More Afghans notified their immigration status is at risk

Sarah Flagel, managing attorney for a World Relief asylum legal clinic in Chicago, received an unexpected request on Monday. A colleague asked her to look at the case of an Afghan special immigrant visa holder, who received a U.S. State Department letter saying that they could lose their U.S. permanent residency because officials discovered something wrong with their visa.

Special immigrant visa (SIV) recipients usually worked with the U.S. government or on its behalf with an organization that assisted the U.S. government in some way during foreign wars, typically in Iraq and Afghanistan. Qualifying individuals automatically receive a green card, which makes them eligible for permanent residence in the United States, and eventually, citizenship.

“There’s no doubt that each of these Afghans who got SIV status served the U.S. interests in some capacity,” said Anna Colby, a supervising immigration attorney with World Relief based in California. “There [were] so many background checks … this population is extremely vetted.”

Flagel, Colby, and other immigration attorneys across the country say they are hearing from frantic SIV recipients who have received similar notices about problems with their status. The letters cite a variety of reasons why their green cards might be revoked and give individuals 120 days from when the letter was emailed to appeal the accusation. In the meantime, attorneys are urging their clients to apply for asylum in case their SIV status can’t be salvaged.

So far, only about 600 of the roughly 50,500 SIVs allocated since 2009 are affected, Afghan Evac President Shawn VanDiver told WORLD. But, on average, 4 to 5 people are listed under each SIV, he said, meaning the number of people affected could be significantly higher.

According to VanDiver, the revocations stem from a Biden administration initiative to upgrade its security system within the SIV program around two years ago. Those security systems are now finding more and more faults with the paperwork involved in many Afghan immigrants’ SIVs, VanDiver said.

SIV applicants must submit a recommendation letter proving their connection to the U.S. government along with a human resources letter from the company documenting their employment. The notices some SIV holders have received explain that even though the chief of mission—a military commander they served under while working with U.S. forces in Afghanistan—approved their employment tie in the past, the government is now revoking that approval.

The International Refugee Assistance Project published a redacted example of one of these notices on their website. “We have determined that the letter of employment you submitted with your application for chief of mission approval is fraudulent,” the notice reads. “If you wish to appeal this decision, or reapply for chief of mission approval, you must submit information which demonstrates that we made this fraud determination in error.”

Flagel with World Relief said the problem comes down to whether the companies in question were approved U.S. government partners at the time. She said in some cases, the companies themselves didn’t even know they had been removed from that list and were no longer authorized to provide a letter. Neither did the SIV applicants, who most likely “obtained a benefit in good faith, having actually worked for the company, believing their company was qualified,” she said.

VanDiver also stressed that in most of the roughly 600 cases at issue, the Afghan immigrants did not do anything wrong. Instead, there was an issue with the paperwork that a company or a military officer submitted on their behalf, he said. “Sometimes it’s like, the CIA got the dates wrong on the contract,” VanDiver said. “It was 360 days and not 365 days. And you have to have 365 days of service.”

Only in about 2% of those roughly 600 cases was there any fault on the part of the Afghans, he said, citing government sources. And within that sliver of cases, it isn’t clear there was any sort of nefarious intent. The SIV system didn’t discover that these Afghans presented security risks to the United States, VanDiver explained. Someone could present no threat to the United States and still not be eligible for an SIV, he said, adding that it isn’t easy to sneak past the multiple layers of vetting built into the process.

Colby, the World Relief attorney in California, told WORLD she’s assisted SIV recipients who worked as translators with the U.S. military. Others cleaned the offices of companies contracted with the U.S. government or drove trucks carrying food between military bases.

“I think the word ‘fraud’ is very misleading, even though some of these letters say that,” Colby said. “There were so many companies that were contracting with the U.S. at some point … maybe a company was started, didn’t last for that long, and maybe the U.S. took it out of its list of eligible companies for SIV, but that wasn’t communicated.”

She told WORLD she was not authorized to share the exact revocation numbers she’d received from sources and could not confirm VanDiver’s tally, but she said the development is widespread enough to affect offices at multiple organizations across the country.

The State Department confirmed the revocations in an emailed statement to WORLD. The department spokesperson said they represent approximately 2%—no more than 1,000—of the total number of SIVs issued.

Colby has heard from other attorneys about SIV recipients who received notices after having their green card for several years. “A lot of these families are at the point where they actually could have applied for citizenship, except that they got a revocation,” she said.

Most of the individuals who’ve received notices that Colby and her colleagues are working with arrived in the United States during the chaos of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban took over the country in 2021. Those SIV holders have had their green cards for about three years.

Colby said thousands more Afghans who fled to the United States probably qualified for SIV status but couldn’t get the required documents from their employer. “Once they arrived in the United States, communication basically ceased with a lot of these contractor companies, where they just suddenly ceased to exist,” she noted.

That means it will also be difficult for individuals who received revocation notices to appeal their case. “To say that years later, someone is going to be able to have the ability to communicate with their old company to get a new letter or another company is just incredibly unrealistic,” she said.

Colby and other immigration attorneys WORLD spoke with are encouraging the SIV holders in question to apply for asylum. The government grants asylum status to immigrants who can demonstrate a well-founded fear of targeted persecution based on their race, membership in a social group, religion, nationality, or political opinion if they return home. The attorneys believe the SIV holders have strong cases since the Taliban would likely target them for their past affiliation with the U.S. government if they returned to Afghanistan.

“Even for just the fact that they lived in the United States for the last 3½ years,” Colby said. “The likelihood of them being extremely physically harmed or killed by the Taliban is pretty high.”