No One Left Behind is calling on Biden to commit to keeping the Kabul airport open until all SIV applicants are evacuated.
No One Left Behind is a non-profit organization “committed to ensuring that America keeps its promise to our allies and their families who risked their lives for our freedom.”
Its objectives are both political — its board chairman, James Miervaldis, tells National Review that it’s been “advocating to streamline the SIV [Special Immigrant Visa] program… through three administrations, seven Congresses, seven secretaries of defense, and five secretaries of state” — and philanthropic; it also provides financial assistance to SIV recipients once they’ve arrived in the United States.
Miervaldis is aghast at the reality on the ground in Afghanistan today.
“Over a full year ago, the State Department knew they had a problem,” insists Miervaldis, who says the department’s own 2020 inspector general report pointed out the manifold problems with the current SIV process. “Nothing was acted upon.”
The SIV program is meant to assist Afghans “employed by or on behalf of, the [U.S.] Government in Afghanistan” and who have “experienced or [are] experiencing an ongoing serious threat as a consequence of employment by the Government.”
According to the inspector general report, the SIV program is suffering as a result of understaffing, the “lack of a centralized database” of prospective applicants, uncertainty over visa availability, and the failure to appoint a senior coordinating official at the head of the program.
These were identified as problems to be remedied after a federal judged ruled in favor of SIV applicants and against the State Department in 2019 for taking longer than the allotted nine months the department had to work through the visa application process. SIV cases presently take around three and a half years to finish.
President Biden originally set a hard deadline for full military withdrawal by August 31. In an interview with ABC’s News’ George Stephanopoulos on Monday, he recanted, promising that”if there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out.” according to Miervaldis, that’s not enough, “we’d like them to go farther and say that they’ll stay and keep the [Kabul] airport open to both military and civilian flights until all SIV applicants and their families are evacuated.”
While Biden still calls the end of the month the objective, Miervaldis argues that deadlines should be discarded altogether. His organization is “standing by to rent charters [flights]” out of the country for Afghan SIV applicants, but the “choke points” that the Taliban are operating around the facility are limiting the good that No One Left Behind can do. So far, it has been able to secure flights for five families that had not heard anything from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. It had flights for 50 more families booked, until the Taliban took the Afghan capital and things became much, much more difficult.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby insisted during a press conference on Thursday that people are leaving the country on commercial flights out of Hamid Karzai International Airport, though he declined to provide specific numbers or identifiers for who was being allowed to access the commercial side.
Miervaldis maintains that the situation at the airport now is “fluid.”
“Right now there are massive crowds at all the gates, and people just can’t get through,” he lamented.
Even as the evacuation effort continues, Miervaldis frustratedly noted that the situation was “completely preventable…We’ve been working very diligently for eight years and specifically for the last 20 months trying to get the State Department to pay attention, trying to get the White House from both [the Biden and Trump] administrations to pay attention.”
PHOTOS: The Fall of Afghanistan