Unvetted
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In the early days of the evacuation effort, thousands of Afghans crowded Kabul’s airport seeking a way to flee the country. Some made it through without paperwork, while American citizens and visa applicants were unable to enter and board flights out.
The U.S. still doesn’t have reliable data on who was evacuated, nor for what type of visas they may qualify, the official said, but initial assessments suggested most visa applicants didn’t make it through the crush at the airport.
“I would say it’s the majority of them,” the official estimated. “Just based on anecdotal information about the populations we were able to support.”
The Special Immigrant Visa program set up in 2009 aimed to help those at risk of Taliban reprisal for helping the U.S., including interpreters for the U.S. military and diplomatic and foreign aid workers.
The Biden administration has been under intense pressure by lawmakers, veterans and other advocates to do more to help the more than 20,000 Afghans who had already applied for visas when the U.S. decided to withdraw. Including their family members, as many as 100,000 Afghans may be eligible for relocation.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa program was ill-suited for the circumstances the U.S. faced in Afghanistan.
“The SIV program is obviously not designed to accommodate what we just did, in evacuating over 100,000 people,” he told reporters Wednesday. Mr. Austin, briefing reporters for the first time since all American forces withdrew from Afghanistan on Monday, said the program is “designed to be a slow process.”
“For the type of operation we just conducted, I think we need a different kind of capability,” he said.
Among the visa applicants left behind was an Afghan interpreter who was part of a 2008 mission to rescue then- Sen. Joe Biden and two other senators when their helicopter made an emergency landing in blinding snow in a valley 20 miles southeast of Bagram Air Field.
His application had been snagged in the bureaucracy when the Taliban took over, and now he is in hiding.
On Tuesday, the interpreter, identified only as Mohammed to protect his identity, made an appeal for help to Mr. Biden in The Wall Street Journal.
“Don’t forget me,” he said.
In response to the story, Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, said the U.S. wouldn’t forget him.
“We’re going to cut through the red tape,” he told MSNBC. “We’re going to get him and other SIVs out.”
But the evacuation from Kabul was so haphazard and rushed that many, perhaps most, of those extracted were not such previously screened people. Representative Tom Tiffany (R., Wis.) told the Washington Times that of the 2,000 Afghans housed at a base in his state, not one had the Special Immigrant Visa for Afghans employed by, or on behalf of, the U.S. government. And at least one previously deported convicted rapist appears to have landed at Dulles already.
So, how to screen those Afghans who’ve never been screened? Given Afghanistan’s low level of development, it’s not like the record-keeping there was ever comprehensive and efficient, if it existed at all. And worse, as 30-year INS/ICE veteran Dan Cadman pointed out on my “Parsing Immigration Policy” podcast last week, while we occupied Afghanistan, we at least had a chance of verifying claims that people made. Now that we have left and a hostile force is in charge, what are supposed to do, call up the Kabul DMV to verify someone’s identity? Even under the best of circumstances, vetting can never be perfect; to borrow from Queen Elizabeth I, we can’t open windows into men’s souls. But under today’s conditions, meaningful vetting of Afghans is literally impossible.
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Geraldo said on The Five yesterday that FOX News had made sure they got their interpreter and his family out of Afghanistan. It was a private effort, not necessarily coordinated with the government.
He also said most of the other networks had done the same.
