President Joe Biden evacuated tens of thousands of Afghan civilians who did not meet the refugee requirements while hundreds of American citizens and Afghan allies remain trapped in the Taliban regime.
The Biden administration airlifted 124,000 people from Afghanistan before he withdrew the U.S.’s military presence completely on Aug. 31, but the U.S. government still does not know who exactly was evacuated, according to the Washington Examiner.
The Department of Homeland Security said of the 63,000 people who have arrived in the U.S. from Afghanistan, 7,000 were U.S. citizens, 3,500 were lawful permanent residents, and the other 52,000 were Special Immigrant Visa applicants or “vulnerable” Afghans.
The department did not specify who exactly the vulnerable Afghans were or whether they qualified for the Special Immigrant Visa program.
“We can’t get good numbers,” said Chad Wolf, the Trump administration’s former acting Homeland Security secretary, in reference to how many of the Afghans were actual SIV applicants versus those who did not qualify for any legal status.
David Lapan, a former spokesman for the Pentagon and the DHS, said Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan made it so that U.S. officials in the region were moving Afghans out of the country “regardless of SIV status.”
The White House is also asking Congress to grant all Afghan refugees permanent residency in the U.S. after one year, even though tens of thousands of them do not actually qualify for legal residency.
As part of a $6.4 billion emergency funding request that Biden sent Congress earlier this week, the administration asked lawmakers to include language in bill that would allow an unspecified number of Afghan citizens the ability to apply for a green card one year from now.
