More than 165,000 Afghans have fled Pakistan in the month since the country's government ordered 1.7 million people to leave the country or face arrest and deportation, AFP reported.
Most of them rushed to the border in the past few days as the Nov. 1 deadline approached and police began opening dozens of detention centers for arrested Afghans.
Authorities on the Afghan side of the border are overwhelmed by the scale of the exodus as they try to process the returnees - some of whom are setting foot in Afghanistan for the first time in their lives.
"We are constantly in contact with them (Pakistani authorities) and we are asking for more time. People should be allowed to return with dignity," said Khalil Haqqani, the minister for refugee affairs in the Taliban government.
"They should not create difficulties for Afghans, they should not make more enemies," he said at the temporary document processing center.
Taliban authorities set up the center a few kilometers from a border crossing, as well as camps for families with nowhere to go, after the difficulties there created an "emergency situation" for thousands of stranded people, an official said.
At the largest border crossing, Torham in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, officials worked until the early hours of November 2 to clear a queue of 28,000 people that stretched seven kilometers.
Just over 129,000 people have fled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province's interior department said, and a total of 38,100 people have crossed through Chaman in Balochistan province.
As border pressure eased, officials vowed to continue the crackdown on immigration, detaining hundreds of Afghans while encouraging undocumented families to continue to leave voluntarily.
In a police operation in the metropolis of Karachi, more than 100 people were detained, and in Quetta, the city closest to the Chaman border crossing, police detained 425 Afghans.
"I have the necessary document, but this morning the police raided our home and told us they would check our identity cards. We would rather leave than suffer police raids in our homes," said Hamid Khan, a 30-year-old refugee-born potter camp in Peshawar.
In conservative Afghan culture, it is considered a great dishonor for a man who is not a close relative to enter the home when women are present.
After the country's interior minister met with the Afghan ambassador in Islamabad, Pakistan announced that women and children under the age of 14 who leave the country voluntarily will be spared strip searches and biometric scanning at the border, in line with cultural preferences.
Lawyers and rights groups have accused the Pakistani government of using threats, abuse and detention to force Afghan asylum seekers to leave the country, while Afghans have reported weeks of arbitrary arrests and extortion.
"Pakistan's constitution gives every person on this land the right to a fair trial, but these refugees have been denied that right," said Moniza Kakkar, a Karachi-based human rights lawyer. /BGNES
