My Christian client is hiding out in Afghanistan. He deserves the same chance for asylum as Ukrainians.
Next month marks the anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. That's when the world watched desperate Afghans scramble for flights out of the capital as the Taliban took control of the country.
That's also when my 37-year-old client Nazif knew that he and his family were in danger. Nazif — whose name I've changed for security reasons — is an Afghan national. But unlike most of the country, he's a Christian. He's spent the last decade working for a Colorado Springs-based organization teaching principles of Christian servant leadership to Muslims in the western region of the country. With American security, Nazif felt safe to live and work openly. But that became impossible under the Taliban regime, which enforces a radical interpretation of Islam.
Nazif, his wife and their three children immediately fled to neighboring Pakistan. I became their lawyer and set about helping them apply for temporary humanitarian parole in America.
Under normal circumstances, this would take about 90 days. Of course, these days are anything but normal. Roughly 45,000 Afghans like Nazif, are waiting for immigration services to process their parole requests. Many of these people lack secure housing and can't provide for their families. Worse, they're unable to apply for permanent asylum based on religious or political persecution. For that, you have to be physically on American soil.
The situation is especially frustrating because thousands of Ukrainians — who only recently fled their home country—have had their parole applications quickly approved. Consider these shocking statistics: As of May, nearly 6,000 Ukrainians had been granted humanitarian parole under a Department of Homeland Security program called "Uniting for Ukraine" that expedites their applications. By contrast, fewer than 3,000 of the 45,000 Afghans who've asked for parole have been processed. Of these, only 270 had been approved.
The American response to Ukrainian refugees has shown that our immigration system can provide speedy service to those in need. Now we must extend the same efficiency to all people who have the right under international law to request asylum here.
In May, a handful of U.S. senators wrote to the Biden administration, asking that Afghans seeking humanitarian protection receive the consideration offered to Ukrainians. This includes waiving the $575 application fee, which people like Nazif can barely afford. I'm urging the White House to move quickly and process Afghan parole applications.
It's cruel of us to make asylum seekers wait in this kind of limbo. While Nazif's parole application languished, he and his family spent six months living underground to escape the Taliban in hotels in Pakistan—a situation that drained his savings and required his three children, a 13-year-old and 11-year-old twins—to miss a year of school. This spring, they reluctantly returned to Afghanistan to visit Nazif's mother-in-law who was having heart problems and needed care. The family has been unable to get new visas to return to Pakistan. Nazif continues to live in hiding, forced to change locations frequently for fear of repercussions from the Taliban for his past religious and political work. He is still fearful they will find him and torture or kill him.
These unconscionable delays at the hands of our government keeps people in harm's way and forces them to take risks that could endanger their lives. Even more frustrating is the fact the U.S. immigration system only processes temporary humanitarian parole claims for Afghans when they are outside Afghanistan because the U.S. Embassy in Kabul is closed.
My client dutifully relocated to Pakistan, and I immediately notified immigration authorities to expedite his case. But Nazif could not wait there indefinitely. Now that he's back in Afghanistan, his application is on hold. In recent months, he's been looking for new ways out of the country to restart the process.
Our humanitarian immigration programs are designed to relieve people's misery—not compound it.
Let's do the right thing and make sure our system works for the people it's designed to protect.
— Petula McShiras is a senior immigration attorney with Shaftel Law in Colorado Springs and president of the Colorado chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
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