Thousands left behind
The trauma of Ukraine’s millions of migrants fleeing carnage, thousands of whom have arrived in the United States, cannot be cause for American amnesia concerning the plight of Afghan refugees. The fact that this country has resettled tens of thousands of Afghans in the past year is a credit to the Biden administration. But the work is not done.
U.S. forces managed to board more than 76,000 Afghans on evacuation flights last summer as they fled the pandemonium of Kabul’s sudden fall to the Taliban.
But even as Washington has continued arranging for Afghans to depart their country and be granted admission here—nearly 10,000 have arrived since the fall—thousands more who aided the U.S. war effort, and their immediate family members, have been left behind. Those severed families—children, husbands and wives wrenched apart during the turmoil of the sudden U.S. exit— were the subject of a heart-rending article by The Washington Post’s Abigail Hauslohner. It was a timely reminder of this country’s unpaid moral debt to a cohort of people whose lives have been torn asunder, and in many cases endangered, in the aftermath of the two-decade-long U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
It’s true that extracting people from Afghanistan is difficult and dangerous work. For those who want to leave, even to be reunited with their immediate family, the task is infinitely more complicated than simply booking a commercial flight out of Kabul. It’s also the case that U.S. officials have continued to work on getting Afghans out, including roughly 350 who have been arriving weekly in this country for the past two months.
That’s not nothing; it’s also not enough.
As The Post reported, the Biden administration has not established any systematic process by which to proactively identify and assist resettled Afghans in the United States who remain separated from their close family members, many or most of whom remain in Afghanistan. No easy-to-access official channel is available through which such information can be transmitted to the State Department, the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security. Why not?
Advocates for the refugees believe the number of severed Afghan families based partly in the United States numbers in the tens of thousands. And while major questions remain about the longterm immigration status of Afghans already in this country—problems Congress could address by granting them a path to citizenship—easing procedures for reuniting those families is a separate matter, and a far more urgent one.