As the United States winds down its evacuation operation in Afghanistan, the Biden administration is accelerating efforts to resettle Afghans on U.S. soil, where they will be expected to apply for visas or humanitarian protection that could put them on a path to legal residency and citizenship.
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But the chaotic nature of the enormous airlift means that much is unknown: Officials have not said precisely how many Afghan evacuees have made it into the United States or whether all will be allowed to stay.
More than 117,000 people had been evacuated from Afghanistan on U.S. and other flights as of Saturday, and Pentagon officials said the vast majority are Afghan citizens. Thousands have arrived in the United States, while thousands more are waiting in “transit hubs” in Europe and the Middle East. They are a mix of brand-new refugees and families with existing immigration applications that have been pending for months or years.
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Where the evacuees will end up is “a hard question to answer,” said Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, one of the refugee resettlement agencies operating in the United States. “I don’t really know where they stand,” Hetfield said in an interview. “It’s chaos.”
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Afghans have been one of the world’s largest refugee groups for 40 years, with more than 2.2 million having fled violence in their country and registered with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The United Nations runs a formal program that vets refugees — most of whom live in Iran and Pakistan — and attempts to find them permanent homes, a process that can take years.
The U.S.-led airlift stands in stark contrast to that established program and is being carried out with much less preparation. The evacuees are generally Afghans known to the United States, such as former U.S. military interpreters, embassy employees and naturalized U.S. citizens, and their Afghan families.
The Post’s Anne Gearan explains the Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) process for Afghan allies and the bureaucratic jams that hold them up for years. (Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post)
Although the evacuees were likely to have been vetted before, they also are being checked at the airport in Kabul and then airlifted to staging areas in countries such as Italy, Germany, Qatar and Kuwait to undergo additional security screenings.
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Approximately 300 Department of Homeland Security employees from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard have been dispatched overseas to conduct biometric and biographic screenings. Afghans cleared to come to the United States are vetted again upon arrival. Some have been sent back to foreign staging locations after being flagged for security concerns.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — who is leading the U.S. government effort to relocate evacuated Afghans to the United States — directed CBP in a memo last week to admit the Afghan allies for two years on “parole,” a legal authority typically invoked in emergencies, such as the 1996 evacuation of U.S.-backed Iraqi Kurds during President Saddam Hussein’s rule. Each person is being vetted and admitted on a “case-by-case basis,” the memo said.
Parolees are taken to U.S. military bases, where 90 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffers process their paperwork. Some get medical checkups. Others apply for work permits and Social Security numbers. Hundreds of those arriving are children or teens, including 34 who traveled without their parents, though some have since been reunited, government officials said.
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Some are just starting the immigration process because they did not expect to flee. Many waited for years for a special immigrant visa (SIV), after risking their lives to serve as interpreters and in other roles aiding the U.S. military. Others could request humanitarian protection such as asylum.
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“Basically, they’re all going to need immigration lawyers,” said Margaret Stock, a retired U.S. Army officer and an immigration lawyer in Alaska. “This is really complicated.”
Lawyers and nonprofit agencies are mobilizing to help these Afghans on top of the work they are doing for migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, where apprehensions are at 21-year highs.
Mayorkas said in the Aug. 23 memo that some Afghan parolees could be required to check in with immigration authorities after being released from U.S. custody and that those who fail to follow up could be detained and deported. So could applicants who fail to complete their immigration applications, lawyers said.
Defense Department officials plan to expand their capacity to house evacuated Afghans on military bases to 50,000 by Sept. 15. By Saturday, they had space for 21,000 people and had stocked up with halal meals, coloring books and toys. At Fort Lee in Virginia, Defense Department officials said, some Afghans were staying five to seven days. Others are on military bases for hours. Many already have family in the United States.
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Among the arrivals at Dulles International Airport in Virginia last week were a married couple with four children who encapsulated the immigration difficulties.
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Stock, their lawyer, said the father is a former U.S. military employee who became a naturalized U.S. citizen through the SIV program. But he stayed in Afghanistan because his wife was still waiting for her immigration paperwork. Three of their children automatically get U.S. citizenship through the father, but they lack U.S. passports. A fourth child, adopted, does not automatically get citizenship.
All but the father, therefore, had to be paroled into the United States. For a few harrowing hours Tuesday, the mother — who does not speak English — was separated from the group at Dulles for questioning. Stock and others intervened in the middle of the night to reunite the family.
“They’ve been trying to get out of Afghanistan for a couple of years now,” Stock said, adding that her client refused to leave without his family. “There’s no way he would have done it,” she said. “He would have died in place first.”
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Housing is a critical need, resettlement agencies said. Some evacuees are being resettled in existing Afghan communities, such as in Southern California, where the cost of living can be expensive. Some Afghans are eligible for resettlement aid because they are refugees, but others are not.
“All you have to do is look at a picture of these refugees on a C-17 — they’re coming in literally with their clothes on their backs,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, -another resettlement agency.
Federal officials have not said what will happen to evacuees who are not paroled into the United States.
Suneeta’s husband, an interpreter for U.S. forces, disappeared in 2013. She made it to Albany, N.Y., as a refugee, but her four children are stuck in Kabul. (Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)
Afghan evacuees have faced grim conditions while in transit, including inadequate sanitation facilities, intense heat and overcrowding at hastily arranged centers in the Persian Gulf. Some have boarded flights without knowing where they were being taken.
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Camille Mackler, the executive director of Immigrant ARC, an immigration law and advocacy nonprofit, described the evacuees’ journey as “disorganized, lacking in transparency, traumatic and unsafe.” Though the process has improved since the chaotic first days of the operation, she said, Afghans are facing a system thick with bureaucracy.
The U.S. government has leaned heavily on resettlement agencies and nonprofits to sort out the various legal-status issues, Mackler said. Using military bases, which are walled off from advocates and immigration attorneys, has added another layer of complexity.
“They’re building the plane as they’re flying,” Mackler said of the administration.
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The situation seems even more tenuous for Afghan allies still in Afghanistan, with evacuations winding down ahead of Tuesday’s deadline for U.S. troops to depart and the State Department warning of ongoing security threats at the Kabul airport.
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The International Refugee Assistance Project, which has sued the U.S. government to speed up the SIV processing, said in an emergency petition to the State Department on Aug. 18 that thousands of applicants in Afghanistan are in “imminent danger.” The petition cited the case of an Afghan man who worked at the Kabul airport for years and said he knew of five interpreters killed by the Taliban in August.
“I do not know when [it] is my turn but they will find me, too,” he said in a statement provided by the nonprofit.
Others could be targets because of their work, including women’s activists, judges and prosecutors.
The Biden administration has said that thousands of Afghans who are not eligible for the SIV program can apply for alternate refugee programs, such as a new “Priority 2” program for military employees who didn’t meet the SIV criteria or those who worked for U.S.-based media or aid groups.
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But they would have to flee Afghanistan to apply, a condition that advocates said is unrealistic, given that the Taliban now controls all border crossings.
“Requiring applicants to be in a third country in order to begin the process excludes the Afghans who are most at risk from the Taliban,” said Sunil Varghese, policy director for the International Refugee Assistance Project.
The State Department said those who are ineligible for the Priority 2 program could ask a U.S. embassy, a nonprofit or the U.N. refugee agency to refer them to the U.S. refugee system.
But the State Department’s foreign affairs manual says the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program requires multiple security clearances — which can take years — and is “not the optimal option for an individual in urgent need for protection.”