From Military.com:
“Almost Two Years Since Kabul Fell, a Frayed Refugee System Creates
Obstacles for Afghans in Texas”
(Afghan refugees Azita Jawady and her husband Hamid Sadra at
their home in Austin on May 17. Jawady, a former social worker and employee at
USAID and Sadra, an artist, fled Afghanistan after the Taliban took control of
the country, fearing that they could be in danger because of their jobs.)
"Almost two years since Kabul fell, a frayed refugee
system creates obstacles for Afghans in Texas" was first published by The
Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans
— and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and
statewide issues. In the summer of 2021, Azita Jawady and Hamid Sadra were a
young, married couple in love, living in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, and
expecting their first child. They felt good about their future and their
country. Despite decades of war, Afghanistan seemed to be moving in a positive
direction. At least in urban areas, women could attend school and university,
enter the workforce and participate in public life. Jawady believed this was a
lasting transformation since the end of the first Taliban regime in 2001. "For
20 [years] we tried to make a good Afghanistan," Jawady said. "We
were an open-minded people. We go to restaurant, we work with men. We never
thought that Afghanistan fall downs again."
But on Aug. 15, 2021, their lives changed in an instant. Two
weeks before the U.S. military ended its 20-year presence in Afghanistan, the
Taliban took control of Kabul and the country. Jawady, Sadra and many others
didn't expect it to happen so quickly — if at all. Tens of thousands of Afghans
who had worked for the U.S. government or other Western entities were now at
risk. That included Jawady, who was a social worker for the U.S. Agency for
International Development, and Sadra, who worked for ArtLords, an Afghan
artist-activist group that had done work for the U.S. Embassy and painted
murals with themes of peace, health and human rights on the blast walls that
protected buildings from bombs across Afghanistan — themes that conflicted with
the Taliban's stringent rules against behavior considered un-Islamic.
Even speaking English was dangerous. A Taliban fighter at a
security checkpoint once asked Sadra, in English, what his job was, and Sadra
pretended not to understand. He felt he was being tested. "I really was
scared, and all of my body was shaking. I didn't say anything," he said. They
feared for their lives, and for the life of their unborn son, and fled the
country on Dec. 1, 2021, on a flight arranged by nongovernmental organizations
including Sadra's employer. After staying at a military base for a month in
Qatar — where Jawady was treated for Bell's palsy, a partial facial paralysis,
usually temporary, that she thinks was triggered by stress — they were sent to
a U.S. Army base in New Jersey, then to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and finally arrived
in Austin in February 2022.
More than 97,000 Afghans have come to the United States since
the Afghan government collapsed in 2021, according to a U.S. State Department
spokesperson. Federal data indicates at least 3,800 Afghans came to Texas as
refugees or with special immigrant visas during that time. Since fiscal year
2010, at least 17,000 Afghan refugees and those with special immigrant visas
have arrived in Texas. Only California surpasses it, with at least 40,000
Afghans arriving during that time.
Texas has long been one of the top states for refugee
resettlement in the country. Almost 220,000 refugees arrived in the state
between 1980, when the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program began, and 2018,
according to research conducted by Germany's Georg-August-Universität-Göttingen
and the University of Western Australia. Most recent Afghan refugees are here
through humanitarian parole, which allows people facing an urgent humanitarian
crisis permission to stay in the United States for a short time. They don't
receive visas or permanent residency — better known as green cards — but they
are eligible for public benefits and can apply for temporary work permits.
Afghan parolees now have up to four years to either figure
out a way to stay in the country for good or leave when their parole expires.
Their best option for eventually getting a green card is the so-called Afghan
Special Immigrant Visa. Afghans who worked for the U.S. government in
Afghanistan for at least one year are eligible, as are their spouses and
children. Many SIV applicants worked as interpreters for the U.S. military. In
2021, the Department of Homeland Security estimated that more than 40% of
Afghan parolees were eligible for SIVs because of their previous work with the
U.S. government. But what should be a minimum nine-month visa process is
currently taking at least 10 months to navigate, and has climbed to as much as
33 months in recent years.
The State Department has historically been slow to process
SIVs, but it became a crisis when thousands of Afghans eligible for those visas
arrived in the United States after the fall of Kabul. The State Department was
understaffed and reported receiving "hundreds of thousands of emails"
between August 2021 and October 2021. It took at least a year to clear the
backlog of inquiries.
For now, Jawady and Sadra are trying to focus on what they
can control. That includes adjusting to refugee life in Austin, where they live
with 1-year-old Qmars, a gentle boy with fluffy spikes of dark hair, in an
apartment they found about 15 miles north of downtown. After first working at
an online retailer's fulfillment center, Sadra, who was an artist in
Afghanistan, now works as a technician testing building materials for
construction sites. He says he's become a workaholic after starting over in
Austin and struggling to keep up with the city's high cost of living. Jawady
tutors other Afghan refugees in English; she also teaches refugees how to
access health care services in Texas through a nonprofit organization. Navigating
the labyrinth of federal, state and local entities in charge of helping them
get health care, food and housing support and even diapers and formula for
their son has been a head-spinning experience. "We thought the American
people has a special benefits to the babies — maybe some nurses help? Because
it''s my first experience of being a mom, so it's very hard for me,"
Jawady said. "In America, we have a lot of expectation. But it's
different." And their immigration status is always on their minds. Jawady
applied for an SIV and said she hasn't heard anything from immigration
officials since four months ago, when they said her case was in "stage
one." Sadra's not eligible for an SIV because he didn't officially work
for the U.S. government, so he applied for asylum in April. Receiving asylum
gives someone temporary permission to stay in the United States and the ability
to apply for a green card after a year. The best-case scenario for the family
would be that Jawady receives an SIV, which would cover Sadra and Qmars too.
Felix Villalobos, an attorney for RAICES, which provides free
and low-cost legal services to immigrants and refugees, said so many Afghans have
arrived in Texas after the fall of Kabul that he formed a rapid response team
that has counseled Afghan families mostly about special immigrant visas and
asylum. He estimates RAICES has worked with 400 Afghan refugees so far, and
that has just been in San Antonio, where RAICES operates. "It is very
time-consuming work," Villalobos said. "It's not their fault, and
they're just having to deal with the realization that … they're in a new
country, they may lose status here in the next few months and they're trying to
find a way to stay because they can't go back."
A system under stress
(Jawady, Sadra and Qmars outside their Austin home.)
For refugees, getting help from an immigration attorney can
give them the best chance for a favorable decision in their case. But for
refugees in Texas with little to no money, free or affordable legal help is
hard to come by. Villalobos is one of those hard-to-come-by attorneys. He's
trying to beat the clock and submit around 200 applications for Temporary
Protected Status in the next few months as parole begins to expire for his
clients. TPS prevents someone from getting deported for a designated period of
time if they're from a country the U.S. deems unsafe. Recipients get temporary
authorization to work, but unlike parole, they don't get access to public
benefits. And while his clients are also now eligible to extend their
parole for two more years, he's not convinced it will be a smooth process or
that it ultimately serves his clients' best interests. Helping Afghan
clients over the last year and a half has been unnerving for Villalobos and
others. Getting official documents out of Afghanistan can be difficult to
impossible since its government fell to Taliban rule and its president fled the
country.
Houston-based refugee advocate Khalil Arab, an Afghan refugee
who received his special immigrant visa in 2019 after spending five years
interpreting for the U.S. military and coalition forces, said Afghan refugees
without "concrete documentation" are unlikely to be granted visas. Villalobos
says every one of his clients is eligible for an SIV, including some who risked
their lives assisting the military at prison camps, in black ops missions or in
confrontations with the Taliban. Not receiving a visa at the end of it all
would be a huge broken promise, he said. "All of them had the expectation
that upon arrival to the U.S., they would get their green cards," he said,
referring to the fact that under normal circumstances they would have finished
the SIV application process prior to leaving Afghanistan and received a green
card once they arrived. "It took quite a while for them to understand and
figure out that that was no longer the case."
They have also arrived when the U.S. refugee safety net is
badly frayed. The Trump administration drastically reduced the number of
refugees allowed into the United States for several years — from 110,000 when
Donald Trump took office to 18,000 in 2020. The Biden administration has since
raised the limit to 125,000 for fiscal year 2023. But the effects of the
previous cuts linger because less federal funding had been flowing to agencies
and to the system as a whole.
Ian Kysel, an expert in migration and refugee law and a
professor at Cornell Law School, says that created a vicious cycle starting
with the federal government ending contracts or cutting off support to some
organizations — "starving" the resettlement system, according to a
2020 Migration Policy Institute report — which caused those organizations to
lay off workers and limited how many refugees they could work with at a time. Texas'
largest refugee resettlement agency, Refugee Services of Texas, collapsed in
the wake of those cuts. In March, the organization announced a budget
shortfall, and in early May, it announced it was cutting staff and closing some
offices. On May 26, it announced it was closing completely. Over the last seven
months, the agency has served almost 1,000 refugees in its seven offices across
Texas. When Kabul fell to the Taliban, the system couldn't accommodate the
surge in demand — especially for Afghan refugees who needed specialized help
such as Pashto or Dari interpreters.
Khaleemullah Ghazi, a former interpreter for U.S. Special
Forces and an Afghan refugee who resettled in Austin after evacuating his
country in August 2021, worked at a Texas resettlement agency in 2022 and said
caseworker pay is low, especially given the skills needed. "The person who
has a skill of three or four languages, he still is getting paid $16 or $17 an
hour," Ghazi said. "Every person has more than 15 or 20 cases.
There's a ... heavy load of work on everybody." The refugees have allies
who are trying to help them. One veterans organization, Houston-based Combined
Arms, has been lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would streamline the
Afghan immigration process. Khalil Arab, the Houston refugee advocate who also
works for Combined Arms, said this is an emotional issue for many veterans who
feel a deep "moral injury" about how the U.S. withdrawal from
Afghanistan unfolded. "They left their comrades behind. A lot of them have
seen their interpreters or their comrades suffering, go into hiding, some of
them even got a family member killed by the Taliban," Arab said. "So
the expectation is to provide them a pathway to legal residency and eventually
to citizenship."
Still waiting Jawady and Sadra's humanitarian parole expires in about seven
months. In a perfect system, that should be just enough time for Sadra's asylum
to be approved and Jawady's SIV application to be finalized. But neither
is certain. The good news for Jawady is that processing time for the
visas dropped significantly at the end of last year. The bad news is that the
recent end of Title 42, a public health order that went into effect at the
start of the COVID-19 pandemic and allowed border officials to swiftly deport
people who had crossed the U.S. border illegally, could delay refugee
processing. Villalobos of RAICES said he's already seeing the effects. "USCIS
[U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] has canceled asylum interviews for
our clients to move resources to the border. We had several clients set to go
to interviews next week and they were all canceled on us yesterday,"
Villalobos said on May 11, the final day Title 42 was in effect. Despite
all that his family has gone through since fleeing Afghanistan, though, Sadra
isn't cynical. "I trust one thing: America is very, very, very
lawful," he said. But the closing of Refugee Services of Texas
seemed to shake Sadra. A lawyer from the organization had been helping them
navigate the system, and now they have to start over with another agency, which
could further delay things like renewing his work permit. "Honestly,
we don't have a good feeling, but we don't have any other option," Sadra
said.
Refugee Services of Texas said in a press release that all of
its Austin cases will now be managed by Episcopal Migration Ministries. One
thing keeping Jawady and Sadra grounded is their close ties to family and
friends in Afghanistan. But they also feel responsible for them. They were the
lucky ones who got out, and they worry about their loved ones' well-being given
the damage to Afghanistan's economy since the U.S. withdrawal. Sadra feels
obligated to send money back home. "When … Afghanistan fell down, all of
the jobs go down … no education, no work, no money, no income. So we should
support them," Sadra said. They still feel the weight of how their country
transformed seemingly overnight. Jawady grieves for the girls who aren't
allowed to go to school or work like she did. To an observer, Jawady's new jobs
with refugees as a tutor and health care advocate could be interpreted as
subtle acts of defiance against the Taliban regime. "It's really hard for
us, all of us just cry," Jawady said, reflecting on what Afghans have gone
through during the last couple of years. A few minutes later, she quoted the
Farsi version of the saying, "This too shall pass."
^ Sadly, the US Asylum System has been broken for years and
then the Fall of Kabul happened making things go from bad to worse. We need to
not only fix the System, but also make sure that Afghans (and Ukrainians) can
come and stay in the US. ^
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/06/09/almost-two-years-kabul-fell-frayed-refugee-system-creates-obstacles-afghans-texas.html
