection agency to Reuters. 

Stern revealed he had been sitting for 14 hours at Abu Dhabi airport after arriving from Kabul with 117 people, including 59 children.

An administration official said they were “unfamiliar with the matter”, but that the US government follows a certain procedure to verify the manifest of charter planes and that it typically takes time to do so in order to clear them for landing in the United States.

On Monday, a senior State Department official said the United States was aware of about 100 American citizens and legal permanent residents ready to leave Afghanistan.

“Six Americans, 83 green card holders and six people with US Special Immigration Visas granted to Afghans who worked for the US government during the 20-year war in Afghanistan were aboard the Kam Air flight,” Stern said.

It was initially planned that the passengers would be shifted to a chartered Ethiopian Airlines plane for an onward flight to the United States cleared for landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. However, “customs then changed the clearance to Dulles International Airport outside Washington before denying the plane landing rights anywhere in the United States,” he said.

“I have a big, beautiful, giant, humongous Boeing 787 that I can see parked in front of us,” he said. “I have crew. I have food.”

Stern said “intermediaries in Kabul had obtained permission from the Taliban-run Afghan Civil Aviation Authority for the groups to send a charter flight to retrieve the passengers from Kabul airport.”