Bryan Stern, himself a veteran and the organizer of the evacuation flight, said that the flight took off from the international airport in Kabul but then was held on the tarmac in Abu Dhabi for roughly 14 hours with 117 people on board, including 59 children.

"Right now we have 59 children sleeping on airport chairs and cold airport floors — not the warm bed with a hot meal that we’d arranged for all of them stateside — because the US Government denied our flight clearance into ALL US ports of entry," said Project Dynamo, which is in charge of the evacuation flight, according to a post on the organization’s Instagram page.

"They escaped the regime they were running from only to have the government they were running HOME TO, turn them away. This cannot be what America does to Americans," the post adds.

In a Rooters interview, Stern said the initial plan was to transfer all of the passengers to an Æthiopian Airlines flight charted to fly into JFK International in New york. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection then switched clearance to Dulles before barring the flight altogether.

Rooters said that a Biden administration official claimed the reason for the delay is that it takes time to confirm manifests of charter flights before they are permitted to land in the U.S., but that seems arbitrary given that DHS had cleared the flight to land twice before banning it altogether. What’s more, the flight is filled with American citizens as well as Afghans who have already been cleared to the point of being given green cards and SIVs.