MN lawyers struggle to help Afghans resettle here after U.S. withdrawal

Nearly four months after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, Minnesota advocates for refugees are growing frustrated with the U.S. government’s lack of urgency in helping Afghans resettle here.

The late-August military withdrawal left tens of thousands of Afghan allies to the United States needing to leave their home country, where they are unsafe under Taliban rule. Some 74,500 have made it to the U.S. at least temporarily, but many still are waiting.

“It is insanely frustrating,” said Abigail Loesch, a Minneapolis attorney helping an Afghan man navigate immigration rules to come to the United States. “The puck is being passed between the state and Congress and the White House and the Department of Defense, and meanwhile, nothing’s happening.”

For Afghans, there are two main ways to gain temporary entry into the United States: Special Immigrant Visas for people who worked with or for the U.S. government, and humanitarian parole, which has broader criteria based on urgent humanitarian considerations.

So far, Minnesota has resettled at least 27 Afghans on special visas and 456 through humanitarian parole, according to the state’s Department of Human Services.

Loesch said it’s frustrating to deal with the program requirements and to wait for cases to be processed.

Since July, only around 135 of the 28,000 applications for humanitarian parole have been approved, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Until recently, there had been as few as 10 agents processing the cases.

Meanwhile, many clients like hers are living in dangerous situations, Loesch said.

Although humanitarian parole typically is for emergencies, many attorneys have sought to use it as emergency travel documents so that clients can then pursue a permanent plan of action in the U.S., Loesch said.

“They don’t want you to use it to get around traditional immigration routes,” Loesch said. “We’ve been struggling a lot with whether U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is even going to process these cases.”

LEAVE, THEN APPLY

It’s difficult for Afghans to even apply for humanitarian parole. Because the U.S. embassy in Kabul is closed, applicants must travel to a third country.

“So when it first started, I thought, ‘oh, we’ll get a decision in just a few weeks,’ because that’s normally how my cases go. And then USCIS says, ‘We’re not going to decide any unless you’re outside Afghanistan,’” she said.

Her client, who applied on Sept. 15, went to Pakistan so his application could be processed, but his Pakistani visa expires after 60 days.

“Even if they can get to a third country, how long is it going to take for the U.S. government to finish processing whatever visa option they might have?” she said. “​​If he runs out of his 60 days, there’s either an issue of him getting caught and deported back to Afghanistan, which will be directly into Taliban custody, or he just hides underground.”

Loesch said her client’s brother was murdered in November. He was kidnapped by the Taliban and held for ransom in exchange for her client turning himself in, she said.

“We hadn’t been as worried about his wife and his kids. The Taliban know where they are and harass her on a regular basis, telling her that they will catch her husband,” she said. “They just did this to his brother, and now he’s totally freaked out about his wife and his kids.”

NO ‘IMMINENT DANGER’

Another Afghan man applied for humanitarian parole in the United Arab Emirates but was denied six weeks later.

According to his Minneapolis attorney, John Medeiros, the U.S. government determined the man no longer was in “imminent danger” because he had left Afghanistan.

​​”How can you on one side of your mouth, say, ‘We’re going to give priority to those outside of Afghanistan, because those within Afghanistan (we) won’t be able to fully process for their visas,’ and then say, ‘We’re going to deny you if you’re outside of Afghanistan because you no longer face imminent harm’?” he said.

Appealing the decision costs $600, a barrier on top of the $575 application fee. The USCIS has received an estimated $17.2 million in fees in the past two months, based on calculating the number of applications times the fee.

“So the government’s been getting this money. Some of us are feeling like this is a total bait-and-switch. You’re getting these exorbitant fees from people to process through applications for a benefit that they clearly qualify for and you’re denying them,” Medeiros said.

Biden administration officials have said they are trying to ease the passage. But they have struggled with what Secretary of State Antony Blinken described last month as a situation that “is in so many ways a complicated story that I’m not sure the American people fully understood.”

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Medeiros doubts the Afghans would win a lawsuit against the government, so he’s asking the public to show they care.

“If this were the Trump administration, people would be chaining themselves up to the White House right now,” he said. “How can you abandon our allies? How can you take in $17.5 million and not adjudicate these applications, and then start adjudicating them and start denying them all?”

Medeiros wants the U.S. government to create a parole program for Afghanistan, as it has for countries like Cuba or Haiti.

The Biden administration also could lower the standards for the humanitarian parole to “generalized harm,” he said.

“Why are we being so complacent about this?” Medeiros said. “This is not OK. These are our allies. These are people who have worked side-by-side with the U.S. government for 20 years. It just astounds me.”

This report includes information from the New York Times.

Pioneer Press