Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees could be released into the U.S. without a decision about their immigration status, CBS News reported on Thursday.
The refugees came to the U.S. on humanitarian parole instead of with visas, and many of them do not have a way to obtain lawful permanent residence, according to the report.
Since August, more than 55,000 Afghan refugees have been evacuated to the U.S., and around 40 percent of them qualify for special immigrant visas, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
“We evacuated them here. We did that. It’s not very equitable to force people to stay in this limbo state,” Church World Service Policy Director Meredith Owen said, CBS News reported.
Church World Service is one of the organizations working with Afghan refugees in the U.S. resettlement programs. --->READ MORE HERE
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| US Marine Corps/Sgt Isaiah Campbell/Handout via Reuters |
The White House has done little to vet the 40,000 Afghan refugees, most of whom did not work with the U.S. military, it has so far brought to American soil.
At first glance, last week’s bipartisan passage of H.R. 5305 was not particularly unusual. The bill’s stated purpose was bureaucratic in nature: to extend the funding of the federal government after the end of the fiscal year on September 30. It’s the kind of stopgap funding measure that Congress has long preferred over traditional appropriations bills. But H.R. 5305, with the support of 49 Republicans — 34 in the House, 15 in the Senate — enacted more than just the usual funding-extension resolutions for existing government programs. The legislation also included provisions pertaining to the resettlement of more than 95,000 Afghan refugees.
This is a recklessly dangerous initiative, made worse by a persistent lack of transparency — and at times, outright dishonesty — from the Biden administration. Despite the Department of Homeland Security’s assurances that Afghan refugees are “vetted to the same rigorous standards we use during normal refugee and [Special Immigrant Visa] processing,” few of the recently arrived evacuees have even been adequately vetted for security threats, and none have completed the normal refugee-processing requirements. Furthermore, conventional criminal background tests are practically useless given that the vast majority of Afghanistan’s criminal-record database is not digitized and is inaccessible to American security agencies. In essence, the president has extended an invitation to tens of thousands of unknown individuals from a notoriously terror-prone nation to come to the United States — albeit with many of them waiting in another country first — with almost no adequate screening.
“Afghanistan is a particularly bad country to just simply bring people from, because the documentation standards are not very robust,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, tells National Review. “It’s a big country, it’s a rural country, and they don’t have the same documentation standards that we do. Even when we ran the country, we didn’t really have a lot of intelligence on who the good guys or the bad guys were, which is why there were so many ‘green on blue’ attacks.” Green-on-blue violence, shorthand for “insider attacks” perpetrated against U.S.-allied forces by Afghan soldiers or Taliban infiltrators who had previously passed security screening, took 172 lives and wounded 85 more in 2019. The deadly pervasiveness of these attacks is not an argument against accepting refugees, of course, but it does point to profound and systemic issues with our access to background information on Afghan citizens. --->READ MORE HERE
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