Posted August 10, 20235:00 pm
By Mark Oprea
With humanitarian parole set to expire in August for hundreds living in the city, a lack of action by Congress and Biden leaves their immigration status up in the air
It was around noon on a Sunday, her usual lunch break in the payroll office where she worked, when Kamela Bahadori knew she would never see Afghanistan ever again.
This was Kabul, August 15, 2021, the day many Afghans considered, like Bahadori does, one of the worst in their lives. At the building where Bahadori processed checks in the Afghan National Army’s finance department, panic slowly erupted. “We know you work with the army,” a commander told Bahadori in a phone call. “Your life is in danger.” Bahadori stood up immediately, covering her upper body in a niqab to evade Taliban harassment, and headed straight for the Kabul International Airport. With no family, no belongings, nothing. “I was crying all the way,” she said.
Meanwhile, Bakht Moqbel, a 39-year-old man originally from Kabul, was walking onto a C-17 U.S. Army jet with his wife, four kids and 270 other Afghans and anxious American expats. Like others crammed on the jet, Moqbel’s blood pressure was particularly high. As an employee for USAID, he had spent years aiding women’s rights organizations. He had spent weeks in flak jackets, survived the 2017 American University bombing, had witnessed two relatives' deaths at the hand of Taliban insurgents.
If they recognize me, Moqbel was thinking while ushering his family through Kabul International, they will definitely shoot me.
As Moqbel’s plane was bound for Qatar, Shukria Zafari was in Kabul’s traffic jam trying to make her supposed flight to Turkey. At least she thought it was Turkey. It could’ve been Qatar, like others, or to Pakistan, which she feared.
As flag-waving Taliban roared down the streets in their Humvees, Zafari worried about her girls, Sidiqa, Zarah and Fatima. Just that summer, she had escaped the Taliban takeover—“They were all over the place trying to kidnap soldiers”—of Jowzjan, a province of 540,000, a quarter of the land covered by mountains. She’d taken refuge in Kabul at her sister’s house, hoping to give her girls a better life on a tailor’s salary, despite her brother escaping to Pakistan, despite the father of her children fleeing to Arabistan.
And now, like 70,000 other Afghans would be at some point, she was shoulder-to-shoulder, knee-to-knee on a C17 jet to Istanbul. And, as Zafari is pained to recall to this day, without her youngest. Should I go back and get Zarah or stay here? Zafari thought. Or should I just leave and figure it out afterwards?
Boarding the plane, she made up her mind: “If they can take me out of Afghanistan, I don’t care where they drop me,” Zafari recalled. “So as long as they take me out of Afghanistan, I’ll be fine.”
Almost two years to the date of the fall of Kabul, and one of the largest mass airlifts in history, its refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. are near a steep breaking point. Although President Biden and the Feds granted the 70,000 or so humanitarian parole, or the select few, a Special Immigrant Visa, such refugee legalities are nearing a potentially lethal deadline: Either the U.S. government enacts policy to renew Afghans’ temporary stay, or, as some immigration lawyers fear, most if not all of the 17,000 who haven’t already sought protection could be deported.
That is to say, back to Afghanistan. Such reality has created a sudden hierarchy of privilege for the Second Wave of Afghan refugees: those on an SIV, a fast-lane towards an American green card, given to Afghans who’ve been on U.S. payroll; and Afghans still seeking asylum, a sluggish system rife with suspicions of terrorism, endless biometrics, and complications if, on an applicant’s application, i’s aren’t dotted, t’s aren’t crossed. Or, like in the case of thousands of Afghans who fled Kabul with just the clothes on their back—if they have any retrievable documentation at all.
“The problem is that it’s two-fold,” Joe Cimperman, the president of Global Cleveland, a nonprofit that’s helped in the resettlement of roughly 850 Afghan asylees, told Scene from his office in the Hanna Building, in April. “The first one is the [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] isn’t working quickly enough. The other thing is that they’re trying to push up certain Afghanistan folks to get their visas.”
President Biden’s Afghan Adjustment Act has the potential to wholly renew pending visas, and streamline the greed card application, but it’s so far stalled in the U.S. Senate. “We haven’t heard anything complete to lead us to believe that will happen,” one attorney told Scene. Global Cleveland, with assistance from Legal Aid attorneys and Catholic Charities USA, assembled visa clinics last June to try to aid, en masse, the $575 parole applications—and requisite document gathering—for some 950 Afghans. But a year later, as of this July, according to interviews with four Legal Aid attorneys, requests for parole renewal have still gone unanswered. “Everyone’s starting to call me in a panic,” Lisa Splawinski, a lawyer for Legal Aid, said. “And I understand their panic, because I feel the same way—as their attorney.”
Cimperman’s tone sharpens. “There’s no clear path in sight, when August comes, what’s going to happen? What are we going to do? Deport them back home to Afghanistan?” His hands flailed in the air. “They’ll get killed!”
Since September 6, 2021, Zafari and her two daughters here in the U.S. have oscillating feelings of hope and despair. In an interview in Legal Aid’s offices in July, Zafari, a 32-year-old woman with a round face and light brown eyes, talked about life off West 117th, where she’s been living with her girls since the end of 2022.
Besides the distraction of work—Zafari’s a tailor for an upholsterer—and caretaking of Sidiqa and Fatima, Zafari fights to keep her mind on American normalcy, despite the pangs of Taliban-ruined Afghanistan.
“I still have those old memories,” Zafari said in Dari, through a translator. “And they are with me here. Sometimes it comes in my mind, or arises in my dreams, that somebody will come and break in my house.”
Pondering the what ifs, Zafari leans into dark humor on the what if, say, her parole status isn’t renewed in October, or she doesn’t get asylum. If she’s forced back. She allowed a slight smile thinking of the scenario: “When they put me on the airplane, I’ll probably jump out into the sky,” she said, through bouts of nervous laughter. She covered her mouth, readjusted her hijab over long parted hair. “But yes. I am not going back there,” Zafari said. “No matter what.”
***
“My name is Wahidullah Muhammadi, son of Mohammadullah, former resident of a remote and dangerous region of Nuristan,” begins the 34-year old’s declaration for U.S. Citizen Immigration Services. “I was born on November 15, 1988.”
But that’s not what his documents say. When Muhammadi received his parole identification back in September of 2021, his birth year was accidentally 10 years off—1998. All of his documents were confiscated after Muhammadi applied for a driver’s license at the Parma BMV. FBI agents interrogated him at his house on West 115th. He was denied medical coverage.
“If everything expires, I will not be able to get a job or get any work,” Muhammadi said in June. “I have no idea what’s going to happen to me or my family.”
Eight years before Muhammadi’s birthdate became his personal and legal source of hell, he was a 26-year-old guard for the U.S. State Department manning security watch at the Fenty Operating Base in Jalalabad, the fifth largest city in Afghanistan. Muhammadi’s duties were relatively straight-forward: keep Taliban insurgents away from U.S. personnel, suss out possible suicide-vest attacks, incoming firefights. Occasionally, Muhammadi would join a Humvee patrol of neighboring mountain villages, aiding the bullhorn-led evacuation of residents’ homes, hoping to find covert Taliban sympathizers to arrest before him and his crew were shot.
Surprisingly, even to Muhammadi, a stoic, plainspoken man, he had not been gravely injured in the decade he had worked protecting troops from Taliban intervention. Close calls surrounded him since 2007, his first year as a soldier for ANNEX, an international branch of the U.S. Department of State. That year, suicide attacks on both civilians and U.S. troops had quadrupled since President Bush made an alliance with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. “I was always worried about the safety of my family,” Muhammadi told Scene, through a translator. “Taliban would say that those who worked with U.S. Army would be hunted down.”
That was in September 2013. Two years later, Obama had set the intention of removing all U.S. troops from Afghan soil, after clocking $444 billion spent with 1,800 Americans dead. But that September was extremely personal for Muhammadi. He had relocated to Jalalabad as a safer haven for his family when he received news that his uncle and brother were attacked just outside Nuristan.
“They were stabbed and beaten,” Muhammadi said. “My brother’s arm was fractured.” An hourlong gunfight erupted from hillside to hillside. Three Afghan soldiers would die at the end of it. “My family would’ve been killed had they not been interrupted by the National Army, who arrived just in time.” Days later, Muhammadi’s house was set on fire. He moved to Jalalabad, but continued to receive death threats over the phone, or letters posted on his door. “We would not dare walk freely in the streets,” he said.
In 2017, Muhammadi got a job doing security with a unit of soldiers called Zero 2 on a base owned by the Special Forces of Jalalabad. It was good pay, and Muhammadi felt pressed, almost philosophically, to keep Taliban and their corrupt version of Sharia Law away from his daughters. Standing guard at Zero 2, Muhammadi escorted a convoy inside the base, as traffic came regularly from Kabul to the north. This one was different: a suicide bomber had pulled a Trojan Horse.
He sped to a tower overlooking the entrance. He saw the insurgents, so Muhammadi ran down the turret’s stairs to get a better shot. He was met with a grenade. “It blew up,” he said. The resulting shrapnel injury led Muhammadi through months of surgery. “But I’m okay,” he said, showing his right leg where scars remain. He said almost defiantly, “It wasn’t that serious.”
That year, after Donald Trump won the presidency, the U.S. recommitted to the Afghan War. The following January, Trump launched air attacks on Taliban-run opium fields—their main revenue source—and slashed aid to Pakistan, which had been accused of harboring terrorists. By November of 2020, after the U.S. and Taliban leaders had their most intense peace talks in the two decades since the World Trade Center towers crumbled, the Pentagon looks to solidify a “gradual” release of the 5,600 troops still fighting, still training Afghan security forces.
“After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders and intelligence personnel, with our diplomats and our development experts, with the Congress and the Vice President, as well as with [President Ashraf] Ghani and many others around the world,” President Biden announced from the White House Briefing Room, on April 14, 2021. “I have concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war. It’s time for American troops to come home.”
“We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit,” Biden added. “We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.”
On August 15, 2021, safe might not have been the word to detail what the U.S. called Operation Allies Refuge. The day Zafari, Moqbel, Muhammadi and Bahadori rushed their families to KIA to prevent certain murder-by-Taliban is now often considered one of the most chaotic U.S.-led evacuations of its kind. As cold-faced Taliban with M4 rifles scoured streets in Humvees and set up checkpoints on major throughways, frantic Afghans lined up at ATMs, hoping to withdraw their savings before it was frozen. The poor flooded parks. Helicopters descended over a smoke-filled U.S. Embassy, as staff inside burned sensitive documents. And at KIA, thousands of Afghans stormed the tarmac, running after C17 jets, leaping on wings, climbing the ladders of jetways, doing anything to escape the ire of the Afghanistan terrorist coup.
“We are trying to solve the issue of Afghanistan with the Taliban leadership peacefully,” Karzai said in a video posted on Facebook. Surrounded by his three daughters, Karzai said he was still in Kabul, waiting to finalize the transition. Later, those on Twitter discovered Karzai shot the video from Pakistan.
At the end of August, after 120,000 people were evacuated, and 13 were killed by an Islamic State bomb outside KIA, Biden defended the decision of him and his advisors: We, the U.S., had done enough over two decades to train the Afghan National Army to handle its own protective duties. “I was not going to extend this forever war,” Biden said, affirmatively. “And I was not extending a forever exit.”
***
Joe Cimperman likes to call the concept “brain waste.” It pains him, but Cimperman sees the shameful underuse of immigrant intellect in almost every phase of American asylum seekers: in the Vietnamese in the wake of the 1970s; in the Polish of the 1920s; in the Ukrainians after Vladimir Putin kickstarted a mass exodus of 271,000 refugees since last spring.
And Cimperman sees this clearly, maybe too clearly, with the 950 or so Afghans in the recent wave of immigration. He sees National Army office workers, like Bahadori, taking dishwasher gigs in Chinese restaurants. He sees skilled soldiers and intelligence officers, like Muhammadi, settling for employment at Midwest Direct, sorting mail on the late shift. And he sees people like Moqbel, who worked in senior level roles for the U.S. Agency for International Development, delivering for Amazon.
“It’s a story time memorial,” Cimperman said. “You see the guy working in a blood lab somewhere in Damascus, or working in healthcare in Baghdad. And we’re here at a point where we’re seeing people who could be doing jobs specific to their expertise, but doing others because it’s just easier for them to get them.”
Though a thorn in the side of every asylum seeker eyeing an American life, the reality of brain waste was eating at 39-year-old Moqbel for months after the evacuation. Moqbel has four children, and the immediate, yet necessary, choice to settle in Cleveland—and make the same money he made in Afghanistan—clawed at him. He applied for 165 jobs with not one interview. In the fall of 2021, he took a job in manufacturing, at a cement and drain maker called Oatey, for $13 an hour, yet felt severely underutilized. After all, Moqbel had an MBA. He had spent years evading scary Taliban checkpoints to construct women’s health organizations. “I was just looking for work. I just needed money. Supporting my parents back home was on my shoulders.”
“Bakht is fluent in, like, five languages. His dad was in the Air Force,” Cimperman, who met Moqbel at a visa clinic in late 2021, said. (The two now regularly meet up for lunch on the West Side.) “And we’d hear often from companies, ‘We’re looking for workers.’ ‘Well, we’ve got a guy.’ And they’d actually say, ‘We’re actually looking for other people.’”
In early 2022, after ten months of witnessing his ailing job search, Cimperman hired Moqbel as a settlement case manager for fellow Afghan asylees. It was, in a way, helping those precisely in his exact position months previous, yet those that weren’t granted SIV status. “I’m lucky,” Moqbel said. “I’m very lucky.” The tasks revolved around basic needs: finding apartments, getting healthcare. “We were giving them different kinds of trainings,” Moqbel said. “How to use the bus, how to get a driver’s license, how to sign up for ESL classes.”
Somewhere in his case management work, Moqbel befriended fellow Afghan Ahmad Farid Aria, who had also come over to the U.S. on an SIV. The two bonded almost immediately. Come 2023, the duo formed the base of the soon-to-be Afghan Community Center, a cultural hub that Moqbel wants to formalize by the end of this year. He said he needs roughly $300,000 to buy and rehab a vacant church on Pearl Rd. in Parma, a sort of node where Afghans living in West Park’s Little Arabia (“Little Kabul,” as Moqbel calls it) and the 45 families in Parma Heights’ North Church Tower could convene.
“Actually to be honest, like almost 90 percent of newcomers have a kind of anxiety or depression,” Moqbel said one recent afternoon at a diner on Euclid Ave. A short, relatively quiet man in a dress shirt, Moqbel speaks with a muted confidence about his future. Though Moqbel said his life’s improved since scoring a full-time job in development at Esperanza last October, and pursuing the Community Center project, he’s still faced with past shadows.
“I’m seeing a therapist. I’m taking one capsule, which I need to take for 90 days. And, of course,” Moqbel added, looking out the windows of the diner, out to Euclid, “the anxiety level always increases in the winter.”
***
In the middle of July, roughly three months before her life could be upended yet again, Shukria Zafari has her Legal Aid attorney, Corrylee Drozda, her interpreter, Rafiullah Albari, her uncle, Safi, and Scene over for a Sunday lunch. Zafari said her anxiety dreams had flared, but summer break has allowed her to plunge into her strongest defenses against apathy – her job and her children.
But, on that Sunday, from her airy second-story apartment off West 117th, you would be remiss to catch any despair in her eyes. “She’s on her phone too much,” Zafari said, wide-eyed. She nodded to Sediqa, 13, whose face is absorbed by TikTok. Zafari smiles. “I’ve thrown three phones out the window so far.”
After an hour or two of cooking, Zafari lines every inch of her dining table with a smorgasbord of Afghan cuisine: four bowls of lamb kofta, plates of chickpea-topped mantu dumplings, bowls of raspberries and apples and salads, with cans of Coca Cola and yogurt and cucumber dhoog to drink. In the center, a gargantuan helping of kabuli palao, the national dish of Afghanistan. “That’s all you’re gonna eat?” she questions in Dari, when the second spoon of rice and raisins hits the plate. “We will finish the rice!”
Safari is still waiting, as she has since August 22, 2021, for her parole status to be re-approved. And if it goes smoothly, she still has to figure out how exactly she’ll get daughter Zarah over from Afghanistan, just like Moqbel will with his aging parents. Bahadori is still pending approval, and has recently taken up a second job to occupy her free time in Little Arabia.
In late May, Muhammadi received SIV status, and should, if a biometrics appointment goes well, score a green card in September. He will no longer have to worry about bank withdrawals, about keeping his job. “That was a game changer,” Agustin Ponce de Leon, his lawyer, told Scene. “A turning point for him and his family.”
As for the others: “I have 31 other cases,” he says. “Still pending.”
The lunch passes, and the group retires to Zafari’s living room, where a gilded platter of nuts and dates is served with cake and mountain flower tea. As Zafari and her daughter clear the table, the small coalition the Afghan evacuation has brought here together begins to talk about the situation at hand. Albari, a trucker-turned-entrepreneur who has a build like a Crossfit trainer, talks about how the U.S. immigration at the Canadian border once asked him if he gave money to the Taliban. “I told him, ‘Ask me what I had for lunch, as I have a better response for that,” Albari says, in typical defiance.
“Those questions are pretty standard,” Drozda says. “They’re mental. They’re a total mind game.”
Zafari returns from her kitchen, which is shrouded by a gray curtain, and sits next to her uncle, Safi. “So many questions!” she says in Dari. “Why are there always so many questions?”
“Every time he goes to the interview he comes back with a headache.”
With Zafari and Albari’s encouragement, Safi goes into his own story of evacuation and reluctant immigration. His story, like Cimperman says, is time memorial. He had a business near Kabul, he made money, he was forced to flee, after August 2021, and chose Cleveland. Zafari followed. “And it took me two months for an asylum interview,” Safi says. “Two months! And nothing.”
A silence came over the living room. “It’s really hard, mentally, living here,” Safi says. “It is really a mental battle. Yes, we are happy here. But sometimes I’m not sure about myself. I have a permit. I can work. I am not sure if my asylum will be approved or not, after two years.”
“In two months, I go again.” Safi says. “We will see.”