CUT FEES & RED TAPE FOR AFGHAN REFUGEES

Petition to the U.S. government to waive fees & cut red tape for Afghan refugees seeking humanitarian parole/asylum: As Americans, it is our duty to keep our promise to Afghans who put their lives, hopes, and dreams in our hands for the past 20 years. Tens of thousands of Afghans risked their lives to offer interpretation services and other on-the-ground support to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. These interpreters and their families, numbering by some estimates at up to a million—along with other Afghan allies and high-risk individuals like judges, journalists, and human-rights workers, are now in the crosshairs of a humanitarian crisis as the Taliban take control of the country. In addition to a U.S. visa-approval process saddled with red tape and an inadequate plan to evacuate eligible Afghans from Kabul, refugees also face an additional monumental hurdle: the cost of applying for humanitarian parole or asylum. The fee for a humanitarian parole application is $575. Cathryn Miller-Wilson writes, “Imagine: One family with 22 relatives—one of whom was executed by the Taliban this week because he was a member of the former Afghan military—would need to raise $12,650 within days, all to pay fees to a government that has said it recognizes such Afghans are in danger of losing their lives.” Refugees, Afghan allies, and humanitarian targets should not face an additional barrier to safety in the form of high fees to process visa applications. Given the urgency and peril of the current crisis, we demand the USCIS immediately take the following three actions: 1. Apply pressure to the Taliban to meet their commitments to allow any Afghan ally of the U.S. to safely evacuate from Afghanistan (they’ve said they’ll let people leave, and we must hold them to that). 2. Lift refugee resettlement caps at the national and state levels—arbitrary quotas do not make sense in the face of human suffering of allies to whom we’ve made promises. 3. Eliminate fees for visa applications and invest in processing all pending Afghan visas, as quickly as possible, in the U.S. and in third countries.