Editor’s note: SNN first featured Zabihullah “Zabi” Najafi as a Grad with Grit in 2021, and we now check in with him as he graduates college and begins his career, focused on helping refugees.
Wyoming — Zabihullah “Zabi” Najafi can still see the little girl at the El Paso, Texas, border clearly in his head.
“She was crying and saying, ‘Can you please clean my shoes?’ They were full of mud,” he recalled.
Others around her, after a long trek across countries, begged for food and water; some had broken legs from jumping the border fence. All were desperate for help.
Najafi had been with a group of Western Michigan University students in 2023 volunteering at the border as part of the Border Awareness Experience. He spent two weeks there, visiting the U.S. Border Patrol, attending hearings, listening to the stories of migrants and refugees and living in the Annunciation House.
“One day we went to a gym, and we were taking people inside,” he recalled. “There were hundreds of people outside, and it was so hot with no water and no food. I saw people sheltered outside in their tents. I saw kids that were begging for food and water, and we could not help them. We only could take 100 people inside.”
They brought in elderly people, children and those who were injured. They helped translate required documents that were only available in English.
‘If you want to ever change the world you find people who support you along the way.’
— Zabihullah ‘Zabi’ Najafi
The situation, shocking to many, was familiar to Najafi. An Afghan refugee, he had spent seven months in a cramped detention center at age 13, and then 18 months in a shelter in Indonesia, after he fled Afghanistan.
Being at the border reminded him of when he had just arrived in Indonesia and tried to register as an asylum seeker at the International Organization for Migration.
“It was super emotional at the border, because it brought back all the memories that I lived through,” he explained.
‘Find people who support you’
As hard as it was to be there, helping people at the border was something Najafi had to do, he said. He looks back at the past decade and sees the people who helped him after he was resettled in West Michigan and started as a student at Wyoming High School in 2019.
Having graduated in December from Western Michigan University, he now plans to spend his career advocating for immigrants and migrants.
“If you want to ever change the world, you find people who support you along the way,” Najafi said. “My journey in Wyoming started like that. I had people who were kind to me, who understood me for me, who accepted me for me, who heard me and supported me.”
After excelling at Wyoming and graduating in 2021, Najafi received WMU’s Medallion Scholarship, which covered his tuition and made many opportunities in college possible, from study abroad to volunteering on a clean water project, to an internship in Lansing.
He graduated from WMU with a degree in International Comparative Politics with with a focus on global and international studies. Now, with a heart to continue to serve young migrants, he works two full-time jobs, as lead youth specialist at Samaritas, a Christian service organization, and as a youth development specialist with residential services at D.A. Blodgett. He works directly with youth.
“It makes me happy — that may be a selfish reason,” he said of working with youth in foster care. “I feel content going home and saying, ‘Hey, maybe I had just a little bit of an impact.’ … You are doing little by little, step by step, that’s actually huge for them. I think it’s important to be a voice for them, because they don’t have a voice.”
An Advocate for the Displaced, Marginalized
Four and a half years ago, Najafi was preparing to start college when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August 2021. His focus shifted to one thing and one thing only — the safety of his family who remained in Afghanistan. (Read the SNN story.)
“I was ready to take a gap year before I even started, because when everybody was moving in at Western there was beautiful air, trees, beautiful everything, new rooms and roommates, and my mind was 10,000 miles away,” he recalled.
Once his family got across the Afghan border by foot and into Pakistan that September, he could focus better, he said. As a student who had been in the foster care system, he was assigned a campus coach.
“I sat with him and we figured things out with finance, with everything. We came up with a plan where I could take not a lot of classes at first, while I was still working full-time,” he said.
Supporting his family was still his main priority, he said. In high school he also worked full-time at Amway, and in college he worked at Bethany Christian Services in a house he had previously lived in as a client. There were eight Afghan unaccompanied minors in the house.
He inspired one refugee, Sami Ayazi, whom he met at Bethany, to enroll at Wyoming High School.
As the years went by, Najafi hoped to be reunited with his family, including his mother, brother and three sisters, who went through a four-year resettlement process. As of a year ago, they were fully admitted to the Refugee Resettlement Program and their flights were booked.
Najafi had everything set for them. Though he was attending college in Kalamazoo, he rented an apartment in Wyoming with room for all.
Then, “In comes the new (federal) administration and suspends the entire RRP program indefinitely. Their flights were canceled, never to be rescheduled to this day,” he said.
His family, including his older sister, her husband and their three kids, remains in Pakistan, where many Afghans are being deported. While his mother and brother are not able to work, his sisters are allowed to go to school and his brother graduated from high school.
Najafi, now a U.S. citizen, plans to visit his family in Pakistan in March. It has been 11 years since he’s seen them.
“I am counting days right now,” he said.
He looks forward to spending time with them, eating dishes cooked by his mother, including a rice and meat dish called qabli palaw.
“I just want to see them, just connect with them and hug them after a very long time.”
Embracing the Opportunity of an Education
At WMU, Najafi took advantage of the activities and programs available to him.
“I enjoyed my time at Western; I did a lot of extracurricular activities, I loved my major,” he said.
He was on a mock trial team, for which he competed at other colleges and universities; he studied abroad in Iceland and Dominican Republic and served a five-month internship in 2023 with State Sen. Stephanie Chang, on behalf of whom he attended hearings and took constituent calls, among other tasks.
He also worked on a project with Clean Water for the World, making water purification systems for people in Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries.
When he returns from Pakistan, Najafi plans to begin working toward a master’s degree in international affairs. His long-term goal is to work for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“I don’t forget where I came from and how lucky I was to win a lottery ticket to be resettled,” he said. “There are millions of people that never get any resettlement. I have friends that are still in Indonesia that came with me there, and I am still in contact with them.”
Najafi considers the time he spent at Wyoming High School as the underpinning for his life in the U.S.
“I am super grateful that I got to come to Wyoming. I am still in contact with many of my teachers. They were the foundations of college for me and they were really kind to me.”
He pays that forward wherever he goes, he said.
“Moving forward, I tried to carry that to Western and found people who supported me as well. People who were kind. Professors who I went to their office hours not because I needed support, but because I wanted to just chat with them.
“It started with Wyoming: People supported me, and now I can support others.”
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