Afghans desperately seeking refuge in California reflect broader US policy failure

Even after two decades of increasingly futile occupation, ending America’s longest war required a degree of resolution that eluded three presidential administrations. But President Joe Biden’s political courage in doing so was marred by humanitarian callousness. As the Taliban rapidly reasserted control of the country in the wake of the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the surrender of the fragile government and military they propped up, countless Afghans had to fend for themselves and their loved ones with little or no help from their supposed liberators.

Sacramento County, home to a larger portion of the Afghan diaspora than any other in the United States, was the hoped-for destination of many of those left behind. The region as a result is rife with stories like the one detailed by The Bee on Sunday, of a Sacramento elementary school principal who took it upon himself to help three of his students escape the country with their family after they were stranded by the U.S. retreat and Taliban takeover.

Many of these human dramas aren’t likely to end as well as that of these children, who are expected to make their way back to Sacramento and Ethel I. Baker Elementary School. The same U.S. policy failure affects not just hundreds of Afghan American citizens and legal residents but also thousands of Afghan nationals who aided the U.S. effort and are seeking special visas to immigrate to California and other parts of the country.

While the United States has a special responsibility to its citizens, residents and allies in Afghanistan, our failure to provide asylum to people in need has become far too ordinary. That’s still the case even under an administration that promised to correct the Trump era’s unprecedented retreat from the nation’s legal and moral obligations to refugees.

In a stark betrayal of the country’s claims to serve as a beacon to immigrants in need, the Trump administration dropped the ceiling on annual U.S. refugee admissions to 15,000. That was the lowest level since Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980 into law in the wake of another U.S. retreat from a misbegotten war, Vietnam, and the mass displacement that followed.

Biden pledged shortly after taking office to reassert “the United States’ moral leadership on refugee issues” and “begin the hard work of restoring our refugee admissions program to help meet the unprecedented global need.” His administration has fallen far short of that promise, however, and not just in Afghanistan.

Biden raised the refugee cap to 62,500 for fiscal 2021, about two-thirds of which was under his presidency, only after an intraparty outcry over an apparent attempt to keep President Donald Trump’s historically ungenerous limit in place. Biden characterized that as a “down payment” on his plan to raise refugee admissions to twice that many, 125,000, by the “first full fiscal year of the Biden-Harris administration.”

That intermediate step seemed reasonable given that the administration faced rebuilding a resettlement system decimated by its predecessors. But when the fiscal year closed last month, admissions had fallen short of Trump’s original limit, to a record low of fewer than 12,000.

It was under another Trump immigration policy retained by Biden that thousands of Haitian refugees were detained and deported at the southern border, prompting the U.S. special envoy to the country to resign last month in response to what he called an “inhumane, counterproductive decision.” Widely seen images of mounted Border Patrol agents chasing desperate refugees from a failed state provided a disturbing illustration of the administration’s policy of denying entry regardless of the national and international right to seek asylum.

Like the previous administration, Biden’s is misusing a federal public health statute known as Title 42 to close the border to most crossings on the premise that migrants could spread COVID-19. It’s a particularly flimsy excuse coming from a country that has served as one of the foremost global engines of the pandemic.

Granted, the White House eased enforcement of Title 42 against unaccompanied children in March, raised the refugee cap to 125,000 this month and, last week, announced a program to facilitate Afghan resettlement with private-sector assistance. But the administration remains a long way from living up to the promise of the president, his party and a nation of immigrants.

This story was originally published October 31, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Afghans desperately seeking refuge in California reflect broader US policy failure."