After abandoning up to 1,000 American citizens in Afghanistan during his botched withdrawal from the region, President Biden recently requested Congress appropriate $6.4 billion to resettle 95,000 Afghans over the next year.
The overwhelming majority of these Afghan nationals will be brought into the U.S. via humanitarian parole, which allows the executive branch to bring otherwise inadmissible aliens into the country on a temporary basis in emergency situations. The power of humanitarian parole was intended to be used on a case-by-case basis, not as a mechanism to admit entire classes of foreign nationals.
Not included in this tally are refugees, meaning these 95,000 Afghan nationals will not count against the refugee resettlement cap even though they will be granted access to many of the same refugee benefits and services.
This massive intake of foreign nationals comes after the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan led to hundreds of U.S. citizens and green card holders being stranded under the Taliban regime. Currently, 30 California schoolchildren are trapped in Afghanistan, still looking for a way out after President Biden reneged on his promise not to leave any American behind. While the administration has not released the total number of Americans remaining in Afghanistan, some estimates put the number as high as 1,000, including family members.
Rather than prioritize the safety and security of American citizens, President Biden is spending billions of dollars helping foreign nationals, most of whom we know little-to-nothing about and have not been properly vetted. Additionally, the administration acknowledged that fewer than half of these evacuated Afghans qualify for Special Immigrant Visas, a visa category designed for Afghan translators, interpreters, and other partners that assisted the U.S. military. In other words, the majority of the Afghans coming into the country have no prior history of helping the United States with the war on terror.
While it’s important that the United States help those who assisted our military, we must ensure that the administration’s debacle in Afghanistan is not turned into yet another opportunity to throw open our borders, especially given the Pentagon’s warning of enhanced terrorism risks.