Thousands of Afghan evacuees remain in limbo nearly 2 years after chaotic U.S. withdrawal

For as long as Shabnam Khalilyar can remember, the United States was a fixture of her life in Afghanistan.

She was just 5 years old when the U.S. military invaded her home country in late 2001, following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Her father quickly went to work for the Americans as a translator, as did her uncle, making most members of her family eligible for special visas created for those who helped U.S. forces.

But when America’s longest war finally came to an end in the summer of 2021, allowing Taliban militants to once again seize control of the country, only Khalilyar was able to make it out to safety.

A former journalist, she had been working for then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani prior to the withdrawal, putting her at direct risk of retribution from the newly empowered Taliban. After unsuccessfully trying to get to the Kabul airport on Aug. 30, Khalilyar and her family traveled to Mazar-i-Sharif in hopes of making it across the border to Uzbekistan.

“There was uncertainty [about] what Taliban are going to do after [Aug. 31],” the day that American troops officially withdrew from Afghanistan, Khalilyar told Yahoo News. “Are they going [take] the whole population hostage, closing all borders, no airport, and you cannot leave the country? The situation was very big for us.”

While they were waiting for an opportunity to cross, Khalilyar received a WhatsApp message from a stranger telling her she could join a group that would be traveling from Kabul up north to Mazar-i-Sharif to be evacuated. She didn’t know anything about the people in this group, or where they were going, but she knew it was an opportunity she couldn’t afford to miss.

“One thing was very important for me: just to get out of that country, no matter where,” she said. “I was risking my life. Either I'm going to die or leave that country.”

The next morning, Khalilyar went to a hotel in Mazar-i-Sharif where she joined about 150 women in a wedding hall, where they’d been separated from roughly the same number of men, who were in another area. After a few days at the hotel, Khalilyar said they were moved to some apartments where she was paired up with four strangers who are now her good friends. They stayed in the apartments for about three weeks until finally one night they were taken to the airport and put on a flight to an unknown destination.

It wasn’t until they landed that Khalilyar discovered they were in Doha, Qatar, west of Afghanistan. After spending about a month in a refugee camp there, she said, they were informed that they’d be traveling to the United States.

Khalilyar was one of roughly 80,000 Afghans who were evacuated and brought to the United States as part of Operation Allies Welcome, an emergency resettlement effort established by the Biden administration amid the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Less than two years later, Khalilyar, 27, has resettled in Norman, Okla., where she studies international studies at the University of Oklahoma. She’s also among tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees who has yet to obtain legal permanent residency in the U.S. and whose temporary parole — good for just two years — is set to expire starting later this summer.

By relying on humanitarian parole, the Biden administration was able to bypass the regular refugee admissions system — which had been gutted under the previous administration — to quickly conduct one of the largest emergency resettlement efforts in decades. But parole is a temporary status, which offers no pathway to permanent residency; nor does Temporary Protected Status, which the Biden administration granted for Afghans in the U.S. last year.

That leaves few options for Afghans who were brought here specifically because of the dangers they would face at home, under Taliban rule. Those who worked directly with or for American troops or other U.S. government agencies are eligible to apply for Special Immigrant Visas, a lengthy and complicated process that requires applicants to submit a variety of documents — documents that could easily have been destroyed or left behind in the mad dash to flee the country.

But more than half of Afghans who were part of Operation Allies Welcome, including Khalilyar, are not eligible for the SIV program, including women’s rights activists, journalists and civic leaders. For them, the best option is to request asylum and hope that their applications make it through the backlogged system — a process that can take years — before their parole expires. That’s precisely the situation that Khalilyar finds herself in now.

“It's certainly not a proud moment in American history, our treatment of these individuals after 20 years,” said Michael Turansick, supervisory policy and practice counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “We’ve given them parole status but that’s really, as a practical matter, legal limbo.”

A majority of Afghan evacuees are in legal limbo

According to recent data provided by the Department of Homeland Security, of the more than 77,000 Afghan evacuees who received humanitarian parole, 17,000 had submitted applications to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to register for permanent residence as of April 16, 5,300 of which have been approved.

DHS said that since July 31, 2021, USCIS has also received approximately 16,200 asylum applications from Afghan evacuees, of which more than 2,000 had been approved as of April 16. The agency notes that the total number of asylees may be larger because applicants may include their spouse and unmarried children under age 21 as dependents on their applications.

The DHS also notes that, in a typical year, the USCIS will receive less than 2,000 individual requests for humanitarian parole from people of all nationalities, of which 500-700 are usually approved. Since July 1, 2021, however, the agency has received and processed 52,000 humanitarian parole requests from Afghan nationals, approximately 11,700 of which have been denied.

A spokesperson for the State Department, which oversees the Special Immigrant Visa program, noted that “at the President’s direction, we have undertaken substantial efforts to improve the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program to streamline the application and adjudication processes, while safeguarding our national security.” including significantly increasing the number of staff dedicated to” processing applications.

As a result, the spokesperson said, “since the start of the Biden administration through April 1, 2023, we have issued more than 25,000 SIVs to principal applicants and their eligible family members — representing substantial yearly increases from the previous several years.”

However, many more applications are still pending. According to the State Department's most recent quarterly report on the SIV program, as of Dec. 31, 2022, 62,919 principal applicants were awaiting Chief of Mission (COM) approval, which is one of the first of several steps in the SIV application process. At that time, an additional 76,778 principal applicants had submitted some, but not all, of the documents required to apply for COM approval.

A legislative solution

Historically, following other large humanitarian parole efforts , Congress has passed what’s known as an adjustment act, to offer permanent status to those who were paroled into the country during an emergency situation. For example, two years after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, when the U.S. evacuated more than 100,000 Vietnamese refugees, Congress passed a Vietnamese adjustment act giving Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian evacuees in the U.S. the opportunity to become permanent residents after two years.

Similar combinations of parole plus adjustment acts were used throughout the Cold War to give refugees who fled communist countries, such as China and Cuba, a path to permanent residency. More recently, at various times during the 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. government enacted adjustment legislation for certain parolees from the Soviet Union, Iraq and Southeast Asia.

But despite the support of the White House, as well as members of both parties in the House and Senate, Congress has thus far failed to pass an Afghan Adjustment Act.

“In the past, we've kept our promises,” Turansick said. “Now in Afghanistan, we told them we’d have their back and we haven't done so yet.”

Afghan evacuees and their supporters, including veterans groups and immigration advocates, had hoped to see the Afghan Adjustment Act included in a Continuing Resolution to fund the government, which was guaranteed to pass last fall, but it was unable to overcome opposition from critics like Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who raised security concerns based on a report from the DHS inspector general, which found that some Afghan evacuees “were not fully vetted” before being paroled into the country.

In a statement at the time, Grassley said, “Congress should not consider sweeping status immigration changes for evacuees unless and until this administration guarantees the integrity of and fully responds to long-standing oversight requests regarding their vetting and resettlement process. Anything less would be irresponsible.”

Proponents of the Afghan Adjustment Act argue that it addresses those vetting concerns by requiring evacuees to undergo an extra layer of security checks before they can obtain permanent status.

“This is where I think it’s just politics,” Mahsa Khanbabai, an immigration law expert, said of the opposition over security concerns.

Khanbabai was a co-leader of a task force created by the American Immigration Lawyers Association during the evacuation to provide pro bono legal assistance to newly arrived Afghans. She told Yahoo News that the Afghan Adjustment Act would be “game changing” for tens of thousands of Afghans who would otherwise be forced to navigate the “broken” and “dysfunctional” asylum system.

“We have cases years in backlogs. You don’t have enough asylum officers in the first place. And to put people through that trauma all over again is really disconcerting,” she said. “Basically it's going to put a huge plug into ... this huge crack that’s in the dam right now.”

Grassley’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether he would be open to considering a revised version of the Afghan Adjustment Act during this Congress.

So far, the bill hasn’t been re-introduced, but Sen. Chris Coons, D-Conn., one of the co-sponsors of the act, told Yahoo News in a statement that he’s optimistic that Congress will reach an agreement to “enact protections for Afghans in the United States before humanitarian parole expires this year.”

“Not only is this a moral imperative, but countless former military leaders, including three former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO have said this is in our national security interest,” Coons said. “I am hopeful we can get an agreement together this Congress to keep our commitments to Afghans in the U.S., and heed the call of the U.S. troops, veterans and military families who have made this a priority.”

Betrayal

For some Afghans, the U.S. government’s inability, or refusal to provide them with permanent protections after 20 years of war feels like a betrayal.

“The allies of [the] U.S., the Afghans, both in Afghanistan and here, were not expecting this kind of treatment,” Helal Massomi, a women’s rights advocate who was part of the U.S. evacuation, told Yahoo News.

Before the Taliban seized control of Kabul in August 2021, Massomi was working as an adviser to the Afghan government, advocating for the rights of women and other “war-affected people” were included in peace negotiations with the Taliban.

Now Massomi is advocating for Afghan refugees in the U.S. She works as a policy adviser for the Lutheran Immigrant Refugee Service, one of the country’s largest refugee resettlement agencies, and also serves as co-chair of the Evacuate Our Allies Coalition, a network of refugee, religious and human rights groups as well as veterans organizations that have been advocating on behalf of Afghan allies since President Biden first announced the plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan in the spring of 2021. The coalition has been a leading voice on Capitol Hill in favor of the Afghan Adjustment Act.

While Massomi is among the minority of evacuees who’ve already received asylum, she said she regularly speaks to members of the Afghan community in Washington, D.C., where she’s based, who have not obtained some kind of permanent status.

“They think that they're going to be deported from this country,” she said. “And there's a big probability that they will be deported from this country because the options that are out there are not permanent.”

Massomi said that among many of the Afghans she talks to, there is a sense that the U.S. does not care about them, that “we were just a country that was used for the benefit of [the] U.S.”

She said this feeling is especially acute among Afghan women who were evacuated but, in most cases, don’t qualify for Special Immigrant Visas, noting that the U.S. government had justified its prolonged presence in Afghanistan, in part, by promising to bring democracy and gender equality to a society where women had long been treated like second-class citizens.

For Massomi, this sense of betrayal is compounded by the Biden administration’s treatment of Ukrainian refugees, who were granted humanitarian parole to enter the U.S. following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced an extension of parole for certain Ukrainian refugees whose temporary status was at risk of expiring, allowing them to remain in the country for another year without having to submit any additional paperwork.

“We are so happy for what they're doing [for] Ukrainians, but we stood by the U.S. for more than 20 years. We provided our home to them. We [gave] them everything they needed,” Massomi said, adding that during the two decades the U.S. was at war in Afghanistan, roughly 66,000 Afghan soldiers and police were killed.

“It makes Afghan people think that they’re less valuable than other communities,” she said.

In lieu of an adjustment act, advocates like Massomi have urged the Biden administration to alleviate some of that anxiety by announcing an extension to the two-year parole for Afghan evacuees before it begins to expire this summer.

A National Security Council spokesperson told Yahoo News on background that the administration remains “committed to supporting Afghan nationals who were admitted to our country through humanitarian parole, and the Department of Homeland Security is exploring opportunities for humanitarian relief.”

Many more Afghans left behind

Massomi also emphasized that this immigration limbo is just one of the many things weighing heavily on Afghan evacuees in the U.S., many of whom remain separated from their families nearly two years after boarding an evacuation flight.

For those left behind in Afghanistan, like Khalilyar’s family or that of Col. Nazar Mohammad Azizi, a former helicopter pilot in the Afghan Army, getting out has become even more challenging — and more urgent.

Azizi, who served alongside U.S. and allied forces for 20 years, was evacuated after leading a fleet of Afghan military helicopters and other aircraft to safety in Uzbekistan during the Taliban takeover. He has since resettled in Tucson, Ariz., and been granted asylum, but worries for the family he left behind. His wife and daughter remain in Kabul, moving to a new house or apartment every few months to evade the Taliban, who’ve already thrown his brother in jail.

Azizi’s two sons, who were just toddlers when the U.S. military invaded and he decided to join them on the battlefield, are now both over 21 — the maximum age to be included on a parent’s asylum application.

A few months ago, amid growing Taliban threats, Azizi sold his house in Afghanistan to pay to send his two sons to Kazakhstan, for their protection. But shortly after their arrival, tragedy struck: One of his sons was hit by a bus, putting him into a coma for 10 days. Now, Azizi said, he is awake but remains in the hospital with serious injuries from his chest down. A doctor there told Azizi that if his son is not moved to a hospital in the United States or Germany, he may never walk again.

If that happens, Azizi told Yahoo News, “I couldn’t forgive myself, in my whole life.”

A recent report from the Association for Wartime Allies found that Afghan allies who were left behind following the evacuation “continue to face years-long bureaucratic delays of processing of their SIV applications with lengthy wait times for relocation,” as the threat to their existence under Taliban rule becomes increasingly more perilous.

“Since the Taliban takeover, the Taliban have engaged in a systematic country wide effort to hunt down and murder the Afghans who previously worked with American forces,” the report states, adding, “Their campaign has thus far been tragically successful.”

Afghans can also apply for humanitarian parole from outside the country, and in the wake of the evacuation, the USCIS received a flood of humanitarian parole applications from Afghans who were not lucky enough to escape. But those requests have also encountered bureaucratic hurdles.

As of April 12, the DHS said that approximately 770 Afghans outside the U.S. have received conditional approval for their humanitarian parole requests. However, they said the process is complicated by the fact that the USCIS requires humanitarian parole applicants to complete vetting and biometrics screenings in-person, at a U.S. embassy or consulate, neither of which are currently operating in Afghanistan. Those seeking humanitarian parole from Afghanistan must first travel to a third country to complete their vetting and screening requirements before they can be approved.

Khalilyar noted that such logistical barriers pose a particular challenge for other young women and girls left behind in Afghanistan, who are now barred from leaving the country without a male guardian. She reflected on where she might be had she not gotten out when she did.

“It was my good luck that I was among the list of vulnerable people,” she said.