Week 5
This week I helped one of the GAIN attorneys with some administrative work for Project Ally. Project Ally is one of GAIN’s initiatives to help Afghans, both overseas and in the U.S. While reviewing the files, I had a chance to learn more about a lesser-known part of the immigration system – humanitarian parole.
Humanitarian parole is a different form of immigration relief from asylum. It’s a temporary status that’s usually granted for urgent humanitarian reasons (a typical example is someone seeking urgent medical care in the U.S.). Because humanitarian parole is temporary, it does not give recipients a path to citizenship. Its primary benefit over other forms of relief, prior to August 2021, was the likelihood of faster processing times. While asylum claims often drag out over years, humanitarian parole requests typically were decided within 90 days, and requests could be expedited in time-sensitive situations.
In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, over 44,000 people from Afghanistan requested humanitarian parole. To give a sense of how significant an increase this number was, in the year before, USCIS only adjudicated 79 requests from Afghanistan. Over the same fifteen months in which the US received 44,000 requests from Afghanistan, there were only 307 requests from Ukraine, 96 from Venezuela, and 39 from Syria.
Few organizations could absorb such a massive influx of requests without problems. The relatively small numbers of humanitarian parole requests in any given year and some differences in the process of making a request meant that the system was primed to have additional problems.
In asylum cases, immediate family members are derivatives of the applicant. This means that in an asylum case, if you can make a successful claim that you will be persecuted because of one of the protected reasons, your spouse and kids also get asylum through you. They can submit their own applications for asylum, but they don’t have to.
In contrast, each family member has to request humanitarian parole individually, even if their claims all derive from their relationship to a single family member. This leads to redundancies in the application process and discrepancies in the approval process the asylum’s derivative framework is able to avoid. For example, because each family member applies separately, each member is approved separately. USCIS can approve all the applications of a family group at the same time, but they don’t have to. This can lead to situations where part of a family has been approved, while other members are left in limbo.
It has been almost three years since the U.S. withdrawal, and many of Project Ally’s requests are still pending. Some of the people who requested humanitarian parole through the program were able to find safety in countries other than the United States, like Canada. USCIS is still working through the backlog. Earlier in the summer, GAIN received requests for evidence for some of these pending petitions. I can only hope that in the coming months these families will receive their conditional approvals and be able to find safety, freedom, and opportunity in the U.S. after waiting so long.
Statistics from the American Immigration Council