Without congressional action, the tens of thousands of Afghans we evacuated to the United States may be deported in the coming year.
America has a long, disastrous history of forgetting when it comes to Afghanistan. Abandoning the country to Islamic radicals in the 1990s after its war with the Soviets; deprioritizing our own war after 9/11 so we could pivot to Iraq—this willful forgetting has, again and again, bred disaster. This played out most recently last year, when the collapse of the Afghan government surprised many senior officials in the U.S. government. Today, this pattern of forgetting is poised to repeat. Without congressional action, the tens of thousands of Afghans we evacuated to the United States may be deported in the coming year, and very few in Washington seem to be talking about it. The cost of this apathy will be a second Afghan evacuation, equally disastrous, this time played out in reverse, with our allies shipped back to the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan they fled.
To understand how we arrived at this looming crisis, we have to go back to August 23, 2021, when, during the withdrawal from Kabul, the Biden administration authorized the use of humanitarian parole to temporarily expedite the entry of Afghans into the United States. The preexisting Special Immigrant Visa program—which can take three years from application to approval—had proved impracticably onerous, so humanitarian parole filled the gap and eventually enabled the administration to evacuate approximately 80,000 Afghans to the United States.
Although humanitarian parole accelerated their processing, the program didn’t provide resettlement services or a clear path to long-term residency for the new arrivals. Afghans have struggled with resettlement and with securing the necessary documentation to work or attend school, as well as access to a host of other necessities. And humanitarian parole extends for only two years. Those tens of thousands of Afghans we evacuated have been living under a cloud of uncertainty, and they will soon be subject to deportation unless Congress acts by adjusting their status. The Afghan Adjustment Act—a bipartisan, bicameral piece of legislation introduced this past August—aims to do just that. Astonishingly, it’s struggling to pass.
