Another Failure: Biden’s Plan To Rescue Afghan Allies Failing
The American Lookout Headlines homepage has 60 new headlines every 24 hours - click here to see it.
The Biden administration pledged he would recuse Afghan interpreters and Afghan allies who helped the United States in Afghanistan.
Due to a backlog at the State Department, that plan is failing.
Tens of thousands of Afghans who are trying to get to America under a special visa program for U.S. allies – and hundreds of thousands of their family members – are stuck in a State Department backlog that is getting worse 14 months after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
President Biden pledged to rescue Afghan interpreters and others who worked with the U.S. during the 20-year occupation in Afghanistan, and said in July 2021 that America would “continue to fulfill our promise” to those who “served shoulder-to-shoulder” with U.S. troops.
But a report from the State Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) says Afghans who are trying to apply for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) that would get them to the U.S. are still stuck in bureaucratic red tape. The State Department is so far behind that hundreds of thousands of emails have not even been opened yet, according to the report.
“By May 2022, there was a backlog of 61,888 principal Afghan SIV applicants in process with an additional 325,000 unopened emails in the SIV application email inbox,” the report said. It added that in May of this year, staff were “still opening unread emails dated from August 2021.”
The Biden administration is inept.
