Afghanistan Refugees Told Time’s Up

by Jack

Updated – Source – New York Times 24 Mar 2014

A number of Afghanistan refugees that assisted us in Afghanistan are being told the visas they were promised may have timed out.

These are people who risked their lives and their families to help us when we desperately needed their help as translators, negotiators, and workers and now we’re telling them, due to the enormous red tape in granted visas their application time may run out. Meanwhile literally tens of millions of illegal remain in the USA with no visas. Something is really wrong with the system.

From the New York Times…”KABUL, Afghanistan — Raiz Ahmad may have the saddest vantage of the United States’ failure to issue visas to thousands of Afghans who put themselves at risk by helping Americans during the war.

As an administrator for the American military’s interpreter program, Mr. Ahmad sees dozens of Afghan interpreters every day, waiting for their visas and racked by fear ahead of the military withdrawal. Some can no longer go home — the Taliban control their villages.

But his own story is among the most painful of all. In late 2012, while he was traveling home with his two brothers, insurgents opened fire on their vehicle. He suffered multiple gunshot wounds. His brothers, a doctor and an engineer, were killed.

“I was the one supporting the U.S. Army, not my brothers,” said Mr. Ahmad, who applied for his own visa in 2012. “It’s because of me they died.”

Mr. Ahmad oversees a frightened demographic of Afghans whose vulnerability is increasing at a crucial moment of uncertainty. With the Western troop withdrawal deadline looming at year’s end, and given the recent bloom of tension between Afghan and American officials at the highest levels, Afghans awaiting special immigration visas fear that their time for receiving one has run out.

American officials say that through most of the program’s history, the State Department fell behind in granting visas, and as a result, nearly half of the number once available have simply expired because they are canceled if they sit unused for two years.

Put another way, even if the government grants every single remaining visa from now until the program ends in September 2015 — an effort that would require it to approve more than three times as many visas as it has during any other year — thousands of visas have already gone to waste.

Now, about 5,000 Afghans deemed under threat will be competing for fewer than 2,300 visas, to say nothing of the hundreds coming in to start their applications every month.

“It’s as if we intentionally denied them their benefit,” said Marc Chretien, a former adviser to the commander of the coalition forces in Afghanistan. “It hasn’t been a priority until now and only under public pressure.”

READ THE ENTIRE STORY HERE.