Afghan refugees push for Houston consulate

Raqibah Mohammadi had to sell two of her gold rings to help afford her and her family’s passport renewals.

The family of five, all refugees from Afghanistan with special immigrant visas, recently needed to renew their passports — but there is no embassy or consulate for their home country in Houston. So they had to travel to Washington, D.C., for a three-day trip.

The ticket costs totaled about $1,500 for the family. The passport renewal application fees were $600. And the rest of the expenses — including hotel and food — came out to about $800 for the family, Mohammadi recalled. The price was steep for the 51-year-old and her husband, who make $9 and $9.50 an hour, respectively. So she sold two of her gold rings for $300 each, and they borrowed $500 from a neighbor.

Mohammadi’s experience is not uncommon.

Employees and volunteers with various refugee organizations and groups in the Houston area have said their clients, too, faced finan

cial strains from needing to travel for consulate services.

Although more than 100 countries have consular offices in the state, members of some of Houston’s largest refugee populations — Congolese, Iraqi, Burmese, Bhutanese and Somali — must travel to consulates in Washington, New York and Detroit, according to Ali Al Sudani of Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston. With Houston and Texas resettling the largest number of refugees in the nation, some organizers are looking for ways to encourage more consulates to open and begin offering services for nationals residing in the South.

“The embassy is working with us and is trying to facilitate this problem,”

said Naqibullah Laghmani, who works with the Afghan Cultural Center, or ACC. “They acknowledge it’s a problem, especially in the case of people working $10, $9 an hour.”

Laghmani in 2016 was one of the founding members of the group, which promotes Afghan culture and diplomacy in addition to empowering and aiding Afghan refugees in the Houston area.

Since its creation, Laghmani and his colleagues have realized that many Afghan refugees — there are about 700 families in Houston, Laghmani said, and more than 9,200 individuals have settled in Texas since 2007, according to the U.S. Department of State — were having to travel to New York City and Washington for consulate services such as marriage and divorce certificates, passports or minor

travel consent forms.

With many of these families facing financial hardship. Laghmani’s group had an idea: bring the consulate to Houston.

The group raised funds in 2016 to bring employees of the Embassy of Afghanistan to Houston for two days to perform consulate services at one of the BakerRipley neighborhood centers.

“There were people coming from San Antonio, Austin, Dallas,” Laghmani said. “They issued more than 200 passports.”

The event was so successful that now the ACC is hoping the embassy will consider opening a location in Houston. But the process is arduous, and the embassy said it’s not ready yet.

“We will see what the exact population of Afghan migrants in Texas is, and after that we will prepare to

provide consulate services for them maybe twice per year,” said Sayed Zabihullah Mahdiar, a staffer with the Embassy of Afghanistan. “But until now, we don’t have any instructions from the foreign minister of Afghanistan in regards to opening another consulate there in Texas.”

According to data from the State Department, Texas is second to California in the number of Afghan refugees and special immigrant visa recipients resettled since fiscal year 2007.

Refugee Services of Texas said in an email that it didn’t have a good read on the demand for consulate services among its Houston clients, but that there is a demand for immigration services such as citizenship applications.

Sudani, who is vice president of the refugee services program at IMGH, said he hasn’t seen too many clients within his program complain about traveling for consulate services, “but it doesn’t mean there weren’t refugees who were really struggling.”

He said that having more consulates for the largest migrant populations in Houston would benefit not only local residents, but also refugees living in other Texas cities or Southern states. Instead of driving or flying to the Northeast or California, they could drive to Texas, which has historically always settled either the largest or secondlargest number of refugees in the country.

“I definitely advocate and support the idea of having an embassy in Houston or in Texas in general,” Al Sudani said.