An Afghan interpreter for U.S. forces hides his face as a result of threats against his life before he left Afghanistan in 2020 on a Special Immigrant Visa. The U.S. government must come up with a new plan to fix delays in the SIV program, which allows interpreters from Iraq and Afghanistan to resettle in the United States, after a federal judge rejected a government request to cancel the plan. (J.P. Lawrence / Stars and Stripes)
A U.S. request to cancel a plan to speed up visa applications for interpreters who assisted U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq has been rejected by a federal judge, who instead ordered the government to revise it.
The government’s 2020 plan aimed to fix delays in the Special Immigrant Visa program, which allows interpreters from those two countries to resettle in the United States.
“Applications are still pending beyond the statutory deadline and the government has not provided any concrete timetable for adjudicating them,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote Wednesday.
The White House argued that the U.S. was no longer unreasonably delaying applications because the fall of the previous government in Afghanistan had increased the number of SIV applicants and decreased the State Department’s ability to handle their cases.
Although Chutkan noted that the government has reported improvements in processing times, she was not swayed by the arguments for ending the plan altogether.
However, she accepted the government’s request to come up with a new plan as long as it still follows the basic elements of the previous one.
The new plan will include input from lawyers representing Afghan and Iraqi SIV applicants, Chutkan ruled.
It must also include means for SIV applicants who are stuck in the backlog after the original 2020 plan to speed up processing of their cases.
The legal proceedings stemmed from a 2018 class-action lawsuit by the New York-based International Refugee Assistance Project, which argued on behalf of five anonymous applicants from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The refugee advocacy group contended that almost no SIV applicants get their results within the congressionally mandated nine-month response time.
Advocates argue that delays in securing visas for interpreters affiliated with the U.S. military put them at risk for violent reprisals from the Taliban and other militant groups.
While the U.S. had argued that the nine-month response time was merely a guideline, courts determined that the delays were unlawful.
The U.S. said the total average processing time had been cut to 24 months for the Afghan SIV program and 15 months for the Iraqi SIV program, but Chutkan noted that those times are still longer than the congressionally mandated nine-month window.
In 2020, the government agreed to a plan stipulating that SIV application decisions must be made within 120 days and that it would report its progress in clearing the applications backlog every 90 days.
In a May court filing, the government argued that circumstances in Afghanistan have changed since it agreed to the plan. The Taliban’s seizure of power ended U.S. Embassy services in the country, making SIV interviews impossible, the U.S. contended.
The fall of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan led to a messy withdrawal of people affiliated with the U.S, leading the monthly volume of SIV case inquiries to surge by 816%, and the number of new cases to grow by 443%, the filing stated.
Afghan applicants make up the vast majority of cases in the program, with the State Department’s National Visa Center receiving more than 530,000 SIV inquiries in the five months after the fall of Kabul in August 2021.
The U.S. welcomed some 74,000 Afghans after the Taliban takeover last summer. About half of them are eligible for SIVs or have applied, a senior administration official said in 2022.
The SIV program has seen case delays lasting years because of understaffing and a reliance on outdated technology, a State Department inspector general report in 2020 said.
The memo comes amid debate within Congress for another bill, the Afghan Adjustment Act, which provides permanent legal status to Afghans outside the SIV program or the asylum system.
The bill faces opposition by some Republicans, who say the security procedures in it are not stringent enough.
