Displaced Afghans Face Long Standing Entrance Barriers in U.S. Humanitarian Parole

Nearly two years have passed since the Taliban took over Kabul, Afghanistan following the United States’ hasty exit. Approximately 120,000 Afghans were airlifted out of Afghanistan immediately following the fall of Kabul, including roughly 76,000 that were resettled in the United States. Since then, however, the immigration of displaced Afghans to the U.S. has ground to a halt. One of the most sought-after pathways to resettlement in the U.S. as a displaced person is Humanitarian Parole, a program designed to admit individuals to the U.S. temporarily due to humanitarian concern or public benefit. Humanitarian Parole, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has a decades-long history of being used to facilitate the passage of refugees and displaced individuals from refugee camps or other dangerous environments to the United States. However, Humanitarian Parole also carries with it a legacy of systemic barriers that now face displaced Afghans. 

Since the fall of Kabul, more than 30,000 Afghans have applied for Humanitarian Parole as of late December 2021. These applications contained stringent requirements, including an affidavit of financial sponsorship, a plethora of legal documents, and a $575 application fee per individual, resulting in the Humanitarian Parole program receiving significant criticism from advocate groups. Seeing as the average income in Afghanistan was $368.80 in 2021, advocate organizations cited the fee as an unethical and unreasonable barrier to filing an application. This concern went unresolved despite diligent legislative advocacy, and a range of other issues arose months later in the Humanitarian Parole program for Afghans.

In December, 2021, the Afghan Network for Advocacy and Resources (otherwise known as Project ANAR) issued a joint letter to President Biden, Vice-President Harris, Secretaries Mayorkas and Blinken, and USCIS Director Jaddou expressing heightened concern about a drop off in Afghan Humanitarian Parole acceptances. Project ANAR, along with a number of other legal, resettlement, or diaspora organization co-signatories, cited recent changes in the USCIS’s standards for Humanitarian Parole application acceptance which allowed for blanket denials and painstakingly long processing periods for individuals in urgent and unsafe conditions. These issues in Humanitarian Parole application adjudication, according to Project ANAR’s joint letter, include an “insurmountable” standard for evidence, an “inappropriate” level of threat required for application acceptance, unreasonable standards for applicants residing in third countries, and a lack of alternative passageways to refuge in the United States. These standards, according to Project ANAR and numerous co-signatory organizations, form unrealistic and unattainable standards for Humanitarian Parole acceptance, and further endanger the fate for thousands of displaced Afghans. 

The systemic barriers to attaining Humanitarian Parole cited by Project ANAR not only bear an urgent relevance to current application processing, but also fit into a longstanding history of issues in the program since 1975. This is seen in the striking parallels in barriers faced by displaced Afghans and displaced Southeast Asians following the United States’ similar evacuation from Saigon in 1975 in their pursuit of Humanitarian Parole. Following both the 1975 fall of Saigon and the 2022 fall of Kabul, the resettlement of the first wave of Afghan and Vietnamese refugees to the U.S. was facilitated, in large part, by Humanitarian Parole. However, similar to the current struggles of Afghans who remain displaced internally in Afghanistan, those who remained displaced in South East Asia in the years following 1975 faced stringent requirements and barriers to U.S. entry. Vietnamese refugees, who were not included in the initial 1975 evacuation, were faced with dangerous and inhumane paths to refuge in nearby countries, as well as long processing periods in their attempts to immigrate to the United States. 

Nearby, the struggle of Cambodian refugees also illustrates longstanding barriers in U.S. Humanitarian Parole. The 1985 Cambodian Refugee Program, a program created to facilitate family reunification for Cambodian refugees in Thai-Cambodian border camps, aimed to provide displaced Cambodians with Humanitarian Parole passage to the United States. Similar to Afghan Humanitarian Parole, however, this program failed to facilitate passage to the U.S. for the large number of people whose situations demanded this service. In 1988, Arthur Wallenstein, a Humanitarian Parole petitioner, and Court Robinson, member of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, bashed the Cambodian Refugee Program for its narrow discretion in application adjudication and painfully slow processing periods in a program review. The review also noted a $35 fee for application to the program, not adjusted for inflation from 1988 to 2023.

More recently, the use of Humanitarian Parole to facilitate the immigration of Ukrainian refugees to the U.S. following the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine, however, shows a break from the program’s legacy of barriers. Through the U.S. program Uniting for Ukraine, approximately 67,000 displaced Ukrainians were granted passage to the United States through Humanitarian Parole. Additionally, the $575 fee for application per person to this program was waived, allowing displaced Ukrainians to apply for Humanitarian Parole without the cost faced by Afghans. Furthermore, the processing period for Uniting for Ukraine applications was, on average, just a few weeks. These disparities in Humanitarian Parole have been cited by some as evidence of discrimination in the administration of the U.S. Humanitarian Parole system.

The immense similarity in Humanitarian Parole barriers apparent in the 1980s and the present depict a legacy of systemic failures and barriers in Humanitarian Parole – a program designed to facilitate legal safe passage to the United States. The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has only worsened since 2021: attacking Hazara ethnic minorities, increasingly strict bans on education for women and girls, crushing poverty, and more, continue to harm the people of Afghanistan. The humanitarian demand for continued passage and resettlement of Afghans to the U.S. is thus as high and as urgent as ever. Despite this, the Humanitarian Parole program for Afghans remains plagued with barriers and inequities – the latest addition to the U.S. Humanitarian Parole program’s decades-long legacy of issues in application discretion, adjudication, and painstakingly long processing periods. Displaced Afghans now face heightened uncertainty in their prospects for passageway into the U.S., as President Biden announced an end to the Humanitarian Parole program for Afghans in October 2022.