Special treatment for some: Most refugee families in Idaho wait years to reunite with loved ones

Most Americans understand waiting as being stuck in slow-moving traffic or holding onto their shopping cart while standing in long lines at the store. But for many refugees, “waiting” depends on the whims of domestic politics, international relations, and a good dose of luck, magnifying their feeling of being stuck.

Immigration to the United States is a waiting game – it can take years, decades, even to receive immigration visas, to reunite with family, to receive asylum, to get green cards and then citizenship. More than 20,000 people had already been approved for refugee status when Trump took office, many of them with family already here in the U.S. and in Idaho. Now they too wait.

However, the Trump administration is resettling white South Africans now, just three months after floating the idea, essentially allowing them to jump the line in front of people already approved, thousands of whom had already booked their travel.

As a sociologist studying migration and refugee integration in the U.S., I have been conducting interviews on the impact of the 2021 Afghan evacuation – when tens of thousands of Afghan allies fled their country after the U.S. withdrawal and return of Taliban rule.

Many Afghans were able to resettle in the U.S., at first through humanitarian parole. Later, they had to apply for asylum to create a pathway to citizenship. However, due to the backlog with asylum cases, many were forced to apply for Temporary Protected Status to receive work permits. On the same day that a small group of white South Africans arrived, the administration canceled Temporary Protected Status for Afghan allies.

In my research, I have talked to many Afghan families and to people who work with the refugee community in Idaho. Many are still moving through pending asylum cases, years later, including one man I met named Muzar (a pseudonym).

Muzar came to the United States in November 2021 after former President Joe Biden  withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghans stood in lines for hours at the Kabul International Airport, desperately waiting to be evacuated. Muzar worked for the U.S. military, cleaning a military base, a critical service that made him a target, but did not qualify him for a Special immigrant Visa for Afghans who were connected to the U.S. military.

Now, his asylum case is still pending, as he tries to prove his service, as is the case for many. “Lack of proof” is a common theme for many service workers, which I describe in my own work on low-wage immigrant workers in the U.S.

They had tickets. A flight number. An arrival time. Then Trump’s executive order changed everything.

There are many youth and elderly women whom I regularly meet at the legal clinics in Boise. One such elderly person is Nurma (a pseudonym). She has been in the U.S. for 25 years and is still waiting for her daughter to join her.

The daughter had to flee Afghanistan with the rise of the Taliban and has been stuck in Pakistan for the last seven years, waiting on the visa petition her mom submitted. The legal clinics in Boise are led by attorneys working around the clock to help people like Muzar and Nurma file their asylum claims and reunite with their families. Week after week, many Afghans come seeking answers, and often the answers are elusive.

The waiting within the refugee system has become even more arduous since the Trump administration suspended the U.S. Refugee Admission Program on Jan. 20, his first day in office. Currently, more than 10,000 Afghans abroad, all of whom went through years-long background checks and have been approved, are waiting to be relocated to the U.S. Many are stranded in neighboring countries — Pakistan, Turkey, and Iran.

Yes, the U.S. immigration system is broken, but not in the way you may think. It should not take decades to reunite these Afghan families, torn apart by U.S. policy in Afghanistan. And it should not take one day for a new president to tear apart five decades of U.S. resettlement policy and undermine the family-based immigration system that has been in place since the 1960s.

If resettling white South Africans demonstrates anything, it’s that the U.S. refugee resettlement system is indeed a proper function of government that is capable of operating in an efficient and humane manner when given the proper resources.

Local refugee agencies plan to do what they do best and welcome newcomers to Idaho, but that should not come at the expense of the tens of thousands of other deserving people around the world, including our Afghan friends to whom we owe a high debt of gratitude.