Afghani translators face uncertain future in U.S.
Many who helped America in war wary of life under Trump
As a translator for the U.S. military, Shaor Ahmad Safi helped conduct mountain patrols, searching for suspected Taliban fighters.
He once barely missed a deadly attack on an American base. Then a Taliban commander threatened his father in a menacing phone call. If his son didn’t stop working with the infidels, he would be killed.
He applied for an American visa for Afghan translators in danger, and three years later, he arrived in Houston in November. Home is a spare one-bedroom in Gulfton that he shares with four former translators. The sole decor is their homeland’s flag.
“Finally,” said Safi, who is 26. “I feel free.”
Like him, more than 20,000 Afghans risked their lives and those of their families to work with the U.S. military during its longest conflict. In return, the government promised to protect them. But their resettlement program has been riddled with problems.
This year, Republican opposition, steeped in the strong antiMuslim sentiment that has swept the nation, delayed its reauthorization, endangering thousands whose visa applications are in
flux. Some translators were killed, including one Safi knew. After months of infighting, Congress this week allocated just 1,500 additional special immigrant visas for Afghans in its annual defense budget bill, despite the fact that about 10,000 either have applied for the visa or qualify to do so.
Until the last year or so, the program enjoyed wide bipartisan support in Congress, with Arizona Sen. John McCain, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, one of its top champions. But several Republicans, including Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, are leading the fight against it, arguing the program costs too much and isn’t restrictive enough.
“We just need to be careful about this,” Sessions told The Associated Press earlier this year. “Just because you’ve got applicants doesn’t mean every one of them is deserving of acceptance.”
Proponents of the program, including broad swaths of the military, say America owes it to the translators to provide them safe haven after their service.
“As you know, a number of states, including Texas, have taken the position that they do not want Muslim refugees in their states and that is not a very good signal to send,” said Ryan C. Crocker, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq and was dean of Texas A&M University’s George Bush School of Government and Public Service. “It’s pretty awful to think that America is going to leave behind people who risked their lives to aid our efforts and continue to risk their lives today.”
Thoroughly vetted
Matt Zeller, a retired U.S. Army captain who founded the nonprofit No One Left Behind to lobby for Afghans and Iraqis who helped the U.S. mission, said these translators are the most thoroughly vetted immigrants to come to the United States. During their employment, they are regularly submitted to polygraph testing. Their security review takes an average of three-and-a-half years.
“There is not a more highly scrutinized program,” he said.
During his campaign President-elect Donald Trump promised to ban Muslim immigration to the U.S. Since his election, he has backtracked from that proposal, appearing to favor instead that Muslims register with the government in some fashion.
Safi and some of his fellow translators in Houston don’t necessarily have a problem with that proposal, or with Trump’s vow to crack down on immigration from certain Muslim countries. What troubles them is the widespread antiMuslim sentiment that was stoked, in part, by Trump.
Hate crimes against Muslims spiked last year to their highest level since the 2001 terror attacks, according to FBI data released last month. In November, letters praising Trump and advocating for the genocide of Muslims were sent to mosques around the country.
For these young Afghans, such a sentiment is completely out of touch with their idea of Americans, forged out of close relationships with soldiers in the battlefields of Kandahar and Herat. They call their U.S. counterparts brothers and say it was the Americans who lobbied for them to come here in the first place, only for them to find, to their surprise, that they were in some cases not welcome.
“They are making jokes, ‘You guys are killers. You just want to blow up places,’ ” said Sayd Ashraf, who lived in this Gulfton apartment before moving to Virginia two months ago to work as a truck driver. He was visiting for the Thanksgiving break. “I laugh, but on the inside I am taking offense.”
Ashraf, 23, came to Houston in 2014 after a Taliban elder threatened to kill him when he accompanied American soldiers to an Afghan village.
“It’s really hard here, more than in Afghanistan,” he said. “It’s not like what we see in the movies.”
Here he works seven days a week and still struggles to pay his bills.
“But at least I don’t have to worry that someone is going to suicide me,” he said.
There are times, however, when he feels vulnerable here too. An avid gun admirer, he recently walked into a gun shop in Spring. Immediately the atmosphere turned tense.
“You know, you are looking kind of like the Taliban,” his friend whispered. The two turned around and walked out.
‘I’m a good guy’
Jalal, 30, moved into this apartment in October and didn’t want his last name used because he fears for the safety of his family in Afghanistan. He translated for one of the U.S. Army’s most prestigious units, the 82nd Airborne Division. Once during a fire fight, the Taliban shot his Afghan commander in the head as Jalal, who was unarmed, crouched behind an American supervisor. Another time he was in an armed convoy when a roadside bomb exploded, injuring an Afghan translator in the vehicle behind him. The man lost his hearing and his job.
At one point, a Taliban commander approached Jalal on the street in Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city. “I know who you are working for, and I advise you to leave that job,” the man said.
Jalal moved his three siblings and parents elsewhere, but every day he was afraid.
Arriving in Houston in October, he brimmed with excitement to restart his life and dreamed of working in IT. But he found himself
startled when a man approached him on the sidewalk, demanding to see his driver’s license.
“What do you mean?” he asked in careful English acquired from a literature degree and years of translating books for the U.S. Embassy. “I don’t have a car.”
“Are you legal or illegal?” the man pressed.
Jalal replied that he was here on a visa.
Later, he wondered, “Do I need a license to walk around?”
The prospect of a Trump presidency troubles him. A reader of American history, he sees the idea of a Muslim registry as a precursor to segregation.
“Maybe Muslims will have separate schools, separate buses,” he said. “If that is the case, then this is not my place. I come to a place with freedom of speech, freedom of living.”
Roman Jamal, an Afghani who is of Persian descent, lives in the apartment across the hall. The former military translator who now works at a painting company said he has been here for a year and hasn’t had any problems.
“Everything is good,” the 25-year-old said.
“That’s because you don’t look Afghani,” one of his friends joked.
Jamal said he thinks Trump is a “cool guy” and supports the extra vetting of Muslims he has promised.
“I’m OK with every single immigrant coming into America having an extra security check,” he said. “We all want our security. That’s why we come to America.”
Another roommate, Samir Kohistani, has been here for about a year and loves Western movies so much that he listed Texas as the No. 1 place to be resettled. The translator lamented that he has yet to see a cowboy or even a horse.
The 27-year-old dreams of returning to work with the U.S. Army, this time as a soldier. Barring that, he wants to be a nurse or engineer.
“Americans saved our lives so we have to help them,” he said. “It’s my country now even though I wasn’t born here.”
The idea of a Muslim registry doesn’t upset him either.
“Even if Trump gives me an ID card, it wouldn’t bother me,” he said. “I’m a good guy.”
But Trump’s comments about Islam upset them all. They point out that Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in a gay Orlando nightclub this summer, was the son of Afghans,
but born and raised in New York. They note that an Islamic State suicide bomber recently bombed a mosque in Kabul, killing at least 30 people.
“What kind of Muslim kills Muslims who are in a mosque?” Kohistani asked. “These people are not Muslims.”
Friendly Americans
Mohammad Akbar used to live in this same complex. Then he woke up one morning to find a man had been killed overnight. He shielded his six children from the police cars and blood and promptly moved his family to an apartment down the street.
“It was like Afghanistan,” he said. “I didn’t tell anybody that this happened. If I told someone, they would laugh.”
Akbar, who is 30, spent years working with the U.S. military as a lawyer and translator, training Afghan police and settling claims involving the U.S. Army. In one case, an American military vehicle struck an Afghan woman crossing the street, killing her and injuring her child.
“The people were very upset,” Akbar said.
He worked out a settlement in which the U.S. government paid the family $7,500. His job involved direct interaction with the Taliban and its aggrieved supporters. Once, a man, upset after Akbar denied his claim, threatened to return in a suicide vest.
Akbar began receiving nightly letters warning him to stop working with the U.S. Two Afghans at the base he was assigned were killed on their way home from work. Akbar was recommended for the Afghan visa, arriving in Houston last summer.
Surprised at how friendly Americans were, he tried to explain to family back home: “Just their names are not Muslim. Everything else about them is Muslim. They are very nice.”
He hopes to take the bar exam here and resume work as a lawyer, but in the meantime is a security guard at an apartment complex. A devout Muslim, he prays five times a day and said he has never been harassed while taking out his prayer mat during work shifts and paying respect to God under a tree.
He said he isn’t too concerned about Trump, seeing some of his more outlandish statements as purely political pandering.
“He was thinking about how he can become president,” he said. “Now he can be softer.”