Afghan Special Immigrant Visas Surge Amid Taliban Crackdown

The Biden administration figures there are now well over 150,000 Afghan special immigrant visa applicants trying to escape Afghanistan, officials and advocates familiar with the matter told Foreign Policy, a significant surge as the Taliban crack down on former Afghans who aided the U.S. war effort in the war-torn country and are still waiting on American entry papers.

The data offers a glimpse into how many Afghans remain in limbo awaiting support from the U.S. government—18 months after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Although the U.S. State Department has briefed the number of applications to congressional offices behind the scenes, the reality is about 20,000 applicants higher than publicly provided estimates by the agency, according to independent advocacy groups tracking the matter.

Over the course of the two-decadelong war, tens of thousands of Afghans aided the U.S. war effort, including translators, in exchange for the promise of visas for their families to go to the United States. That visa system, known as the special immigrant visa (SIV) program, remains mired in bureaucratic backlogs and red tape that has left former U.S. allies in the Taliban-controlled country exposed to imprisonment or Taliban death squads. And applications are still surging into the system, with more than seven times the number of applicants in the pipeline today than in the summer of 2021.

“We think the number of people with SIVs and P-1, P-2s that are eligible to leave are somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000—or maybe more,” said Shawn VanDiver, president and chair of the board of #AfghanEvac, one of the largest private organizations still trying to relocate Afghan civilians from the country. P-1 and P-2 visas are temporary travel permits to the United States. Groups trying to relocate Afghans believed that the number of Afghans ready to leave the country last year was around 50,000 people, although not all of them had finished their visa processes, and many remain in the war-torn country today.

The surge in visa applications comes as the Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee began oversight hearings on Wednesday into the messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, including probing the number of U.S. visa holders stranded in Europe and the Middle East as well as the security breakdown at Hamid Karzai International Airport that led to an Islamic State suicide bomber killing 13 U.S. service members and more than 100 Afghans.

“In the midst of the unfolding chaos in Kabul in August 2021, the United States State Department was all but useless,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, chair of the committee, in an opening statement at the hearing, where Congress heard testimony from two U.S. military veterans who manned Abbey Gate, where the suicide bombing took place, and several private groups still trying to evacuate Afghans from the country. “No one left behind was a credo. We violated that promise.”

But they were left behind. Tens of thousands of potentially eligible SIV migrants are trapped by bad borders and worse bureaucracy. The lack of lily pads to land on doesn’t help. The State Department has struggled to set up a refugee resettlement center in Pakistan, where many Afghans holding U.S. visas fled after the August 2021 fall of Kabul, as Islamabad has blocked U.S. diplomats who are entering to conduct interviews. And Qatar, the one so-called lily pad country willing to take Afghan refugees in during transit to the United States, has been challenged both by the recent World Cup and a lack of available beds to house visa candidates waiting for final approval to leave.

“The most gross incompetence in some ways is the stuff that’s happened since the withdrawal and how badly managed the whole process of helping our allies [is],” said Kelley Currie, former U.S. ambassador at-large for women’s issues, at a media event organized by the conservative Vandenberg Coalition think tank last week. “It’s not just the SIVs; it’s the P-1 [and] P-2 visa holders who are protesting in Islamabad because they got approved for their resettlement interviews and they’ve been sitting there for a year, waiting.”

“There’s this massive group of people, [this] desperate group of people, who’ve now been sitting somewhere with no job, no education, no health care for 18 months—in some cases, waiting for processing,” Currie added. Because of the massive crowds at Kabul’s airport in 2021 and the lack of vetting of Afghan refugees getting on planes, Currie said the United States is worried that people with criminal backgrounds or ties to terrorism groups may have gotten into the United States.

A State Department spokesperson pushed back on criticism, saying the Biden administration “continues to demonstrate its commitment to the brave Afghans who stood side by side with the United States over the past two decades” by streamlining and improving the SIV application process. And it is “working with allies and partners around the world to seek to protect the rights of the Afghan people and hold the Taliban accountable for their repression.”

The Biden administration has issued around 21,000 SIVs to principal applicants and their family members since August 2021 and around 14,000 other applicants have received “Chief of Mission (COM) approval,” a major final step before obtaining a visa once all the paperwork has been properly filed and approved.

The spokesperson did not comment on the number of total SIV applications but said “tens of thousands of Afghans have expressed interest in the SIV program, have begun applications, or are undergoing Chief of Mission review.”

“Historically, about 40 to 50 percent of applications reviewed at the COM stage do not qualify for the SIV program,” the spokesperson said.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020 in a bid to hasten the end of the 20-year-long war and withdraw U.S. troops from the country. Top U.S. military leaders later said the deal helped speed the collapse of the Afghan government and subsequent Taliban takeover. When U.S. President Joe Biden took office, he pledged to continue the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and claimed he was locked in on following through with the agreement brokered under Trump. He sped up the withdrawal of U.S. troops, overruling dissent from his top generals to leave a residual force in the country.

As U.S. troops withdrew, the Afghan security forces collapsed in the face of Taliban resistance despite two decades and $90 billion in security assistance from the United States alongside its NATO allies involved in the country. The U.S. military airlifted nearly 130,000 Afghans out of the country from Kabul’s airport in the final days of its withdrawal, carrying out one of the largest mass evacuations in U.S. history. Around 160,000 Afghan allies were left behind.

The United States and Afghan national forces also left behind some 300,000 light arms, 26,000 heavy arms, and 61,000 military vehicles that fell into Taliban hands when the Afghan government collapsed.

As decades of massive international funding were cut off and the Taliban took over, the country collapsed into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with an estimated 27 million people reliant on outside aid to survive. That’s led to a surge in applications into the program. The number of applications in the pipeline now is more than seven times the number of Afghans seeking the SIV status in mid-2021 and more than double the 77,200 Afghans who had at least begun initial applications as of last August.

Some Afghans who were airlifted out were sent to third countries, where they remained stuck in limbo for months on end awaiting visa paperwork to clear. Some are still stuck in limbo—more than 18 months later. An estimated 2,000 Afghan evacuees, for example, remain in the United Arab Emirates awaiting paperwork to permanently resettle in the United States or other countries.

Some U.S.-trained and equipped Afghan special forces operators who were abandoned have been forced to flee to Iran. Russia is also working to recruit Afghan commandos to fight for Moscow in Ukraine.

The Biden administration has tried to cut through some of the red tape that has restricted SIV applicants from getting through the arduous process, including efforts to speed up processing times, and has eliminated the requirement for a petition to file for a green card with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, making it easier for possible edge cases, such as kids who might age out of eligibility, surviving spouses, and children of dead applicants.

“We’ve seen them have to rebuild their SIV program from nothing,” VanDiver said. “It’s not enough. It’s not fast enough, but it’s getting there.”