Today, Explained - From Kabul’s airport to Virginia’s burbs

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

The world watched in horror as tens of thousands fled Afghanistan last August. Today, Explained’s Haleema Shah meets with an evacuee still stuck in immigration limbo. This episode was reported and produced by Haleema Shah, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey and Efim Shapiro, and edited by Matt Collette and Sean Rameswaram, who also hosted. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We've been talking a lot about the war in Ukraine on the show lately, but today we're going to step back and talk about what happens after a war ends. It's been a little over six months now since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan and the United States made a very messy exit from its longest ever war. Roughly 80,000 Afghans in danger of retaliation from the Taliban qualified to be airlifted out of the country, as you might remember. They were brought to a number of other countries, including the United States, as evacuees. And on the show today, you're going to hear from one of them

about starting over after war. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. But today explained, I'm Sean Ramos for him. And we were wondering how the Afghan evacuees were settling into the United States on the show. So today explains Halima Shah found one and asked, Halima, who did you find?

I found a woman named Hanifa Garawal. She's 30 years old and she was evacuated last year. And now she's living in northern Virginia outside of D.C. And she's trying to get adjusted to life here. So she's learning how to drive. Yeah, so Halima, at first it was quite difficult getting to know the signs, the driving signs here. You went driving with her?

I went driving with her. I went driving with her. I wasn't teaching her how to drive. The person actually teaching her how to drive is her brother, Zabi, who you heard in the car. I was kind of shadowing this driving lesson. Because Hanifa drove a little bit back in Afghanistan. She was living in Kabul. But she didn't really drive much. And driving in the U.S. is very different.

We have the traffic law, but nobody follows the law. Like there's no signals for stop, stop signs or any other speed signs. But here, once you move, like you know how to drive a car, but you don't know how to follow these signs. So that is Zabi, Hanifa's brother. And he came to Virginia seven years ago, and he's a citizen now. And Hanifa is pretty lucky because she actually has three brothers who are here in the U.S. who are really helping her find her way, including giving her driving lessons. Well, that's one of the difficult jobs, to teach somebody how to drive a car, because I have experienced this with my wife. I'm not a good person to teach how to drive a car

because I don't have that much patience. Brotherly love. No, no, wait, hold on. Look at your mirrors, both sides. You need to put your signal, okay? Yep, keep driving, good. Wait, Halima, I feel like we skipped right to driving, but where does she live?

Like, what's her housing situation? So Hanifa lives in a two-bedroom apartment, which she shares with her parents, brother, and nephew, who were all evacuated with her. Oh. I'm sure the long-term goal is to move in somewhere that's a little bit bigger, but this apartment was very hard to come by. Most Afghan evacuees, when they came to the U.S., were brought to U.S. military bases first and then were resettled into homes. So for people who are resettled in northern Virginia, it's really hard to find housing because, one, it's a very expensive area.

Two, they didn't have income. And three, a lot of places don't accept a cosigner. So they were able to nail down this place because it was one of the few that would accept them if their resettlement agency agreed to pay 90 days of rent. And when those 90 days are up, Hanifa and her family will be expected to cover rent on their own. So now we are all looking for jobs. My brother and my nephew got a part job once

and then it was far from here, and they didn't have a car, so couldn't reach there. They left that place, and now they are getting a training at Dallas Airport. Okay, so it sounds like she's getting money through this resettlement agency. Is that the government, or is that like a government partner? And either way, how long is she going to get this money? So resettlement agencies are oftentimes partners with the government. So it's not the same thing as the government. She's getting support from the government in that she is eligible for food stamps and cash assistance through the county. But the resettlement agency helped her with things like applying for those things and applying for medication.

The government has given her a work permit and a social security number. Hmm. Okay. Does she like life in America so far? She likes that her life isn't in danger. But I mean, suburban Virginia is very quiet and it's nothing like gobble i i imagine that to be true halima yeah i do too because as a person who drove like 45 minutes to an hour from dc to suburban virginia to do this story i was like damn it's quiet out here i am out in the

boonies i miss everything sometimes uh when i wake up in the morning, I even miss the air, driving on the streets, my home, my office, colleagues, my friends, and I miss everything about the country. And she had a really high-powered career in Afghanistan. I think without that, she's feeling kind of bored. Usually the days are spending in doctor appointments or arriving practice. Yeah, it sounds kind of boring compared to a high-powered career in Afghanistan. What was she doing? Well, that's sort of the whole reason she's here. She was a human rights attorney. For working, I have worked with Afghanistan Dependent Human Rights Commission for almost

five years. And eventually she worked directly with the previous government of Ashraf Ghani. For almost a year and eight months as Kabul GPT governor on socioeconomic and development affairs. So the fact that Hanifa worked with the previous government meant she had to get out of Afghanistan because she could face retaliation from the Taliban for being a member of the last government. It was 15th August and I prepared myself for the office and it was eight o'clock in the morning when I reached the office. I went to start my works normally. The colleagues were still coming and they were telling me that something is not normal. And I tried to

motivate them and I told them everything is okay, just get back to your work. Well, there was still a fear in my heart. And then it was around 10.30 when I received a call from our general director's office who told us to leave the office immediately. So if you haven't sensed it already, this was the day that Kabul fell into the Taliban's control. The fall was not a total surprise. I mean, other provinces had fallen into their control with remarkable speed.

But even as people sensed this was coming, it didn't really mean that people were prepared for this to happen in Kabul. Everyone was running. The traffic jam was very high. And the only thing that came to my mind was going to the airport because we thought that might be the safest place, because the U.S. embassy was still in the airport. So while others were waiting for days at the Kabul airport,

Hanifa actually managed to get on a plane on August 15th. Somehow, that moment was very heart-wrenching, because we knew that whatever was gained in 20 years, that has all been lost. And the people were so desperate, they didn't want the Taliban, and they were so afraid that they were ready to do anything just to flee from Taliban. The plane was full of people, and the pilot left it because he said, I cannot take this flight with this amount of people.

We got out of the plane and the airport has a chaotic situation. I think we all remember seeing this. These were like these grisly scenes of people falling off of planes and struggling to get into the airport and there was a lot of ugliness there. What does Hanifa do in the middle of all that chaos? Hanifa left the airport, but she didn't go home because she was expecting the Taliban to come looking for her.

And she spent the next six days in hiding until she heard from U.S. officials. 21 August, at 11 o'clock, they called me. They gave me an address and they told me to wait there as soon as you can. And I was also panicked because I knew this is the last option that I have and I have to get there. So what happens after she gets this call? What does she do? Well, the first thing she does is she tries to convince officials to let her take family members with her. Initially, when Hanifa got this call, it was so Hanifa could be evacuated from Afghanistan.

She managed to convince officials to let her take her parents, her brother, and her nephew. Nice. And are they like straight on a direct flight to Virginia? What happens next? No, they were actually flown from Kabul to Qatar, and then they were sent to an airbase in Germany. It actually wasn't until they arrived at Dulles Airport, which is in northern Virginia, just outside of D.C., that Hanifa realized what her family's immigration status would be. What was her immigration status? A very precarious one. They didn't get one of the more common immigrant visas.

They got something called humanitarian parole. And Hanifa had no idea what it meant. She actually had to Google it once she got here. I'm Googling it right now. Actually, when we were evacuated, nothing was told. How are we going to take to U.S.? What will be our state?

There's nothing. But when we went to Dallas airport here in Washington, they put the humanitarian power visa to our passports. And then when we did the search for it, the only thing I could find is that it's one of the urgent visa systems by U.S. What did you find in your Google search, Sean? A bunch of government immigration bureaucracy kind of stuff.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Humanitarian parole is actually this rarely used program that the U.S. relied on for Vietnamese evacuees. Yeah, so it's an old program and it's kind of a fast track for foreigners who are in emergent situations and really need to get to the U.S. as soon as possible. It's okay. It's a program that does not grant permanent residency. Instead, it gives someone two years of protection from deportation. And about 70,000 of the 80,000 Afghans who were evacuated are classified as humanitarian parolees, with the idea being that they're going to have two years to get their paperwork together and qualify for one of the more permanent pathways,

which would be a special immigrant visa or asylum, which come with permanent residency or a pathway to citizenship. I mean, two years sounds like a reasonable amount of time to figure that out. Yeah, it does. But not when there's a mountain of S.I.V. and asylum applications that are still waiting to be processed. The backlog has been growing and growing over time. Overall, it's a growing number of asylum applications and an agency that just hasn't been keeping

pace with that number. So this is Julia Galat. She's a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, and they reported a backlog of about 18,000 SIV applications and over 400,000 applications for the affirmative asylum system, which is the type of asylum Afghan parolees would apply for. Wow. Yeah. Mount Asaili. A mountain indeed. And which is Hanifa applying for, the SIV or the asylum?

Well, Hanifa has not applied for either yet. She wouldn't even be eligible for SIV because that is pretty narrowly defined as a program for somebody who worked directly with the U.S. government or U.S. government contractor. What she would be eligible for is asylum, which is a much broader pool of people. And she would have to demonstrate that as a former official of the Afghan government, her life is in danger and she has this founded fear of persecution

in her home country. But the reason Hanifa hasn't applied for either of those two things is because she doesn't think her application is going to be processed anytime soon. So what's she going to do? She's hoping for a third option. And it's a third option that doesn't exist yet,

but it has been floated, and in order for it to come into existence, there will have to be a big fight on Capitol Hill. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply.

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free of charge betmgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming ontario when you drive just focus you don't need to give a look at that. Halima, when we left off, Hanifa was looking at this Mount SIV, Mount Asaile, over 400,000 people trying to make it through this immigration system right now. And she didn't really want to join them to find a more permanent status here in the United States. Yes. And I should mention that I reached out to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, about this. And they told me in a statement that recent Afghan parolees should not be affected by the backlogs. There is no backlog for affirmative asylum and SIV applications for Afghan nationals who were paroled into the United States through Operation Allies Welcome. DHS previously announced that the department will exempt filing fees and streamline application processing for Afghan nationals who were paroled into the United States for humanitarian reasons on or after July 30th, 2021.

And since the backlog is not supposed to delay Afghan parolees' asylum or SIV applications, I asked USCIS how many of those applications they've approved so far, and they told me, The data you've requested is not publicly available at this time. Sad. Now, to Congress's credit, they did order agencies to decide Afghan parolees' asylum cases in roughly five months. But Julia Galat at the Migration Policy Institute isn't sure that will actually happen if the agency gets a wave of applications from the thousands of parolees who are already in this country. Given the way things are currently moving, it seems like it would take several years to get through, you know, 70,000 Afghans asylum applications or even 36,000, whatever the number turns out to be of people who apply for asylum. In recent years, the U.S. has approved fewer than 30,000 affirmative asylum applications per year. So at that pace, this could take quite a while. How does Hanifa feel about her status in this country right now? The options she has,

the timeline, all of it? You know, I asked her if she felt like she was given false hope because she was basically evacuated from Afghanistan, told she was going to be taken somewhere safe, and it wasn't until she got there that she found out her status is temporary. I won't say that they gave us a false hope, but I guess Afghans don't deserve it. Being the closed allies and working with them for a common cause all these years, I think the U.S. government and the U.S. people, based on the values they believe in, they will try to advocate for Afghans and I'm sure they will find a legal path for them.

Okay, so it sounds like instead of false hope, she's actually hopeful that Congress will get together and figure out an additional path for Afghan evacuees. Not the special immigration visa nor asylum, but some third path. Yes, and that third path would be something called the Afghan Adjustment Act. This would create a straightforward pathway for Afghans to apply for green cards. Basically, anyone who was evacuated by the United States to the United States from Afghanistan in recognition of their humanitarian need could have a way to apply for a green card. And basically, an Afghan Adjustment Act would mean that evacuees would have to go through the

standard green card background checks instead of the SIV or asylum processes, which are far more cumbersome, take way more paperwork, and usually require a lawyer's assistance. How likely is Congress to do something like this? I think Congress has a lot of other things on their mind, like Russia and Ukraine and stuff like that. Yeah, and Congress also has a very bad track record with passing any kind of bipartisan immigration legislation. But a source of hope could be that they have done stuff like this in the past.

Thousands of refugees fleeing Vietnam. Many don't make it this far. We hope that we will get all the help of the people in the government of the United States. Please help us to survive. And when we look at the Vietnamese example, we see that a Vietnamese Adjustment Act didn't pass for Vietnamese parolees until about two years

after the fall of Saigon. But one thing that occurs to me here is that the whole government seemed to really care about what happened in Afghanistan six months ago. There was a lot of bipartisan attention on this. Is there bipartisan attention on what happens to these evacuees? It's true. I mean, Operation Allies Welcome, which was the legislation that airlifted Afghans out of Kabul, had bipartisan support. But we're not seeing that type of support from Republicans and Democrats for an Afghan Adjustment Act. We've seen some Democrats back it, but there has not been a single Republican who has publicly supported this. And it could be because either constituents or legislators on the right view Afghan evacuees as a national security threat.

Take Republican Senator Tom Cotton as an example, who is actually a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. We have no idea who these people are. We're just taking it on faith. They're using their real name. And then we're testing against incomplete databases and saying, well, if we don't have a record of you being a terrorist, then you must be fine. You're not going to attack Americans. You're not going to commit sex offenses against American women. You're not going to bring any kind of disease or anything else in the country. Wow. This isn't really an idea that's rooted in reality, because from my conversations with Hanifa, evacuees had extensive vetting at the two air bases that they went to before they even came to the United States. And Julia told me that this kind of thinking ties directly to the very dangerous evacuation at Kabul airport, which was broadcasted to the whole world last year. When people saw the evacuation from Kabul, it looked really chaotic and messy. And I think

that led to a perception that maybe some bad people had snuck onto the planes. But the truth is that everybody who made it to the United States went through extensive vetting before arriving to the United States. So the U.S. was, you know, evacuating people to its military bases abroad and then conducting background checks and security checks on those people before they were flown to the United States. On the other hand, we could see some rare cooperation for an Afghan Adjustment Act because some of the strongest backers of this legislation are refugee advocates and veterans groups, which have some more conservative members. I mean, the strongest backer of ending this war, which led to this

entire situation, is the president himself. Is he going to throw his weight around on this issue? Is there anything the executive branch can do without Congress? Well, granting green cards is pretty much something that only Congress can do. But if nothing passes, Biden could renew Afghan evacuees humanitarian parole so it doesn't expire in two years. The problem with that is it still doesn't give permanent residency. It just kind of kicks the can further down the road. So what happens if none of this works out? If Hanifa doesn't get this third path, if she never gets to the front of the line on asylum or SIV, does she get deported in like a year and a half? What could happen is that Afghan evacuees could fall through the cracks of the U.S. immigration system. It's incredibly hard to imagine the U.S. deporting someone to Afghanistan right now, especially someone that the U.S. evacuated at government expense to the

United States. But what could happen is that people could end up in legal limbo if their parole expires and they haven't been able to get asylum or something else. They'll remain in the United States as an unauthorized immigrant and join our population of about 11 million other unauthorized immigrants. So she probably won't get deported, but she could end up losing her status and basically living here illegally. That is if the Biden administration doesn't extend their parole in the absence of an Afghan Adjustment Act. It's kind of heavy that you might just end up being an unauthorized immigrant in a country that

you didn't even plan on coming to that just so happened to start a war with the country you were born in, you know, 20 years ago. Yeah. And I think this is why Hanifa is somewhat critical of the Biden administration's management of Afghanistan. And I think this is why a lot of immigration advocates are very critical of how the Biden administration has handled evacuating Afghans. So what's Hanifa up to in the meantime, just trying to get that driver's license and hanging out in Northern Virginia? She is. And she's also thinking about ways she might be able to continue her career. She's very passionate about being a lawyer. And in theory, she could take the bar in Virginia and practice law here. But I think that she spends a lot of

time just thinking about Afghanistan and the colleagues that she left behind. My colleagues contacted me and they told me that there is a Taliban member working in there. And yeah, at most of the government offices now there are Taliban. How does that feel knowing that your office is there's there's someone from the Taliban basically sitting and working from there now? Usually when you're a public servant, your job is not permanent. And it's like sometimes you're working there or at other times someone else is coming. But I just wish and hope one thing that whoever is at that office, they works for their people and for the betterment of that country.

And it's interesting because as imperfect as the humanitarian parole system is, and given the frustration that Hanifa has with it, she's still relying on it to see if she can help her colleagues get out of the country. Wait, you're saying after everything we just heard, after all of the maybe Congress might do something, but maybe not, Hanifa still wants to help her former colleagues in Afghanistan get the experience that she's having right now? Yes. Most of the time when I'm thinking about them, I just can't do my daily activities because I just wonder what's going to happen to them. What if I hear any bad news?

And I try to apply for humanitarian help for most of them, but unfortunately the process is very slow, and I haven't heard anything back yet. Our episode today was reported and produced by Halima Shah, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey and Afim Shapiro, and edited by Matthew Collette. And me, I'm Sean Ramosverum. It's Today Explained. Thank you.