Annie Yu Kleiman is a senior technical analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an 18-year Air Force reservist. She serves on the board of directors for No One Left Behind, an organization working to help evacuate, resettle and advocate for Afghan Special Immigrant Visa recipients.<\/i><\/p>\n
My 9-year-old daughter still remembers August 2021 as a \u201chorrible time.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the fall of Kabul that month, my husband and I, both Air Force officers who had served in Afghanistan, found ourselves pulled into a complex, unofficial operation to help evacuate U.S. citizens and Afghan allies. There were endless sleepless nights spent frantically sending messages over Signal and compiling enormous spreadsheets of passenger manifests. We worked as if it were a matter of life and death \u2014 because it was.<\/p>\n
Two years later, those long days are a memory for me. But for the hundreds of thousands of our allies still left behind, the horrors continue.<\/p>\n
As of April 2023, about 152,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants\u00a0remain trapped in Afghanistan<\/a>. These people, who served side-by-side with U.S. forces during the long war, face years of danger, severe economic hardship and increasingly onerous restrictions \u2014 particularly on\u00a0women and girls<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 while applying for their SIVs through a\u00a0complicated, Kafkaesque process<\/a>.<\/p>\n [Catherine Rampell: She was lucky to escape Afghanistan. Two years later, she\u2019s stuck in limbo.<\/a>]<\/p>\n To create a snapshot of the absurd gantlet our former friends and allies have to run, I gathered quotations from text messages and emails that they sent to my organization, No One Left Behind, seeking help. They have been edited for clarity, and names are being withheld for the writers\u2019 safety.<\/p>\n Proof of employment.\u00a0<\/b>To start an SIV application, applicants must submit a slew of documents through the U.S. State Department\u2019s website. This requires access to the internet \u2014 not a given when one is hiding from the Taliban. The\u00a0required documents<\/a>\u00a0include proof of employment for the U.S. government for at least one year and a letter of recommendation from a former supervisor. But the companies often kept poor HR records, and former supervisors are difficult to reach \u2014 and may not even remember their former employees.<\/p>\n \u201cI have all the recommendation letters from the teams [I worked for], but I cannot get the HR letter because the company does not answer our emails.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf the Taliban finds me, they will not ask me how many days I worked for the U.S. Army. If the Taliban finds me, they will kill me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI served U.S. troops in my country. I am sorry I don\u2019t have a contact. A long time has passed since then.\u201d<\/p>\n Agonizing choices.<\/b>\u00a0<\/b><\/i>Once the documents are submitted, applicants wait almost a year for \u201cChief of Mission approval\u201d to proceed to the next step. During this time, they must come to terms with leaving behind members of their extended families, many of whom are also in danger for being related to a former U.S. employee. SIV applicants can take only their spouses and unmarried children younger than 21. And because the application process takes so long, many children age past 21 by the time the SIV is issued.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Taliban has killed my brother … and my wife. They also shot my younger brother in the left leg. The Taliban told us that we are spies for the Americans, and that one by one they will kill all my family members.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cKindly note that our children who are over 21 now were all under 21 when I applied for SIV in 2016. Our children are single and they do not have close relatives. We hope they are included.\u201d<\/p>\n Reaching a U.S. Embassy \u2014 outside Afghanistan.\u00a0<\/b>With chief of mission approval in hand, applicants will wait several more months for an interview at an American embassy. Since the United States no longer has a diplomatic presence in Afghanistan, this puts applicants \u2014 who were relying on the SIV to help them escape Afghanistan \u2014 in the paradoxical position of having to get out of Afghanistan to get the SIV.<\/p>\n At this point, the applicant must wait for the United States to help them get to a third country, or self-fund their travel to a nearby country with a U.S. Embassy. The first option is fraught, as the United States\u2019 ability to move candidates out of Afghanistan is extremely limited. Those who can afford the second option are faced with another daunting obstacle: Every single person traveling must have a passport. Many do not.<\/p>\n \u201cI am living like a prisoner. After the fall of the regime, my husband and I lost our jobs. Please help me if you know any way to evacuate me. I don\u2019t have enough money to transfer my case to a third country.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was in a car accident and my leg is broken. If I don\u2019t get evacuated, I\u2019m sure they will kill me. I no longer have a job. I can\u2019t afford my family\u2019s food or medicine for my three girls. Also my Pakistan visa was rejected.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy wife, my three children and I applied for Pakistan visas. Two of my children received their visas, but my wife and I were rejected. The other newborn does not have a passport.\u201dGetting a passport in Afghanistan.<\/b>\u00a0Passports cost about $70 at government passport offices, which can be closed for months at a time. The waitlists are long, and rumors suggest that the Taliban are detaining applicants who worked for the United States. It can be faster and safer to use a passport broker, but this costs $1,700 to $2,200 per person and comes with the risk that the passport is fake.<\/p>\n Obtaining a ticket to the United States.\u00a0<\/b>For the extremely lucky who overcome all the hurdles and get their SIVs, the primary way to the United States is through the United Nations\u2019\u00a0International Organization for Migration<\/a>, which will buy them commercial airline tickets (as a \u201cloan\u201d) and assign them to a resettlement agency.<\/p>\n Getting a flight can take months, and in that time the third country visa, medical exam or the Special Immigrant Visa itself might expire, resulting in additional fees or months of delay.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It could all get worse.\u00a0<\/b>If everything goes perfectly, the process takes more than two years. But there are so many ways something can go wrong. The birth of a child requires updating the SIV application and obtaining a passport. A chance encounter with police abroad could end in arrest and detention, necessitating the payment of bribes and fines. Flights to third countries are sometimes suspended\u00a0for months at a time<\/a>. Applicants who are single women are\u00a0often not allowed to travel<\/a>, even with the proper documentation. Through all of this, applicants struggle to feed and shelter themselves and their families while fearing for their lives. Depression and suicide are common.<\/p>\n \u201cOne day my 6-year-old son went to our home in Kabul without informing the family. A man with a gun asked him about me. My son said I was not at home. This person whipped my son. Me and my family are being targeted. We have changed our location several times since August 2021. Our current location is no longer safe.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMy innocent baby boy was killed by the Taliban. Now it is my turn to be killed.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPlease save my life! I\u2019m stuck in Afghanistan, the Taliban have killed 11 members of my family and detained three of them.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite\u00a0many recommendations<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0bipartisan support for reforming the SIV program<\/a>, only minor tweaks \u2014 eliminating one form, reducing the minimum length of service from two years to one \u2014 have been made.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the dangerously slow SIV process has become practically a death sentence. No One Left Behind has documented hundreds of SIV applicants who were murdered while waiting for their visas; details will be released in a forthcoming report.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t have to be this way. The U.S. government can make life immeasurably better for tens of thousands of Afghan allies and their families. It can grant\u00a0categorical parole<\/a>\u00a0to SIV applicants who are ready for their interviews and fly them to the United States to finish the process in safety. It can dedicate more State Department resources to\u00a0speeding up SIV applications.<\/a>\u00a0And it can establish a\u00a0permanent SIV program<\/a>\u00a0to ensure this doesn\u2019t happen to future allies.<\/p>\n The United States must do better.<\/p>\n Annie Yu Kleiman is a senior technical analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an 18-year Air Force reservist. She serves on the board of directors for No One Left Behind, an organization working to help evacuate, resettle and advocate for Afghan Special Immigrant Visa recipients. My 9-year-old daughter still remembers August 2021 as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9223"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9226,"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9223\/revisions\/9226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ago-af.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A daunting list of obstacles<\/h2>\n
A moral obligation for the United States<\/h2>\n