After a six-year travail that garnered media attention throughout the country, Afghan interpreter Zainullah Zaki has received a final denial for his Special Immigrant Visa application.
The State Department continues to allege that Zaki cannot demonstrate the 12 months of service to the U.S. government that are necessary to qualify for an interpreter SIV. Marine Corps Maj. Tom Schueman, who has helped Zaki through each hurdle of the SIV process, contests the adjudication. In July, Schueman told me that Zaki spent four years working for the U.S. government, though some of his work did not meet SIV qualifications. Documentation Zaki provided in his SIV application demonstrates 10 months of service with one U.S. contracting agency and nearly 24 months of service with a second agency.
REPUBLICANS PLAN INVESTIGATION INTO BIDEN’S DEADLY AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL
Schueman and Zaki developed a deep bond when Zaki both interpreted and risked his life for Schueman’s platoon as the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines regiment engaged in heavy fighting during the Battle of Sangin in 2010. By the lead-up to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the SIV application Schueman helped Zaki submit in 2016 failed to secure his interpreter’s escape from the country. Rather than succumbing, Schueman devoted himself to Zaki’s cause. His efforts ensured that Zaki and his family were among the 120,000-plus Afghans evacuated from Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021.
But because Zaki is in the United States as a parolee, he is ineligible for the government assistance afforded to refugees. To support his family of six, Zaki makes minimum wage hanging drywall at a cancer hospital during six 12-hour shifts each week. Zaki is also the published author of a celebrated war memoir. In August, Schueman and Zaki released Always Faithful, a moving account of both men’s relationships to a nearly 20-year war and the duty they feel toward one another as a result of their shared sacrifice in Sangin.
Unfortunately, Zaki’s undeniable heroism in Sangin has not helped him navigate the broken SIV program. Zaki now plans to pursue asylum in an effort to avoid deportation to Afghanistan.
Neither the State Department nor U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services responded to questions about whether Afghans evacuated to the U.S. could be deported to Afghanistan if their SIV applications were denied. For Zaki, deportation would almost certainly end in tragedy because he is already known to the Taliban. In Always Faithful, Zaki wrote about threatening Taliban letters he received in the night at his home and a poisoning attempt that resulted in debilitating sickness and the loss of his pancreas. Like other interpreters and U.S. allies struggling under Taliban rule, Zaki would also fall victim to a host of tribulations, including joblessness, economic hopelessness, and a constant fear of identification and reprisal.
Schueman and Zaki forged an unbreakable friendship during a deployment that claimed the lives of 25 in the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines regiment. Two hundred more were wounded. But although the war they participated in is over, Schueman’s and Zaki’s fight continues — not only against the Taliban specter but against a U.S. bureaucracy with callous disregard for service.
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Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
