Refugee advocates and veterans accused Congress of abandoning Afghan refugees who fled to the United States after a bill to resolve the legal status of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees was omitted from a year-end spending bill.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers pushed for the Afghan Adjustment Act to be included in the omnibus spending bill, but Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s opposition hampered the proposal, according to refugee and veterans groups.
More than 30 retired senior US military officers, including three former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as eight former US ambassadors to Afghanistan, supported the bill.
Kim Staffieri, co-founder and executive director of the Association of Wartime Allies, a nonprofit organization that assists Afghans who worked for the US government in applying for special immigrant visas, described it as “another slap in the face” to Afghan allies and US military veterans. “It’s unconscionable,” she said.
More than 70,000 Afghans were flown to the United States during the United States military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. The Afghan refugees were granted two years of temporary “humanitarian parole,” putting them in legal limbo and preventing them from working. The bill would have provided Afghan refugees with a path to permanent legal residency prior to the expiration of their parole.
Similar legislation has previously been passed by Congress for Vietnamese, Cuban, and other refugees.
The bill was defeated in Congress after the Taliban regime in Afghanistan issued a decree prohibiting women from attending university.
To address concerns raised by some Republican lawmakers, bill sponsors added language requiring Afghan refugees to go through extensive security screening by US authorities. However, the proposal failed to gain the support of the ten Republican senators required to include it in the omnibus spending bill.
When asked about the lack of Republican support for the bill, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told reporters that it was an “important issue,” but that Democratic lawmakers were to blame for how they handled the omnibus spending bill.
He said that “there were many worthwhile things that didn’t make it that ought to be addressed” and added, “I think it’s important.”
Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said through his office that he disagreed with the Biden administration’s use of “humanitarian parole” to cover such a large group of refugees and that the bill did not adequately address concerns about security vetting of the refugees.
“The administration’s failure to properly vet Afghan evacuees throughout this process has resulted in individuals being flagged for security concerns after they’d already arrived in the United States,” according to Grassley’s office.
“The Senate has received a series of classified briefings on this issue, and Sen. Grassley has been outspoken about the need for transparency so all Americans can know the full scope of these security concerns in the United States.”
Evacuate Our Allies, a coalition of faith organizations, refugee advocates, and veterans organizations, charged Congress with hypocrisy for failing to pass the bill.
According to the coalition, opponents of the bill, including Grassley, “want to forget the debt we owe those who fought alongside Americans, whether it was in battle or building democracy and respect for rights in Afghanistan.”
“The world will not forget this intransigence, and the U.S. will in the future have fewer allies, a grave threat to our national security,” the coalition said in a statement.
Refugee advocates are concerned that rallying support for the bill will be more difficult in the next Congress when Republicans will take control of the House with a narrow majority.
