Climbing got her out of Afghanistan. She needs lawmakers to let her stay in the U.S.
When Mina Bakhshi starts orientation at Swarthmore College this week, she'll have many things in common with the other students in this year's freshman class. She likes to hang out with friends and go rock climbing, and she's still not sure what she wants to major in.
But her path to the Pennsylvania college on a full-ride scholarship was also decidedly different than that of most of her new classmates. Because two years ago, as they were taking the SAT and boosting their extracurricular activities, she was running from the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"Every year, in August, something good or bad happens. For me [it] is the month of big change," she says.
Her escape came just as the Taliban had regained power in Afghanistan, mere days after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal that saw 13 American service members killed in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport.
At 19 years old, Bakhshi knew she had to get out. She assumed, correctly, that the Taliban would prohibit women like her from partaking in both sports and higher education. Without them, she could no longer see a future for herself in Afghanistan. As the threat of violence escalated, her fears about her safety grew.
Today, the 21-year-old is one of the roughly 77,000 Afghans who've come to the U.S. through a rare workaround to the nation's immigration laws known as humanitarian parole. Against a cascading humanitarian catastrophe, the Biden administration turned to the emergency measure to get Afghans on U.S. soil quickly and create breathing room for them to gain permanent status.
But two years later, only a fraction have successfully won that status. Bakhshi, who is still awaiting a decision on her asylum application, is not one of them. A legislative fix — a bill known as the Afghan Adjustment Act — remains bogged down in Congress, despite bipartisan support and the backing of veterans groups and immigration advocates. If it fails, Afghan parolees could be at risk for deportation, which, under Taliban rule, may mean violence or death.
"Thinking that they can send us back to Afghanistan, it's like a threat," says Bakhshi. "If you do anything wrong, or even if you don't do anything wrong, they can decide for our lives."
A problem of speed
The tens of thousands of Afghans granted humanitarian parole starting in 2021 represented the largest admission of refugees into the U.S. from a single country in one year since the end of the Vietnam War, which saw the arrival of 130,000 evacuees from Vietnam and Cambodia.
For most of the following four decades, a new system for refugee admissions made parole for refugees largely unnecessary; it was used occasionally in the 1990s to aid migrants from Iraq and Central America, but almost all refugees were admitted under the system set up by the 1980 Refugee Act.
Afghan evacuees in the U.S. face uncertainty as humanitarian parole expiration looms
Afghan evacuees in the U.S. face uncertainty as humanitarian parole expiration looms
Listen · 4:23 4:23 Toggle more optionsToday, that system has been slowed by funding cuts and overwhelmed by increased demand, forcing the Biden administration to look for other pathways to bring in refugees during large-scale emergencies.
"The problem you run into in the 21st century is one of speed," says Carl Bon Tempo, an associate professor of history at the University at Albany, SUNY.
In the two years since President Biden turned to humanitarian parole to offer safe haven to Afghans, he has also used it to admit more than 400,000 others from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ukraine and Venezuela. The effort to expand humanitarian parole to migrants from Central America and the Caribbean is now being challenged in federal court by 21 Republican-leaning states that say the Biden administration has overreached its authority.
Bon Tempo says that while President Biden's sweeping use of parole may seem unprecedented, he was in fact building on a historical precedent for using the provision to admit refugees urgently.
The problem President Biden found himself in was, in many ways, similar to the one President Dwight Eisenhower faced during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, explained Bon Tempo. The Eisenhower administration, wanting to support the 200,000 Hungarians who were fleeing the Soviet Union, was restricted by an immigration quota system that limited the number that they could admit to fewer than 900. Without a separate quota for refugees, Eisenhower turned instead to a provision that had not yet been tested.
The parole power, which appears in just one paragraph of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, granted the executive branch the ability to temporarily admit people to the U.S. "for emergent reasons or for reasons deemed strictly in the public interest." The Eisenhower administration interpreted it broadly and soon admitted 40,000 Hungarians on parole.
But that was just step one. Step two was the Hungarian Adjustment Act, which provided a streamlined path to permanent residency for parolees. This two-part process became a pattern used by both President John F. Kennedy and President Gerald Ford in future emergencies. It drew backlash, however, from legislators on both sides of the aisle who wanted to formalize the process and separate admissions for refugees from those of other immigrants.
That new process was created with the Refugee Act, which established both a system of vetting admissions procedures and for reviewing and adjusting the ceiling set on refugee admissions. In the 40 years that followed, the U.S. admitted 31 million refugees through this system.
Under the law, each president can set their own annual discretionary cap on refugee admissions, but over time, that number has gotten smaller and smaller. In 1980, the cap under President Jimmy Carter was 231,000. It has steadily declined since then, reaching a low under President Donald Trump of just 18,000 in 2020.
When President Biden came into office, he increased the cap to 62,500 with the goal of doubling that in 2022. But even that larger cap wouldn't prepare the administration for the need to resettle tens of thousands of Afghans.
The fight over parole
Bakhshi's evacuation started with a late-night phone call prompting her to leave her family's home in Kabul immediately. The American nonprofit that taught her how to climb, Ascend, had been working to evacuate its participants, and two weeks after the Taliban takeover things were in motion.
After a tearful goodbye, Bakhshi took a 12-hour bus ride to Mazar-e-Sharif, where hundreds of Afghans were waiting for a flight out of the country. There, she waited for weeks before finally boarding a flight to an American military base in Qatar. It took several months more before she was finally on U.S. soil.
Landing at Fort Dix, N.J., in October 2021 was a huge relief. Despite leaving behind her family, Bakhshi believed she was at the beginning of a brighter future. Only then, however, as officials began to process her paperwork, did she learn that her stay in the U.S. was temporary, granted to her by humanitarian parole. She's still waiting for her case to be resolved.
Under the Biden administration's original plan, her status should have been settled by now. The administration set the parole period at two years, hoping that would be enough time for Congress to pass an adjustment act similar to those passed for Hungarians and Cubans in the 1950s and 1960s.
The first attempt at legislation was introduced in August 2022 by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, but the bill, titled the Afghan Adjustment Act, stalled later that year, dashing many advocates' hopes for quick passage. This spring, it was reintroduced with additional vetting and security measures to try to meet GOP demands, but that effort also stalled. The Biden administration responded in June by extending humanitarian parole for Afghans by another two years.
At the center of the debate are Republican concerns about the expanding use of the parole power. Democrats have argued that humanitarian parole is a necessary tool that provides the president with the ability to act quickly in an emergency, but Republicans say the White House has abused the system and allowed thousands of unvetted migrants into the country.
"The Biden administration has been abusing a law that allows immigrants into the United States for emergencies and for the public interest," said Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., one of the most vocal critics of humanitarian parole, in a statement earlier this year. "But what's in President Biden's political interest is not in the public interest of Americans."
Cotton has introduced a competing plan to the Afghan Adjustment Act that would provide permanent resident status for Afghans conditioned on additional vetting, while also curtailing the president's ability to use humanitarian parole in the future.
"To the Republicans, parole represents the lawlessness of the Biden administration on immigration," says Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International.
She says the long history of humanitarian parole makes today's conversation even more frustrating for immigration advocates like herself.
"We've done adjustment acts for lots and lots of populations and it's one of the tools we have," said Schacher. "The question should really be why aren't we doing that? Not why should we, but why shouldn't we?"
Waiting and hoping
There are other pathways for Afghans to stay in the U.S., but as immigration advocates like Schacher point out, they are either clogged and arduous — like applying for asylum — or temporary, like temporary protected status.
The administration has struggled to meet the logistical resources required to process applications, and the refugee system now takes years to get through; in 2021, only 11,400 refugees were admitted, one-fifth of the allotted space.
In the meantime, parolees like Bakhshi cannot sponsor family members, work in certain jobs, receive in-state tuition in some states, or, importantly, work toward a permanent residency that would allow them to live their lives without having to constantly worry about their immigration status.
Bakhshi resettled in Raleigh, N.C., with the help of fellow climbers who volunteered to host her until she could get her own apartment. She applied for asylum at the end of 2022, but after a five-hour interview in December, she still hasn't received a decision. According to the latest data from Syracuse University, the average wait time for an asylum case is currently four years. And the backlog of cases is over 900,000.
"It's hard to live a life temporarily," she says. "From the beginning, I had no control over my life, when the government collapsed, when the Taliban took over, when I had to leave Afghanistan, when I came to this country. And now I have no control over my life living here or going back to Afghanistan. It's other people in high positions deciding for my life."
As Bakhshi awaits her asylum decision, or passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, she's working to settle in, despite knowing her future here is uncertain.
She moved to Swarthmore last week. She's excited to get back to rock climbing, the sport that started it all for her, the sport that changed the way she saw Afghanistan and the one that ultimately led her to leave it. She's planning to join the climbing club, and she's even found an unlikely, almost unbelievable connection to home: Sam Sidiqi, the first Afghan known to climb Mount Everest, also lives in Swarthmore.
"I cannot pause my life because I don't know what they're going to decide for me," said Bakhshi. "I'm just going to work for what I have control over in my life. And I think college is going to be a very different experience and a big change, a big step in my life."
The podcast episode was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Additional editing by Irene Noguchi and Liana Simstrom.
The digital story was edited by Jason Breslow. Photo editing by Emily Bogle.
The story was originally reported and edited at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
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