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Hi Revealer,
I watched the Taliban takeover of Kabul, Afghanistan, on TV, and I knew there was a story I had to tell. But this wasn’t just another story for me. Next to me watching the country’s flag fall were my parents, who’d left Afghanistan around the time of the Soviet invasion in the late 1970s.
Last year, Reveal produced an episode responding to the breaking news, something we rarely do, given that most of our stories take months of reporting.
But ever since the American withdrawal, I’ve had this one question I wanted to answer: How was the Biden administration responding to Afghans still trying to leave the country?
I was hearing from all kinds of sources that not many Afghans were being allowed into the U.S., that they were stuck in bureaucratic limbo, waiting for a response to their humanitarian parole applications. But what was missing was the data.
And that wasn’t easy to get. I worked with Reveal’s legal team to submit an extensive Freedom of Information Act request. After months of waiting and back-and-forth communication with the government, we finally got what we needed: the number of Afghan humanitarian parole applications submitted, processed, granted and denied.
The records showed that since July 2021, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had collected nearly $20 million from more than 66,000 applications. And officials had approved just 123 of them. Because of our journalism, legal advocates and the broader Afghan community had a more accurate picture of how the Biden administration was responding to Afghans in need.
Shortly after our story went out, USCIS Director Ur Jaddou was challenged about her agency’s handling of Afghans seeking entry into the U.S.— especially when compared with the more than 68,000 Ukrainians the agency had allowed in since the start of the Russian invasion.
And I'm still fighting for answers to my questions. This past fall, we filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government seeking more documents it’s trying to keep hidden.
This is the kind of work that I can do only at Reveal. We investigate stories you won’t hear elsewhere and tell them in a way that is uniquely Reveal: journalism that is people-centered, dogged and revelatory.
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