Without abrupt congressional intervention, Afghan allies who risked their lives to support U.S. personnel during nearly 20 years of operations in Afghanistan may soon lose access to the special immigrant visas they were promised.
A State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that “approximately 8,000” SIVs remain as of Feb. 1. At the current rate of issuance, the spokesperson said that it will exhaust the remaining visas “by September 2024.” According to the most recent State Department quarterly SIV report, there are more than 147,000 SIV applicants at various stages of processing.
A diverse group of advocates, including Andrew Sullivan, the director of advocacy at No One Left Behind, and Shawn VanDiver, the president of the #AfghanEvac coalition, is raising alarm bells throughout Congress — with little success.
Sullivan told the Washington Examiner that in the nearly three years since the United States departed Afghanistan, Congress has only authorized 4,000 additional SIVs. Now Congress has failed to allocate the additional 20,000 SIVs that President Joe Biden requested in his budget for fiscal 2024. Sullivan said the Senate Appropriations Committee has passed a version of the State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act that would allow for the additional SIVs. The House, however, “passed no piece of legislation that authorizes additional visas.”
The Washington Examiner received no response from Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) about whether the House plans to include language in its own appropriations bill that would allow for additional SIVs.
If no new visas are granted, it would put a swift end to the aspirations of applicants such as Maissam Saee, who asked the Washington Examiner to identify him by name. Saee worked for two years as a translator for the Army Corps of Engineers on a contract with Global Technology. Saee achieved chief of mission approval, the first phase of the SIV process, in 2022. In August 2023, he learned that his COM approval had been revoked due to unspecified problems with his recommender.
After reapplying with a new recommendation letter, Saee’s application was denied for a “lack of qualifying employment.” Saee says all former employees of Global Technology faced similar denials. No longer able to appeal those denials, Saee and his colleagues must submit new applications with just six months of visas remaining.
Sullivan has been following Saee’s case. He told the Washington Examiner that Saee, “who has done all the right things, who has served the country, who put himself and his family at personal risk … is likely to be unable to get an SIV only because we’ve imposed this artificial cap.”
Sullivan fears that many of the thousands of SIV applicants in No One Left Behind’s network, hundreds of whom have COM approval, will not achieve their SIVs unless Congress acts quickly to create additional visas. He explained that Afghans are continuing to send new applications, which are “coming this late in the game because [applicants] have been in hiding from the Taliban.”
VanDiver has long called for calm among volunteers in the face of various evacuation-related emergencies. Now he wants all volunteers to speak out. Without new SIVs, “the U.S. government infrastructure we’ve been building for the past four years could come to a grinding halt,” he explained. “Members of Congress have been telling us that they stand with us. They’ve been telling us they want to help,” VanDiver said. But now, he says the “Republican Congress who has so much to say about the withdrawal is going to break the State Department’s ability to stand by [Afghans].”
Worse still is the situation for the remaining Afghan applicants hoping for relocation. “First they weren’t lucky enough to get to the airport” in Kabul, where the initial evacuation took place, VanDiver said. “Now they’re not lucky enough to be in a tranche of 8,000 visas that we have left.”
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A veteran himself, VanDiver also worries about how changes will affect the volunteer and veteran communities. Having personally quit two jobs to continue leading the #AfghanEvac coalition, VanDiver knows firsthand how volunteers “have made [supporting Afghans] their entire identity.”
Kate Kovarovic is the former director of resilience programming for the #AfghanEvac coalition. During her time in the role, she oversaw 50 calls from American volunteers experiencing suicidal ideation because they were overwhelmed by the demands of supporting Afghan allies struggling with myriad post-withdrawal difficulties. Kovarovic attributes one volunteer’s suicide to the encompassing trauma of volunteer work. She told the Washington Examiner that the “willful conclusion of the SIV program would have catastrophic consequences for the volunteer community.”
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News Digital and the co-host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
