Attorneys step up for at-risk Afghans
Volunteers help apply for humanitarian parole
In late August, when Robert Cohen received an emergency request from the Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Cleveland to help at-risk Afghans come to the United States, he and about 15 other attorneys at his firm dropped everything else to work on these cases.
Handling 33 legal cases from start to finish was a time-consuming undertaking, Cohen said. About a dozen lawyers on the volunteer team had never worked with immigration law before and had to quickly educate themselves on the relevant policies and paperwork. It took two days alone just to copy, assemble and ship the files.
After taking on extra work hours at night and over the weekend, the team completed and mailed out all the applications in just four days.
“When you see a humanitarian disaster unfolding right in front of you, you want to do something about it,” said Cohen, a Columbus-based immigration lawyer for 45 years. “This was an opportunity for us to do something about it.”
A week after Taliban forces took over Kabul on Aug. 15, Catholic Charities organized a legal clinic to help Afghan immigrants throughout Ohio apply for humanitarian parole for their family members who are stranded in Afghanistan.
Originally expecting about 100 cases, the team ended up receiving more than 800 calls for help, according to Allyson Dipofi, supervising immigration attorney at Catholic Charities
in Cleveland. Cohen is one of the more than 100 lawyers across Ohio who volunteered for the project.
“So many people are donating their time and money, and that’s wonderful, but there’s only so much of this burden that can fall on volunteer attorneys and small nonprofits,” Dipofi said. “It would have been nice if the government set up a process for this in the beginning, so it didn’t create this situation of chaos and scrambling.”
Afghan humanitarian parole applicants face a long journey
Humanitarian parole is a littleknown process that allows immigrants in exceptional circumstances to enter the country without visas. Humanitarian parole takes less time to get processed than other legal channels and can be more broadly applied to Afghan nationals.
When Dipofi’s team first started the initiative, the hope was to get some applications approved before the U.S. evacuation deadline of Aug. 31 so that parolees could leave the country along with American troops. But it soon became clear that none of the people that the team was working with would be able to get to the airport in time, Dipofi said.
Now that the U.S. embassy in Kabul has suspended operations, applicants for humanitarian parole and other immigration options must first go to a third country to process their applications.
“Some people have warned that there might be checkpoints and extortion along the way when they try to leave Afghanistan,” Dipofi said. “But unless the embassy operations resume in some capacity, that’s going to be the only way to process this.”
So far, approved parolees are mostly those who have been evacuated from Afghanistan and are in the late stage of applying for a Special Immigrant Visa, according to Dipofi. The approximately 800 clients that her team is helping are all still in Afghanistan. About half of these cases have been mailed out, and Dipofi has not heard of any approvals yet.
Meanwhile, these applicants’ lives are in imminent jeopardy because they all have family members who came to the U.S. as refugees due to their association with the American government, she explained. Many of the applicants themselves have provided services to the U.S. during the 20-year war.
“Residents in Ohio are telling us that their families are now hiding in the basement,” Dipofi said. “We’re just hearing basically pleas and cries like, ‘Listen, my family is really in danger. Do whatever you possibly can to help.’”
Attorneys demand that Biden administration continue evacuation efforts
Right now, at least 250,000 Afghans who are likely to be eligible for a visa have not been evacuated, the New York Times reported.
The Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 specifies that the Secretary of State must make efforts to remove allies found to be in imminent danger. The Biden administration has both the moral and legal obligation to continue evacuating Afghan allies, according to Melissa Keaney, senior litigation staff attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project.
The New York-based organization recently filed a series of petitions for evacuation on behalf of Afghans who supported the U.S. in wartime.
Earlier this month, Keaney’s team made an updated request to the Department of State, asking the government to extend humanitarian parole to those still stranded in Afghanistan and negotiate a corridor for individuals to safely get to U.S. embassies in bordering countries.
“There’s still more the U.S. government can and should be doing to bring those that they left behind to safety,” she said. “The Biden administration needs to be taking these additional steps to ensure that the commitment to these individuals is actually real.”
The 33 clients that Cohen’s firm assisted are all family members and relatives of an Afghan refugee woman in Cleveland whose husband was killed by the Taliban in the 1990s. Among them, the two youngest applicants just had their first birthday.
“It’s just impossible to keep up with these gut-wrenching events happening in Afghanistan every day, hearing stories of families who tried to get to the airport but were turned away,” Cohen said. “Helping coordinate the preparation of these applications, it’s a complicated process, and that’s only the first step.”
Yilun Cheng is a Report for America corps member and covers immigration issues for the Dispatch. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation at https://bit.ly/3fnsgaz. ycheng@dispatch.com @Chengyilun