Refugees board buses that will take them to a treatment center after they arrive at Dulles International Airport after being evacuated from Kabul following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on August 27, 2021 in Dulles, Virginia.
Afghan evacuees who have been living in the United States since August 2021 will soon reach the end of their two-year temporary stay.
Unless Congress acts, they could be deported back to Afghanistan — where they would face the wrath of the Taliban.
The Afghan Adjustment Act, which was introduced last August by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Lindsey Graham (RS.C.), would have established a path for permanent residency for Afghans in the U.S., but party leaders left out must-pass spending bills that seemed like its best chance to become law at the end of last year.
“If this bill had been brought to the floor, it would have passed.” Safi Rauf, a US war veteran and president of the Human First Coalition, an organization lobbying for the bill, told HuffPost.
Winning over Republican senators, Rauf traveled to red states in October and November with a group of other veterans. Republicans complained that evacuees had not been thoroughly vetted and posed security risks to the country. After additional vetting measures were added to the bill, Republicans were mostly on board, Rauf said. Two additional Republicans — Sens. Jerry Moran (Kan.) and Roger Wicker (Fr.) – signed on as co-sponsors in December as a result of the changes.
Graham told HuffPost this week that the bill would be reintroduced, but he had not yet discussed it with the other co-sponsors.
The bill’s supporters hope to have it reintroduced in the Senate and House as soon as March. Rauf said the bill’s passage is now less about security concerns and more a matter of when and if party leaders feel like advancing the legislation.
“It’s just a matter of time,” Rauf said. But he hopes that Congress will recognize that the situation is urgent this time, because most of the evacuees’ temporary status will expire already in August.
After the fall of Kabul amid the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, the US government used a policy known as humanitarian parole to bring Afghans who aided US forces and who feared Taliban retaliation into US territory. But humanitarian parole does not provide a path to permanent residency.
For most Afghan evacuees, the expiration of parole will mean they are at immediate risk of losing their work permit with no obvious way to extend it because they cannot change their status through established avenues such as asylum quickly enough. In the long run, the worst possible scenario will be deportation back to Afghanistan.
“The stakes are much higher than they were before,” Rauf said.
According to unpublished DHS data reported by CBS Newsonly 4,775 applications from Afghan evacuees seeking asylum or special visa status had been granted as of February 12, compared to the roughly 80,000 Afghans who have resettled in the United States since August 2021.
The asylum path to legal permanent residence takes a long time due to the backlog of applications. Most applicants have not heard back for months after filing.
DHS data show that per As of February 12, more than 14,000 Afghans had applied for asylum, but only 1,175 of those requests had been approved, according to CBS News.
The process is also complicated and costly as it requires legal aid and there are not enough volunteer lawyers to help with the volume of cases. There is little certainty that all the asylum cases will ultimately be approved because, according to Rauf, around half of the 80,000 evacuees could lack the necessary documentation and thus not be able to adjust their status.
The situation is no better for Afghan evacuees who are eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), which mostly includes translators, interpreters and others who served in the US military. DHS has received 14,600 SIV applications from those already in the United States, but only about 3,600 have been accepted so far.
The Biden administration assigned Afghan evacuees temporary protected status, which is given to people who cannot safely return to their home countries due to conflict. While this policy temporarily protects them from deportation, it does not automatically create a path to permanent residency in the United States. Just over 1,000 Afghans were enrolled in the program at the beginning of February.
“The bottom line is we can’t send them back,” Rauf said, “because the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse every day.”
A human rights watchdog report reveals that despite the Taliban’s declaration of amnesty, the group has executed or forcibly disappeared more than 100 former members of the Afghan National Security Forces.
Arthur Delaney contributed reporting.
