After graduating from Afghanistan’s Herat University in 2010, Heleena Kakar and a group of young, college-educated professionals started a trilingual magazine—in Dari, English, and Pashto—called Ruidad. It was the country’s first feminist publication, and it tackled a range of issues, from family life to the need for women’s independence and an end to domestic abuse.
“We appreciate what is being done for us in the United States . . . but it is not enough. So many people have been left behind.”
—Heleena Kakar
The first issue, Kakar tells The Progressive, was met with great excitement; she soon was being interviewed by international media outlets. Financial support began to flow from philanthropic foundations in the United States and United Kingdom including MADRE, a group headquartered in New York City that works to strengthen women’s human rights throughout the world.
But Ruidad also drew considerable backlash. Menacing messages were mailed and phoned in: “Shut this or we will shut you,” one caller warned.
Then, in 2014, Kakar’s sixteen-year-old sister, also an outspoken feminist, was grabbed and pushed into a large black car. “She had gone to class and was returning home,” Kakar recalls. “People who were watching saw a huge man take her.” Neighbors intervened and Kakar’s sister was freed. A police report subsequently filed by Kakar’s family went nowhere. “The police said there was nothing they could do, that we had to take better care of our family members,” she says.
The attempted abduction was sobering and unsettling for Kakar, her family, and Ruidad’s staff. The magazine quickly relocated to an undisclosed location and switched from being a weekly to publishing new issues just four times a year. Kakar also stepped back from her role as Ruidad’s main spokesperson.
Still, Kakar and others continued to champion women’s human rights and empowerment, and she proudly relates how Ruidad expanded its reach into classrooms throughout Afghanistan.
This continued, she says, until the Taliban took control of the country last August.
“We were petrified,” Kakar relates. “My husband and I got humanitarian parole visas, and I was awarded a small emergency grant from the Urgent Action Fund, and another from MADRE, which I used to help others find safety. Our journey took us from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif [in Afghanistan] to Qatar. We entered the United States on October 31.”
Kakar is now living in New Jersey’s Liberty Village, one of seven U.S. military bases that are being used to shelter, vaccinate, and process incoming Afghan refugees. She and her husband have shared a huge, heated, and air-conditioned tent with several hundred others since they arrived, and while they’ve been told that they will eventually be sent to Colorado, they have yet to receive a timeframe for the transfer. She describes the situation as unnerving.
It’s been made worse by the fact that other members of their families, including Kakar’s parents, siblings, and in-laws, remain in Afghanistan. “My husband had been working in the Ministry of the Interior, and because of this, the Taliban came to his parents’ house while we were in Mazar-i-Sharif. They took my father-in-law and held him for a day. My in-laws have since left their home.”
Kakar’s parents have also gone into hiding. “We are able to communicate with them, which helps, but more is needed,” she says. “We appreciate what is being done for us in the United States—we have food, clothing, a place to stay, and access to medical care—but it is not enough. So many people have been left behind.”
Advocates and human rights activists agree, and stress that the process of relocating Afghan refugees has been far from perfect.
Kat Kelley, senior director of migration and refugee resettlement services at Catholic Charities USA, explains that every refugee entering the United States has to go through one of nine U.S.-based agencies: Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, the Ethiopian Community Development Council, HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the International Rescue Committee, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, or World Relief.
All nine, she says, are scrambling to address the crisis that ensued when the U.S. military left Afghanistan and the Taliban took over.
“The United States has done refugee resettlement since the 1940s,” Kelley says. “But during the Trump Administration, the system that had been in place for more than seventy years—a system that is necessary to adequately care for the people coming in—was deliberately dismantled. This has caused a lot of bottlenecks. It’s been difficult to get processes back up as quickly as is needed to assist the number of people we’re seeing.”
Catholic Charities, she continues, works with local, on-the-ground affiliates in nearly every state, including churches, synagogues, mosques, and community-based groups. All are helping Afghan newcomers acclimate to their new surroundings.
The new arrivals are greeted at the airport after being cleared for transfer by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and taken to either temporary, thirty-day housing—much of it donated by Airbnb.org—or to a more permanent dwelling. Other resources provided to Afghan refugees include enrolling children in schools, connecting adults with English language classes, making referrals for available entry-level or higher-skill jobs, and helping them navigate the grocery store or to apply for Medicaid, food stamps, or other aid.
The support groups can also serve as liaisons with local Muslim service or religious organizations or with other community groups such as the Brooklyn, New York–based Ruth’s Refuge, which collects donated furniture and raises money to buy new mattresses and bedding for recent arrivals.
“The U.S. government gives each refugee a one-time grant of $1,225,” Kelley tells The Progressive. “The resettlement agency also gets $1,100 per capita to do case management.”
Since mid-August, U.S. resettlement agencies have worked with approximately 74,500 Afghan refugees who have been granted at least temporary residence; some have entered the United States as individuals, others as part of families that include several generations of parents, grandparents, and children. They are joining a community of nearly 100,000 Afghans who emigrated over the past several decades.
Those arriving in the United States face huge challenges, from finding affordable housing to managing the mental health issues that often accompany dislocation, stress, and fear, to dealing with the completion of immigration paperwork.
Attorney Christopher Ross, vice president of migration and refugee resettlement at Catholic Charities USA, explains that a small percentage of incoming Afghans have been given Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs. This status provides them with a direct route to a Green Card and citizenship, but is not easily acquired.
“Folks have to be able to show that they assisted the U.S. military and had a working relationship with staff at an Army base or other U.S. agency,” Ross says. “They need evidence: pay stubs, photos, documents, or letters affirming that they did what they say they did.” But obtaining this evidence “can be difficult to impossible,” he explains, since the pullout from Afghanistan was so fast and chaotic.
Ross adds that “90 to 95 percent of new arrivals from Afghanistan are here on humanitarian parole. This allows them to stay in the U.S. for two years and work, but there is no next step for them, no pathway to citizenship.”
Creating such a route will require Congressional passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, which has yet to move forward, despite bipartisan support. As it currently stands, Ross notes, refugees who do not file the paperwork before their two years of humanitarian parole ends “become undocumented, which means their employment authorization expires and they are no longer lawfully in the country.”
Another issue is also putting advocates on high alert. Naomi Steinberg, vice president of policy and advocacy at HIAS, says that because granting humanitarian parole is discretionary, as 2021 came to a close, applicants were increasingly seeing their applications denied.
“There are so many vulnerable Afghans who need to leave their homeland,” Steinberg says. “Members of the LGBTQIA+ community, human rights activists, female judges, feminists, and religious minorities are at great risk right now.” She calls the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ denial of humanitarian parole applications “extremely concerning.”
What’s more, she explains that it costs $575 per person to apply for parole. “Many people have spent the last of their very limited funds on their applications and if they are denied, there is no appeal process. If they have the money they can reapply, but there has to be a change in circumstances for them to do so.”
Steinberg takes issue with the requirement that applicants must now provide third-party evidence that they are facing imminent harm if they stay in Afghanistan, which is “close to impossible” to gather. “How do you prove you will be harassed, intimidated, discriminated against, or hurt?” she asks. “From a refugee rights perspective, this leaves would-be parole applicants with few if any options. If the U.S. continues to enforce this requirement, it is essentially closing the door to the Afghan people we promised to help.”
This, she says, adds urgency to organizing to push the Afghan Adjustment Act. “Immigration advocates are working incredibly hard,” she says, imploring everyone who cares about refugees and immigrants to contact their lawmakers and push for the act’s passage.
Heleena Kakar agrees: “The U.S. invested billions in Afghanistan over the last twenty years, and now many Afghan people are suffering from severe trauma and are left with no hope for the future,” she says, calling on the United States to do more to help Afghans who are desperate to flee Taliban rule.
“By evacuating them so that they can come out of the trauma, and then absorbing them into U.S. society,” she adds, “I believe both U.S. and Afghan people will benefit.”