US Immigration Agency Overwhelmed by 20,000 Afghan Humanitarian Requests

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Masood Farivar
VOA News
October 23, 2021

As recently as last week, the U.S. immigration service was using six officers to process about 14,000 humanitarian requests for Afghans seeking relocation to the United States following the Taliban takeover of the country in August.

That’s what the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service recently told congressional staff, Congressman Jim Langevin, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said Thursday during a House Homeland Security Committee meeting.

“I want to say that again: 14,000 humanitarian parole applications with just six officers,” Langevin said. “That is completely and utterly unacceptable, and I call on USCIS to address the shortcoming immediately.”

A spokesman for Langevin told VOA that the information about the USCIS backlog came during an October 12 agency briefing for congressional staff.

Emergency permission

Humanitarian parole is a special permission given to foreigners to enter the United States under emergency circumstances. While it does not automatically lead to permanent residence, “parolees” can apply for legal status once they’re in the U.S.

In a typical year, USCIS gets fewer than 2,000 humanitarian parole requests from around the world, according to a USCIS official, who spoke on background.

But since August, the agency has received a total of nearly 20,000 such requests for Afghan nationals outside the United States, the official said in a statement to VOA on Friday. That is up from 14,000 in mid-October.

The vast majority of the applications have been filed by Afghan Americans on behalf of relatives back home who have no other options for relocating to the United States, according to community activists. A much larger number of Afghans with ties to the U.S. military, U.S. government and U.S. non-governmental organizations have applied for special immigrant visas or refugee status.

Asked about Langevin’s criticism of the humanitarian parole backlog, the official said the agency is actively assigning additional staff to address the workload.

“USCIS issued an agencywide request for volunteers to help process applications for humanitarian and significant public benefit parole and the agency will have significantly more staff assigned to this workload in the coming weeks,” the official said.

The deluge of applications has nonetheless overwhelmed the immigration service.

Afghan American lawyer Wogai Mohmand said the number of Afghan humanitarian parole requests could reach as high as 150,000 in a year.

“Their systems are not equipped to deal with that kind of volume,” Mohmand said during a recent webinar hosted by several advocacy organizations. “Frankly, they don’t have enough staff to look at all those applications.”

And assigning more officials to the humanitarian parole cases is not going to help anyone get out of Afghanistan, according to Sunil Varghese, policy director for International Refugee Assistance Project.

Varghese said that before parolees are admitted into the United States, they must have their fingerprints taken, identifies verified and travel documents issued by the U.S. embassy.

But the U.S. embassy in Kabul shut down at the end of August and moved to Doha, Qatar. As a result, once an Afghan applicant is deemed eligible for parole, he or she is instructed by USCIS to travel to a third country for vetting and biometrics.

With foreign visas hard to come by and regular commercial flights yet to resume, traveling to a third country for vetting is not an option for most Afghans, according to advocates.

If they do make it through the process “the Department of State issues a boarding letter for the applicant to take a commercial carrier, at their own expense, to the United States,” the official explained.

Even in the best of circumstances, the difficulty many Afghans face in reaching an overseas U.S. consulate has had undesirable consequences. Take the case of Fatima Khashee. As security deteriorated in July, the 61-year-old’s son, a U.S. permanent resident, filed a humanitarian parole request on her behalf.

In her case, USCIS acted fairly quickly, approving her application within 20 days on August 24, according to her son, who requested that he not be identified by name.

But by then the Taliban had overrun the country. The embassy, having relocated to the Kabul international airport, had transferred her case to Turkey. By the time she made it to Istanbul 30 days later, her parole authorization expired.

“It wasn’t my mother’s fault that her parole was expired,” the son said in a message to VOA. “She paid triple of regular price to get [the] first flights [that] became available out of Afghanistan. She tried every possible channel to get out sooner, but all land borders and airlines were closed.”

One month later, Khashee remains stuck at an Istanbul hotel, waiting for what her son describes as a long-overdue, updated parole reauthorization.

“That is unbelievable and very disappointing,” he said of the six officers adjudicating 14,000 applications.

It costs $575 to apply for humanitarian parole, a figure that adds up to several thousand dollars for a family of six and that some members of Congress want to see waived. Despite the cost and uncertainty over their approval, however, many Afghan Americans continue to file applications for their loved ones.

“First, they don’t have any other options available,” Khashee’s son said. “Secondly, they are all still hopeful that the USCIS approve their cases considering the situation in Afghanistan. Most of them are not aware how hard it is to be approved for humanitarian parole.”

The USCIS official did not respond to questions about whether the agency has approved any Afghan humanitarian parole requests and how long it would take the agency to clear the backlog.

Taliban Reacts to Newly-Formed ‘Resistance Council’

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Zabihullah Mujahid

Tolo News: Islamic Emirate spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, reacting to the new movement, said no one can threaten the people of Afghanistan in the name of resistance or anything else. “No longer is there a need for making fronts. Anyone who establishes a front will not gain good results,” he said. Click here to read more (external link).

Afghan Pilots Who Fled To Tajikistan Say Taliban Is Threatening Relatives Back Home

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By Mumin Ahmadi
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
October 23, 2021

DUSHANBE — Afghan military pilots who fled to Tajikistan when the Taliban seized power in Kabul say the militant group is pressuring them to return to Afghanistan by threatening to kill their relatives.

Trained by the United States, the Afghan pilots say their documents have been completed for traveling and they hope they will soon be able to go to the United States.

But two Afghan pilots who are sheltering at sanatoriums on the outskirts of Dushanbe told RFE/RL’s Tajik Service on October 23 that the Taliban is now trying to force them to return to Afghanistan.

One Afghan pilot, speaking on condition of anonymity, told RFE/RL that his son back in Afghanistan was beaten by the Taliban and that the militants threatened to kill the boy if the pilot did not return.

Another pilot told RFE/RL that Taliban militants have gone to the homes of several of his family members to demand that the pilot return to Afghanistan.

He told RFE/RL that the Taliban has a list of the names of all 143 Afghan pilots now in Tajikistan. He said Taliban authorities are increasing pressure on all of the pilots by threatening their relatives in Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid denied that the Taliban is threatening the relatives of the pilots.

“Nobody cares about them,” Mujahid told RFE/RL on October 23. “They come up with high-profile stories to obtain refugee status. We have said many times that if they return, no one will touch them here.”

In August, shortly after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, the Taliban issued a call for all of the U.S.-trained Afghan pilots to join them in order to fly aircraft that the group had seized at military bases across Afghanistan.

Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

Taliban Not Allowing the Displaced Villagers in Daikundi to Return Home

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Daikundi

8am: A public source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Hasht-e Subh that the Taliban district governor had told Pato residents that the land should be occupied by Pashtuns and that Kindir residents had no right to return to their land. Click here to read more (external link).

UN Prepares Polio Vaccination Campaign for Children in Afghanistan

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Child getting polio drops (file photo)

VOA News
October 23, 2021

U.N. agencies are preparing to launch a polio vaccination campaign for all children under 5 in Afghanistan, a country where the potentially crippling disease persists despite a more than three-decade-long campaign that has nearly eradicated it worldwide.

Vaccine doses will begin to be administered in Afghanistan on November 8 for the first time in three years, now that the country’s new Taliban government has granted approval.

“This is a huge development that now we can go all across Afghanistan and deliver the vaccine house to house,” Dr. Hamid Jafari, the World Health Organization’s director of polio eradication for the Eastern Mediterranean region, told VOA.

Jafari described the upcoming campaign as “a real combination of excitement and extreme fear — excitement because it looks like a real opportunity to eradicate wild polio virus finally.”

Warning that the virus might still be “lurking in some hard-to-reach populations,” he said it’s critical that the WHO “maintain this momentum to vaccinate our children so that the virus has nowhere to go.”

“Both Afghanistan and Pakistan really actually need to switch gears,” Jafari declared.

Polio’s presence in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan, where a U.N. polio vaccination effort begins in December, means the disease can still spread globally. Rotary International, which coordinates a global polio eradication program, predicts “hundreds of thousands of children could be paralyzed” if polio is not eliminated within 10 years.

The WHO announced the vaccination campaign on Tuesday, five days before the observance of World Polio Day, part of Rotary International’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).

Since the GPEI began in 1988, when there were 350,000 cases in 125 countries every year, polio cases have been cut by 99.9%, according to Rotary International.

The Taliban prohibited teams organized by the U.N. from conducting door-to-door vaccinations in parts of Afghanistan under their control over the past three years.

The ban and the recently ended war in Afghanistan prevented vaccines from being administered to 3.3 million of the country’s 10 million children over that period.

Taliban support

The Taliban did not comment on the agreement, but Jafari said, “The Taliban have always been supportive of polio eradication. … In fact, the polio education program started in Afghanistan when they were in government” previously from 1996 to 2001.

Jafari said the Taliban vaccination restriction “was imposed purely for considerations of security and the nature of conflict at the time, and that has now obviously changed drastically. So their commitment to support polio education remains, and this is an expression of that.”

He said the WHO has always “maintained dialogue” with the Taliban, in keeping with its “very neutral and impartial program” that enables children to be vaccinated “wherever they are.”

Carol Pandak, head of the PolioPlus program at Rotary International, said in an interview with VOA that GPEI continues to be successful, noting only two cases of polio have been detected in the recent past, one in Afghanistan and the other in Pakistan.

“We have gone the longest time ever since detecting a case of the wild poliovirus. We’ve reached almost nine months, but now is not the time to be complacent,” she cautioned. “We need to build on this progress. We need to continue immunizing children against polio, and we need to intensify our disease detection systems so that with so few cases we’ll be able to tell and prove that there is no polio circulating.”

Pandak said that while Rotary International was “cautiously optimistic” about the progress made this year, “we need to also focus on other diseases, especially for children, because some of their immunization campaigns have been canceled due to COVID. So we really need to be able to protect children from diseases such as polio, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Earlier this month, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus celebrated Henrietta Lacks, a woman whose cervical cells were used to develop the polio vaccine, by acknowledging her “contribution to revolutionary advancements in medical science.”

The “HeLa cells” from Lacks, an African American, are the oldest and most used human cell line in existence. They were taken from her without permission at Johns Hopkins University in 1951 before her death, and their use has resulted in many other medical breakthroughs and research involving maladies such as AIDS and cancer.

Some information for this report came from Reuters.

US nearing a formal agreement to use Pakistan’s airspace to carry out military operations in Afghanistan

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US Drone (file)

CNN: The Biden administration has told lawmakers that the US is nearing a formalized agreement with Pakistan for use of its airspace to conduct military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, according to three sources familiar with the details of a classified briefing with members of Congress that took place on Friday morning. Click here to read more (external link).

Pakistan Kept On Terrorism Financing Watchlist Despite Progress

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By Radio Mashaal
October 22, 2021

A global money-laundering watchdog has called on Pakistan to “continue to make progress as soon as possible ” to address the one remaining recommendation that is preventing the country from being removed from a so-called gray list of terrorism financing.

The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) placed Pakistan on its watchlist in 2018 amid accusations that the country’s powerful military harbors Islamist militants to use them as proxies against India and neighboring Afghanistan.

Being placed on the list can scare away investors and creditors, and make global banks wary of doing business with a country.

Following a three-day plenary session on October 21, FATF hailed Pakistan’s “continued political commitment” since June 2018 to address its counterterrorist financing-related “deficiencies,” which has allowed the country to completed 26 of the 27 recommendations made by the watchdog to prevent terrorism financing and money laundering.

However, FATF President Marcus Pleyer told a press conference that the authorities need to “further demonstrate that investigations and prosecutions are being pursued against the senior leadership of UN designated terror groups.”

The international watchdog also said Pakistan still needs to demonstrate that it “actively seeks to enhance the impact of sanctions beyond its jurisdiction by nominating additional individuals and entities for designation at the UN.”

Hammad Azhar, Pakistan’s energy minister who is also involved in FATF-related matters, welcomed the watchdog’s acknowledgement that his country has made progress as “good news.”

“26/27 items already complete. Majority of countries believe that we have completed the Action Plan,” Azhar tweeted.

FATF also decided on October 21 to add Turkey, Jordan, and Mali to its watchlist, and to remove Botswana and Mauritius.

The organization also announced a new strategy for combatting corruption through anonymous entities such as shell companies. The proposed rules would force countries to set up a registry listing who actually owns an entity.

With reporting by AP

Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

The Supreme Council of National Resistance Establishes in Afghanistan

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National Supreme Council

8am: Afghanistan’s military and political figures announced the formation of a coalition called the “Supreme Council of National Resistance of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.” Abdul Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Atta Mohammad Noor, Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum, and other political figures are said to be members. Click here to read more (external link).