Afghans face new uncertainties, after months in army bases in US
Al Jazeera :
Nep six months after they left Kabul, Sayed* and his family are starting a new life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Their journey involved repeated attempts to get through Taliban checkpoints and reach the airport in the Afghan capital, a flight to Qatar, another flight to Germany, and then more than five months on a US military base in Wisconsin.
Sayed, who worked with Afghan security forces, says that arduous process offered him a lifeline – and he is now looking to build a future in the United States.
“My number one priority is to take care of my immigration paperwork because we have no place in Afghanistan; we were informally sentenced to death there,” he told Al Jazeera in a phone interview.
The vast majority of Afghans who came to the US after fleeing their country in August are on humanitarian parole – which gave them an entry pass into the country, but no path to permanent residency.
Humanitarian parole allows evacuees to remain in the country for up to two years, while they were also granted permits to work legally in the US before leaving the military bases. But beyond that, their legal status is on shaky grounds.
In a report (PDF) late last month, DHS said more than 36,400 Afghan refugees do not qualify for the special immigrant visa (SIV) programme designed for Afghans who worked with US forces during the 20-year war. At the same time, nearly 37,000 evacuees fall under the SIV scheme, according to the report. Their visa applications, which would grant them permanent residency if approved, can be processed while they remain in the country.
In the weeks since leaving a military camp in New Mexico, Ali*, who fled the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif with his sister after the Taliban takeover, has been able to find a house with the help of a local resettlement agency in Pittsburgh, and he is set to start a job at a hotel.
But even at this early stage of resettlement, Ali, who is not SIV-eligible, is worried about the possibility of being removed from the country. “I heard that people who do not have SIV, the US government will deport them after one or two years. It’s not clear. I hope it’s not that because a lot of people [do not] have SIV,” the 31-year-old told Al Jazeera.
Deporting people to Afghanistan seems implausible in the near future, especially since the US government does not recognise the Taliban authorities, but advocates say without legal residency, Afghan refugees will always face uncertainty.
“There’s real worry,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), a resettlement agency. “The fortunate thing is that people are entitled to up to two years of temporary residence in the US, but it’s obviously not a guarantee, and it does feel like a ticking time bomb.”
While Ali, who fears prosecution because his family owned a business and is known for being liberal-leaning and supportive of women’s rights, may have qualified for refugee resettlement, he cannot apply to that programme because he is already in the US.
Afghans who are in immigration “limbo” can formally seek asylum in the US, but advocates say filing applications for thousands of evacuees is not a practical solution. The country’s asylum system is already experiencing an enormous backlog, with an average processing time of more than four years.
“We are not going to be able to provide the support that they need to apply for asylum,” Nezer of HIAS told Al Jazeera. “The legal services just aren’t available. Even with all the volunteers that are stepping up, you’re talking about probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hours of legal advice.”