KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – An Afghan national living in the United States has been sentenced to 35 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to producing and possessing child sexual abuse material and facing state charges related to the sexual assault of minors in Texas.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas said Badshah Sahi, 21, was sentenced on September 29 to 420 months in federal prison. His federal sentence will run consecutively to outstanding state proceedings. Sahi pleaded guilty to the federal charges on April 1.
According to court documents, Sahi was arrested by police in Forney, Texas, on February 28, 2025, on a state charge of sexual assault of a child. Investigators said that while living in Arlington, Texas, he had been communicating with a 14-year-old girl.
Authorities said Sahi picked the girl up outside her home in Forney and took her to different locations where he sexually assaulted her.
Investigators also found evidence that Sahi had communicated with a 15-year-old girl in San Marcos, Texas. According to prosecutors, he travelled to the girl’s location and recorded himself sexually assaulting her.
A search of Sahi’s mobile phone following his arrest uncovered numerous images and videos involving a prepubescent child, as well as communications with other minors online, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
In at least one case, investigators found that Sahi used the online gaming platform Roblox to communicate with a 10-year-old child in Indiana and coerced the child into creating and sending sexually explicit videos at his direction. Court records indicate that Sahi learned the child’s age during their communications.
The investigation involved Homeland Security Investigations’ Dallas office, as well as the Arlington and Forney police departments and sheriff’s offices in Green and Hays counties.
Ryan Raybould, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said the sentence sends a strong message that people who sexually exploit children will be prosecuted.
Antwoine Jones, acting special agent in charge of HSI Dallas, described Sahi as a dangerous sex offender and said he had been allowed into the United States during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan without adequate vetting. Jones said Sahi subsequently preyed on children in North Texas and online.
Sahi entered the United States in September 2021 during the large-scale evacuation of Afghans following the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. According to HSI, he was paroled into the United States on September 5, 2021.
The circumstances of Sahi’s entry come amid broader scrutiny of the U.S. screening process for Afghans evacuated in 2021. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has said Afghan evacuees were subject to a multilayered screening process involving biometric and biographic checks by several federal agencies before entry.
However, a 2022 DHS Office of Inspector General review found that authorities encountered significant obstacles in screening and vetting evacuees during the emergency evacuation. The report said some critical biographic information was inaccurate, incomplete or missing and that U.S. Customs and Border Protection admitted or paroled some evacuees who had not been fully vetted. The review covered more than 79,000 Afghan evacuees who entered the United States between July 2021 and January 2022.
The U.S. government launched Operation Allies Welcome in August 2021 to coordinate the processing and resettlement of vulnerable Afghans following the fall of Kabul. The program involved multiple federal agencies and provided evacuated Afghans with immigration processing, medical services and resettlement assistance.
The case against Sahi is therefore also likely to draw renewed attention to the challenges the United States faced in rapidly screening and processing tens of thousands of Afghans during the 2021 evacuation. His conviction and sentence, however, concern his individual criminal conduct and do not establish wrongdoing by Afghan evacuees generally.
