Congress faces challenges addressing deficiencies in the Special Immigrant Visa program threatening Afghan allies

Congress is on track to authorize an additional 12,000 Special Immigrant Visas to keep the Afghan SIV program afloat after concerns that around 8,000 available visas would run out in September 2024. The stay of execution has offered some sense of relief to many of the more than 147,000 Afghans awaiting processing.

With the time clock on the SIV program temporarily reset, a handful of former and current U.S. Army Special Forces personnel are on a mad dash to get the Afghans who served beside them to safety in the United States. While they worry about Taliban kill orders and combat the exhaustion of supporting allies in a post-withdrawal Afghanistan, their most leviathan foe remains the SIV program itself, which has been beset by failures and a lack of transparency since its inception in 2009.

A decade spent helping ‘Nasib’

The U.S. Army Green Berets who spoke with the Washington Examiner about their support of Afghan allies agreed to do so on condition that they be identified only by their first names.

Todd, a Green Beret with 25 years of military experience says he has spent about a decade on the fight to gain an SIV for his former interpreter Nasib, whose name has been changed for his protection.

In January 2005, Nasib was directly hired by Green Berets in eastern Afghanistan to help them gain cultural competence and liaise with locals. In those early days, Todd explained, if an Operational Detachment Alpha found an interpreter’s work valuable, he referred him to his replacement ODA. Nasib was always referred onward.

The value of Nasib’s service is best demonstrated through letters of recommendation from eight high-ranking Special Forces personnel he worked alongside. Letters from mid-2005 recalled Nasib as a self-motivated, skilled young interpreter. A year later in 2006, a captain described how Nasib “never hesitated to return fire, assist his vehicle crew, carry a wounded soldier, or … provide additional firepower utilizing American weaponry.” By early 2007, another captain noted that Nasib “operated each of the detachment’s weapons systems” and “led other soldiers, inspiring them to fight, close with, and destroy the enemy forces.” Still another captain in 2007 called Nasib “beyond question the best interpreter” on base. He especially applauded Nasib’s discretion when handling sensitive information, including translating captured documents that “provided insight [about] enemy command and control structure.”

By the time Todd worked with Nasib in 2009, he said his interpreter was trusted to question high-value enemy detainees and “charged right next to us” in firefights. In one instance, Todd recalled how, when he began “skidding down” a steep, snow-covered slope as Green Berets moved into position, Nasib “reached back and grabbed [him] and helped [him] move up.” Todd’s was only one of the American lives Nasib saved.

Nasib’s long record of exemplary service put him in danger of Taliban retribution. Not long after he began working with the Green Berets, Nasib was featured in a documentary about Special Forces personnel in Afghanistan. Though his face was obscured, team members referred to him by an Americanized version of his last name. The documentary named Nasib’s location and showed the faces of locals with whom he interacted.

After the documentary’s release, Nasib told the Washington Examiner that he “received threat letters [and his] name was called on the Taliban radio,” with the order to kill him. To protect himself, he left Afghanistan in 2012. He attempted to return to his homeland in 2017, but by 2019, he fled to a refugee camp in a non-neighboring country, hoping that distance would make him safe. Still, he fears the Taliban.

With the help of his Green Beret supporters, Nasib has applied multiple times for chief of mission approval, the first step in the SIV process. Each application has been denied. The government insists that Nasib lacks proof that he completed the program’s requisite year of faithful and valuable service to the U.S. government. Testimonies of American service members from four ODAs who verify Nasib worked for them directly for two years and 11 months are not sufficient. Specific contract numbers are required. Nasib was only retained on contract for about nine months when Todd helped him transition into employment with Mission Essential Personnel in 2009.

Nasib’s denial also appears to be linked to a period of around 17 months when he was detained in an American facility to be questioned regarding the death of an Afghan security guard, allegedly at the hand of a Green Beret. Though Nasib told investigators he had no information about the killing, investigators held him and attempted to coerce a statement implicating Green Berets. When he was finally released in early 2009, Nasib was given a document, provided to the Washington Examiner, stating he “has been determined to pose no threat” and has not been charged by the U.S.

Nasib resumed interpreting for the Green Berets just two days after his release. He was hired by Mission Essential Personnel six months later. A major recommending Nasib to the SIV program noted that “local and national security checks” performed in 2010 revealed no derogatory information on the interpreter. The polygraph examination Nasib completed in the same year revealed no evidence of deception.

In Nasib’s most recent COM denial from December 2023, the State Department asserted that a Mission Essential Personnel rehiring process, which Nasib said was initiated per the company’s request in 2018, was “terminated due to security reasons.” The State Department provided no further details. Mission Essential Personnel said it was “unable to comment on employment specifics without the former linguist’s permission.” When Nasib requested that Mission Essential Personnel release his records for the Washington Examiner’s review, the company neglected to do so, stating that “the information [in Nasib’s file] has been verified against our records.”

Adam Bates, the supervisory policy counsel for the International Refugee Assistance Project, told the Washington Examiner that this is another example of the problematic lack of transparency in the SIV process. “The SIV statute itself very explicitly says that the applicants who are denied have to be provided with a written decision” explaining the denial to the “maximum extent feasible.” This should include “a list of any facts or inferences that were used in order to make that individual determination … and that is just uniformly not happening,” Bates explained.

In addition to presenting a “flagrant disregard for what the law actually requires,” Bates said the SIV program lacks “the requisite appreciation of the situation that these folks are in, the danger that they’re in, and what they risked and sacrificed on behalf of the U.S. mission,” Bates said. The SIV program “just functionally is designed to say no to people.”

Supporting Green Berets’ teammates

Nasib’s struggle highlights a long-standing difficulty for SIV applicants, but Green Berets working to assist another small group of Afghan allies are facing a new and particularly alarming challenge. For months, large numbers of SIV applicants with similar recommenders and employers have faced COM denials and revocations without apparent cause.

Green Beret Dave is co-founder of the 1208 Foundation, which seeks to save Special Forces allies who remain under threat in Afghanistan. Chief among those are members of the National Mine Reduction Group, elite Afghan units with expertise in detecting improvised explosive devices. Routinely subject to polygraph, NMRG personnel had an especially high level of trust and were permitted to carry weapons on base.

Dave told the Washington Examiner that NMRG personnel “were the tip of the tip of the spear. They were paid to move in front of us and find IEDs, and we would walk in their footsteps. If they didn’t find them with their tools, then they’d find them with their feet.”

On one nighttime patrol, Dave said an NMRG teammate threw him to the ground without warning after picking up on a slight ground disturbance with his green monocular night-vision goggles. Dave’s more advanced white phosphor night-vision goggles had not detected the anomaly. Beneath the ground where he was preparing to step was a pressure plate, wired to a 155-millimeter shell. The explosive was daisy-chained to a series of other 155-millimeter shells, laid out in the footprint of the Green Berets patrolling behind him. Dave’s teammate “kept me from not only killing myself but killing my entire team,” Dave said.

Because of their support of American personnel, NMRG personnel who remain in Afghanistan face a particular threat. Though the Taliban promised amnesty to their former enemies on taking over Afghanistan, reprisal campaigns soon began to target former Afghan government and military personnel, as well as U.S. allies. Human Rights Watch released evidence of these campaigns in November 2021. The New York Times released its own proof of reprisals in April 2022, while the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan followed suit in July of the same year.

Dave said he has heard about NMRG personnel being slaughtered by the Taliban in the early months following the withdrawal and has personally received “loads of pictures of guys … beaten to the verge of death.”

The situation for NMRG members became more dire after National Geographic released Retrograde, a documentary focusing on the final days of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. The documentary features unaltered images of NMRG personnel. Dave said that within a month of the film’s release on Disney+, the Taliban murdered a 21-year-old NMRG member featured prominently in the documentary. National Geographic did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.

It is to the backdrop of horrific violence that Dave and other volunteers have been assiduously working to support allies’ attempts to find safe haven through the SIV program.

Retired Green Beret Vince Leyva spent 24 years in the military before contracting in Afghanistan for an additional 13 years as an NMRG trainer. Around the time of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Leyva began supplying his former trainees with the supervisor letters of recommendation required for their SIV applications. Leyva told the Washington Examiner that he wrote around 69 letters of recommendation for the NMRG members whom he worked with personally, as well as several additional letters for support staff members who performed vital logistical tasks that enabled their success. Though they were not leading Green Berets on patrols, those support staff had to navigate Taliban roadblocks, leading some to get “pulled out of cars and beaten or shot and killed.”

Through trial and error over 2 1/2 years, Leyva learned how to supply compliant recommendation letters. At the end of February, he was shocked to find that 17 of the NMRG personnel he recommended received COM denials on the same day. Of these, 11 had previously received COM approval, including some personnel who had been interviewed at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul prior to the withdrawal and others who had been told to prepare for resettlement in the U.S. through State Department flights.

Leyva immediately began reaching out to the State Department for an explanation. “All I get back is the blanket response: We cannot provide any additional information.”

In subsequent weeks, while he considered giving in to the insurmountable odds, Leyva learned of wider efforts to support NMRG personnel and hundreds of thousands of other Afghan SIV applicants left behind in Afghanistan. Now, with help from Dave and his 1208 Foundation co-founder Thomas Kasza, Leyva said he has “a little bit of backup.”

Dave admitted that the process of supporting NMRG members has been exhausting. Through the 1208 Foundation, he said he “still feel[s] like [he is] serving his country every … day,” explaining that Green Berets are only able to do their overseas work by earning trust from locals who believe American promises. If the U.S. develops a reputation for neglecting its allies, “then [local forces] are never going to stay with us,” which puts future Green Berets at risk. “Our motto is to free the oppressed, not to oppress our … allies,” Dave elaborated.

A series of unexplained denials and revocations

Dave and Leyva are not alone. Bates said that IRAP has noticed “a sharp uptick” in “seemingly batched” denials. “It seems like the Department of State has a list of contractors and a list of supervisor letter writers that they simply will not accept for the program,” though no one is certain “whether they suspect some kind of malfeasance or … [the recommender] has just written too many letters.”

Andrew Sullivan, director of advocacy for nonprofit organization No One Left Behind, told the Washington Examiner that his organization has identified 240 Afghans whose COM approvals have been denied or revoked “in what appears to be a ‘batched’ manner.” “We’ve identified over 10 companies and organizations that appear to be blacklisted,” he explained. This includes “individuals who hold active security clearances with the U.S. government and have faithfully served for decades” whose “recommendations have been denied” without “a scintilla of evidence of fraud” and “with no notice or reasoning given.”

Beau Lendman told the Washington Examiner he has spent “many thousands of hours” overseeing the SIV applications process for over 5,000 former employees at Anham, which had more than 20 U.S. government contracts in Afghanistan. In December 2023, Lendman said that applicants began receiving identical COM denials, stating their letters of recommendation were invalid. As of March, around 200 former Anham employees had been denied COM approval, including 27 people who had previous approvals revoked.

Lendman has had no success gathering input from the State Department about why Anham’s recommenders have been suddenly deemed unsatisfactory. “Every day, I get these emails from [Afghan applicants] about the suffering they are experiencing,” he said, explaining that it would be “extremely distressing” to “be party to … a bait and switch on behalf of the U.S. government.”

The State Department did not provide requested statistics about the number of COM revocations issued monthly since August 2023, but a spokesperson said that of its 100,000 COM decisions since 2009, there have been 1,700 revocations of COM approval. “We only withdraw COM approval in cases where we no longer have confidence in the factual bases of the COM approval,” the spokesperson said, in cases when “new information calls into question an Afghan’s faithful and valuable service, whether their qualifying employment was for the U.S. government/ISAF/a successor mission or whether the documents the Afghan submitted are credible.”

The spokesperson rejected characterizations that recent denials have been “batched,” explaining that “all cases are reviewed and decided on their individual merits.”

A call for long-overdue change

Though the SIV program has doubtlessly changed the lives of thousands of Afghans who have found safe haven within the U.S. through its strict guidelines, many of the heroic people whom it was designed to help remain under extreme threat as they navigate a labyrinthine bureaucracy.

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Congress’s authorization of 12,000 SIVs has likely bought one additional year of support for visa candidates. This seems inadequate to resolve concerns for Nasib, whose journey to receive an SIV has lasted over a decade, or for recently denied NMRG personnel, whose SIV wait times approach three years — far longer than the nine-month turnaround the program promises.

It is past time to be cleareyed about addressing the SIV program’s flaws and stand firmly beside the Afghans who risked their lives for their American partners.

Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News Digital and the co-host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into nearly two decades of war and the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.