Former CIA Director and Army Gen. David Petraeus gave his thoughts on President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration Friday, noting the importance of ensuring interpreters who work with U.S. forces are able to come to America if needed.
Petraeus argued that interpreters were integral to U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those who are now in danger should be allowed to come to the U.S. His comments centered on what is known as the Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, program, which was set up by Congress to allow former interpreters to come to the U.S. should their lives be in danger.
“In an ideal world, we don’t need to have a SIV,” said Petraeus while speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, “because in an ideal world, we’d be able to help these countries do sufficiently well that we wouldn’t have those, again, who share risk as interpreters, as translators and so forth have to then come to the United States, an obligation that we absolutely have.”
Petraeus added the U.S. has an “implicit moral obligation to those who have shared risk.” He explained that bringing those individuals to the U.S. would be the “smart thing to do” should the country ever find itself in another war.
The Trump administration’s executive order suspending immigration from certain predominantly Muslim, terror-rife countries included Iraq, where hundreds, if not thousands, of former translators still live. The order created a chaos for some Iraqis who were awarded visas to travel to the U.S. before it was announced.
Saif Naqvi, an Iraqi who worked for two years to help rebuild his country as an IT contractor for United States Agency for International Development (USAID), was awarded a SIV visa before the order. Saif, his wife and three children where on their way to Las Vegas when they found out about Trump’s order.
“My travel [has] been cancelled because of Mr. Trump,” said Naqvi in an email sent to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Jan. 30. “Now I have nothing, I sold everything.”
Naqvi and his family waited for their visas for more than two years. His brother, already in Las Vegas, had even set them up with a furnished apartment. Naqvi worked for nearly a year and a half as an IT contractor, ensuring USAID had the internet services it needed to help rebuild Iraq during the occupation. Naqvi eventually had to quit the job, go into hiding and change addresses after threats were made on his life for working with Americans.
Petraeus noted during the talk that the Trump administration updated the order to ensure those in the SIV program were exempted, but thousands of people who, just like Naqvi, put their lives on the line for the U.S. still remain in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraqi version of the SIV program is effectively dead, and no longer taking new applicants. Meanwhile, the Afghan program is believed to have a backlog of 7,000.
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