Afghan soldier Abdul Wasi Safi's days since his release from a Texas immigration detention center have been filled with medical appointments while living in Houston with his brother.
, called Wasi by family and friends, sat in a dental chair and conversed in Pashto with his older brother Sami as Carrie Underwood’s “Cowboy Casanova” played in the background. It was a scene thousands of miles from the places he'd been the past two years.in August 2021, fear of retribution from the Taliban for sharing information with American soldiers while he was an intelligence officer drove Wasi Safi to flee to Brazil. The goal? Reaching the U.S. and applying for asylum.
Easy days for Wasi Safi have been few. His mind races with worry about his health. There’s also the uncertainty of whether he’ll be granted asylum. And he feels powerless to help his parents and other siblings, who have been threatened back in Afghanistan. More than 88,500 Afghans who worked with American soldiers as translators and in other capacities since 2001 have arrived in the U.S. on military planes since the chaotic withdrawal, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Most were admitted under a program called humanitarian parole that grants them some legal status, including the ability to work.
“They’re just being added to this pile that the immigration judges are” handling, said Aleksandar Cuic, director of the Immigration Clinic at the School of Law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland., has stalled in Congress. As of the end of April, only about 8,100 applications for asylum or special visas for Afghans employed by the U.S. government had been approved, according to Homeland Security.
In the midst of Ramadan on a Friday in April, the mosque’s main prayer hall was filled with about 200 men and boys, some wearing Houston Astros jerseys or carrying bags emblazoned with the Texas flag. Community groups like Al Noor are the ones that help provide long-term support — including job training and activities for children — once the initial federal help ends, Gire said.
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