The Biden administration is not properly handling the thousands of Afghan evacuees who entered the U.S. after the military withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to a government watchdog report released earlier this month.
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) inspector general issued a scathing report about the federal government’s processes for vetting and monitoring the tens of thousands Afghan nationals who were paroled into the U.S. after the military’s fumbled withdrawal from Afghanistan. The report found that DHS is carrying out a “fragmented process” for identifying Afghans with “derogatory information” or negative facts about a parolee, with no established process to monitor parole expirations for individual Afghan parolees. (RELATED: Top US General Warned Biden Admin That Afghanistan Would Get ‘Very Bad, Very Fast’ After Withdrawal)
“DHS has a multifaceted but fragmented process for identifying and resolving issues for noncitizens with derogatory information, including OAW parolees,” the report concluded. “DHS must consider how to address the vulnerabilities in the USCIS and ICE processes for resolving derogatory information and to establish processes for both managing the end of parole and ensuring data integrity.”
This resulted in a low number of OAW parolees being deported from the country.
Despite a pool of tens of thousands of individuals, the report identified only three Afghan parolees removed from the U.S. between July 2021 and December 2022; one for murder, one for abusive sexual contact, and the other for “terrorism related activity.”
The report centered around the management of Operation Allies Welcome (OAW), a program that has paroled tens of thousands of Afghan nationals into the U.S. in the lead up to and aftermath of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The captain of Afghanistan’s women’s wheelchair basketball team Nilofar Bayat (2R) and her husband Ramish (R) disembark from a second Spanish evacuation airplane, carrying Afghan collaborators and their families, that landed at the Torrejon de Ardoz air base, 30 km away from Madrid, on August 20, 2021. (Photo by Mariscal / POOL / AFP) (Photo by MARISCAL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Upon the collapse of the Afghan central government in 2021, the U.S. brought in around 97,000 evacuees into the country, according to the inspector general. Of these evacuees, around 77,000 were granted humanitarian parole into the U.S. for two years.
The paroled Afghans underwent a vetting process by DHS agencies, which included a review of any “derogatory information” that could lead to a rejection of their parole — such as criminal convictions, national security concerns or other details that would put American communities at risk.
However, the inspector general found that DHS agencies were not properly coordinating OAW management. The report found that DHS had no component in place to monitor the Afghan nationals whose parole tenure had expired, meaning they have been living in the U.S. unlawfully and largely unmonitored by the federal government.
“We found DHS does not have a process to monitor parole expiration for individual OAW parolees and has not designated a component to monitor their parole expiration,” the report stated. [Customs and Border Protection (CBP), United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)] officials uniformly believed this was not their responsibility.” (RELATED: Immigration Experts Warn Possible Biden Plan To Import Gazan Refugees Would Be ‘National Security Disaster’)
“Although CBP granted the original humanitarian parole for evacuees during OAW, CBP officials told us that once they paroled an OAW evacuee, USCIS and ICE would monitor the parole status of individual parolees. However, both USCIS and ICE officials confirmed they are not monitoring the end of parole for individual OAW parolees,” the report found.
DHS concurred with every recommendation the inspector general report made regarding these issues, serving as an acknowledgement that the current process for monitoring these Afghan nationals is in need of reform. However, the government stated that it doesn’t expect to implement the necessary changes until July 2025.
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