Between 2001 and 2019, asylum seekers from Afghanistan have constituted a majority of boat arrivals to Australian shores. Fleeing the political turmoil in Afghanistan brought on by the War on Terror, asylum seekers met punitive border policies upon reaching Australia, being sent to offshore detention centers on the islands of Manus and Nauru, with a majority eventually being resettled on the Australian mainland. In 2012, however, the Australian government intensified this policy—any boat arrival would not only be detained, but they would never be resettled in Australia and could be held in detention indefinitely. For the first wave of Afghans who had been resettled, witnessing their family members live through inhumane conditions from afar was tragic but also politically galvanizing. Many formed advocacy organizations that joined the movement to end offshore detention and advocate for immigration policy reform, while others found ways to expedite their family members’ individual asylum claims as they experienced the fragmentation and erosion of their family relations. This paper is a preliminary discursive and historical analysis of the intimate effects of carceral border policies on Afghan diasporic political consciousness. It examines how recently resettled Afghan refugees’ separation from their families shaped the political questions they ask about border control, carcerality, war, and Australian neo-colonialism. The paper is interested in how witnessing carcerality operate from afar generates critical reflections on refuge and the aftermath of war. It asks what does it mean to experience refuge in a place that participates in both imperial war and neo-colonial forms of extraction through carceral economies of border-making in the South Pacific? By turning to the affective and the intimate, the paper seeks to extend the geography of where carceral logics begin and end and how the personal becomes political for Afghan Australians. This paper aims to lay the groundwork for a long-term ethnographic project on refugee rights activism in the Afghan Australian diaspora during the Global War on Terror.