In its latest attempt to force the State Department to comply with special immigrant visa statutory requirements, the International Refugee Assistance Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of three members of the Afghan National Public Protection Force last week.
IRAP Senior Staff Attorney Mevlüde Akay Alp said the IRAP began receiving outreach from “dozens” of NPPF personnel in 2024. About a year and a half after they applied for the SIV program, applicants uniformly reported being denied chief of mission approval, the first step of the SIV process. Applicants’ denial letters said their NPPF employment did not qualify them for the SIV program because the NPPF was an entity owned by the Afghan state.
According to the IRAP lawsuit, “the U.S. Department of Defense had formally agreed to contract with the NPPF for security services in Afghanistan since 2012.” IRAP has credibly argued that the denials “violate the Afghan Allies Protection Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.” Alp said the SIV “statute only says that you have to have worked on behalf of the U.S. government. It doesn’t say anything about the nature of the hiring entity.”
Plaintiffs in IRAP’s case are facing continued risk to their lives because they worked “as security guards protecting .. Bagram Air Base,” Alp said. As a result of the “critical jobs” they performed in support of U.S. personnel, Alp said they are all in hiding, unable to work because their information resides in systems that would reveal their identities to the Taliban if they reentered Afghan society. “One of our plaintiffs had a couple of colleagues murdered” by the Taliban, Alp reported. Alp said the SIV program is the plaintiffs’ “only hope.”
Alp said the problem is not merely impacting NPPF personnel, but also others who worked for the U.S. government through Afghan state-owned entities.
Though the State Department is mandated to provide quarterly reports on its progress in processing SIV applications, it has not released a quarterly report on the status of the Afghan SIV program since April 2025. The State Department did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s requests to provide updated SIV statistics on the number of COM approvals, submitted applications, and remaining SIVs.
April’s report showed that there were 10,216 remaining SIVs, with 9,989 Afghans who already achieved COM approval as of March 31. If Congress does not allocate additional SIVs, the chances that IRAP’s plaintiffs will be able to avail themselves of the SIV program following a successful legal battle are slim, as they will join the cadre of 115,258 Afghans with a pending COM application or who have submitted some but not all of the required documents.
As Alp noted, the dangers our allies face have not dissipated, despite the Taliban’s continued claims of an amnesty for those who served with the former Afghan government. A Lighthouse Reports and Military Times investigation from October found that there have been 110 reprisals targeting Afghan National Defense and Security Forces personnel since 2023. This includes members of units that worked closely with U.S. and U.K. special operations forces personnel.
ANDSF personnel do not qualify for the SIV program, but some have been referred to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which has been suspended by executive order since Jan. 20. The State Department failed to respond to questions about how many Afghan USRAP applicants remain unprocessed more than four years after the fall of Kabul. The latest update on these statistics was in August 2024, when the State Department said 28,000 primary applicants were still undergoing USRAP processing.
In February, IRAP sought to force the resumption of the USRAP through the courts via their Pacito v. Trump case. Its efforts have brought at least one family — a female prosecutor and her husband and children — to safety in the United States. Thousands more are living in limbo, desperate for the safety they were promised amid a Taliban reprisal campaign and an escalating deportation effort inside Pakistan.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and the host of The Afghanistan Project.
