A court in the U.S. state of Texas has sentenced a 21-year-old Afghan man to 35 years in prison on charges of multiple counts of sexual abuse and assault of children, as well as the production and possession of child sexual abuse material.<\/p>\n
Police said the man was convicted after he pleaded guilty to the charges earlier this spring. U.S. Homeland Security Investigations identified him as Badshah Sahi.<\/p>\n
According to court documents, police arrested Sahi on February 28, 2025, on charges of sexually assaulting a child. Investigators said he had been in contact from his residence in Arlington with a 14-year-old girl, picked her up from outside her home in Forney, and took her to various locations.<\/p>\n
Police added that a search of the defendant\u2019s phone uncovered numerous images and videos of a minor girl, as well as messages with other children. According to court records, in at least one case Sahi used an online gaming platform to pressure a 10-year-old child in Indiana into producing and sending sexual videos at his direction; police said he knew the child was underage.<\/p>\n
Court documents also show that he was in contact with a 15-year-old girl in San Marcos, Texas, and visited her residence. Investigators said he filmed himself sexually assaulting the girl there.<\/p>\n
U.S. officials said Badshah Sahi was admitted to the United States on September 5, 2021, as U.S. forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan, under the Biden administration\u2019s evacuation programme for Afghan partners who had worked with the United States. In a statement, Homeland Security Investigations claimed he entered the U.S. “without proper screening and vetting” and then harmed children in North Texas and online.<\/p>\n
Antoine Jones, the acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Dallas, described the man as “dangerous” and said law enforcement, working with local agencies, was able to arrest him so he would spend the next 35 years in prison. Ryan Raybould, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, also said people accused of sex crimes against children would not find a “safe haven” in the district and would face federal prosecution.<\/p>\n
The same statement said post-withdrawal relocation programmes after the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan led to the resettlement of about 190,000 Afghan citizens in communities across the United States. It also said that after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, the White House issued orders to change immigration policy and, under one of those orders, entry for nationals of 12 countries, including Afghanistan, was restricted because of what the U.S. government called “deficiencies in security screening and vetting processes.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Texas court sentences an Afghan man to 35 years for child sex abuse and exploitation charges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23319,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}