Most entered the U.S. under humanitarian parole, which allows noncitizens to enter the country without visas for pressing humanitarian reasons and stay for one or two years, depending on the parole term.
Over the next several months, Afghan evacuees lived on domestic U.S. military bases across the country before settling in American communities through the refugee resettlement process. In February, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the last evacuees had departed from their temporary housing on military bases.
But around 76,000 of the Afghans paroled into the U.S. lack a clear pathway to permanent legal status, according to estimates from the International Refugee Assistance Project. Although most are expected to be eligible for either special immigrant visas or asylum, those application processes can take years. And tens of thousands of Afghans are still stranded overseas.
The SIV program “has been beleaguered with dysfunction and delays that resulted in so many allies stuck in Afghanistan despite active, imminent threats to their lives,” said Susannah Cunningham, advocacy manager at LIRS during a press conference on Wednesday. “Neither of these programs will offer a speedy way for either people to get out of Afghanistan or to get status here — and their parole is running out.”
In total, there are around 74,000 principal Afghan SIV applicants in the pipeline both in the U.S. and overseas, DHS officials said last month. Meanwhile, the total asylum case backlog is more than 400,000.
