More than a year after the collapse of Kabul, Afghans who helped the U.S. during the war are still struggling to get special immigrant visas and only a small percentage have made it through the process, adding to the frustration of advocates who are trying to assist.
The State Department has granted only 18,000 of the visas to Afghans and their families since President Joe Biden took office — a small fraction of the number applied for — partly due to a short-staffed and dysfunctional system, according to a report by the agency’s inspector general released this week. The slow pace continues despite major increases in applications for the special immigrant visas, or SIVs, in the months after the American military withdrawal.
Scores of veterans and Afghans have gathered at Capitol Hill and across the country in what they are calling a “fire watch” — round-the-clock protests that are aimed at urging Congress to help Afghans who were evacuated to the U.S. under special immigration provisions, but are now facing uncertainty as time runs out on those protections.
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“This report doesn’t say anything that we already didn’t know,” Matt Zeller, a U.S. Army veteran and Advisory Board Chair of the Association of Wartime Allies, told Military.com in an interview Thursday. “Veterans and people paying attention to this have been saying this for the better part of the last year — not just the better part of a year but for the last decade.”
“The SIV program is fundamentally broken,” said Zeller, who’s been traveling the country on the so-called fire watches, talking to politicians and communities about the problem.
Since the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 and the militant Taliban takeover, Afghanistan has witnessed a breakneck economic crisis that has resulted in famine and political instability, all while the average Afghan ally worries about violent reprisals from the Taliban for helping the U.S. during the war.
For Afghans and their advocates, this famine and instability are an enormous source of fear, with Zeller adding that they are “going to do far more killing than the Taliban will ever be able to do in this time period.”
Between October and May, the number of Afghan SIV principal applications more than doubled, according to the State Department watchdog report. At the same time, a Military.com analysis earlier this year showed that visa approvals dropped by a whopping 91% between fiscal quarters. There are an estimated 322,000 Afghans in the pipeline for a special immigrant visa, according to the inspector general.
The State Department watchdog looked into the agency’s handling of the growing backlog of applications and found despite “minor” fixes to the application process, deficiencies remain, and the situation is not improving.
“These deficiencies have contributed to Afghan SIV applicant processing times exceeding the 9-month goal set by Congress and may have delayed vulnerable Afghan allies from reaching safety in the United States,” according to the IG report, which was requested by Congress.
The department filled a long-vacant senior coordinating official position in the SIV processing office to remedy issues causing the backlog, but the official is “not sufficiently coordinating and monitoring” fixes to the program, the IG found.
Overall staffing for the program is also insufficient, the watchdog reported. In January, the Afghan SIV unit only had eight employees; by summer, it had increased that to 42 personnel.
“However, the increase was not sufficient to address the existing application backlog while absorbing additional new applications,” the report said. Despite adding even more personnel, the National Visa Center estimated last year that it would need 263 staff members.
In May, the National Visa Center’s Afghan SIV email account had more than 325,000 unread…
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