The refugee system in Texas and nationally is still recovering from major cuts under the Trump administration. The latest casualty is Texas’ largest resettlement agency, Refugee Services of Texas.
At their home in Austin, Azita Jawady, her husband Hamid Sadra and their 1-year-old son Qmars look through wedding photos from Afghanistan.For now, Jawady and Sadra are trying to focus on what they can control. That includes adjusting to refugee life in Austin, where they live with 1-year-old Qmars, a gentle boy with fluffy spikes of dark hair, in an apartment they found about 15 miles north of downtown.
And their immigration status is always on their minds. Jawady applied for an SIV and said she hasn’t heard anything from immigration officials since four months ago, when they said her case was in “stage one.” Sadra’s not eligible for an SIV because he didn’t officially work for the U.S. government, so he applied for asylum in April.to stay in the United States and the ability to apply for a green card after a year.
And while his clients are also now eligible to extend their parole for two more years, he’s not convinced it will be a smooth process or that it ultimately serves his clients’ best interests. They have also arrived when the U.S. refugee safety net is badly frayed. The Trump administration drastically reduced the number of refugees allowed into the United States for several years — from 110,000 when Donald Trump took office to 18,000 in 2020. The Biden administration hasto 125,000 for fiscal year 2023. But the effects of the previous cuts linger because less federal funding had been flowing to agencies and to the system as a whole.
Khaleemullah Ghazi, a former interpreter for U.S. Special Forces and an Afghan refugee who resettled in Austin after evacuating his country in August 2021, worked at a Texas resettlement agency in 2022 and said caseworker pay is low, especially given the skills needed. “They left their comrades behind. A lot of them have seen their interpreters or their comrades suffering, go into hiding, some of them even got a family member killed by the Taliban,” Arab said. “So the expectation is to provide them a pathway to legal residency and eventually to citizenship.”Jawady and Sadra’s humanitarian parole expires in about seven months. In a perfect system, that should be just enough time for Sadra’s asylum to be approved and Jawady’s SIV application to be finalized.
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