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| Afghan passengers sit as they wait to leave the Kabul airport on August 16, a day after the Taliban took control of the Afghan capital [Wakil Kohsar/AFP] |
WASHINGTON - Thousands of deportees from Afghanistan awaiting resettlement at eight US service installations departed Saturday from a base in New Jersey, completing a trip that began with a chaotic evacuation from Kabul in August.
With help from exile resettlement associations, Afghans who were vacated after their country fell to the Taliban have gradationally left military bases in recent months and started new lives in communities across the United States.
The US took in Afghans as part of Operation Drink Allied, the country's largest exile resettlement in decades.
“This is a veritably important corner in Operation Abettors Drink but I want to emphasize that this charge isn't over yet,” said KrishO'Mara Vignarajah, chairman and CEO of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of nine public resettlement associations that's part of trouble.
Afghans are still in their country but face peril under Taliban rule and those who make it to the United States still need help, Vignarajah said.
"Successful resettlement and integration won't be in a matter of days or weeks,"he said."Our new Afghan neighbors will need our support and fellowship for months and times to come because the challenges they face won't go down overnight."
The US plans to take in thousands of Afghan deportees over the coming time but they will arrive in lower groups and will be housed in installations at an unidentified position, the Department of Homeland Security said.
Casing installations for deportees at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in town New Jersey will remain open temporarily, the agency said. The base hosts the largest number of Afghans, reaching a peak of. The next largest was at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, where the last group departed last week.
Afghans suffer immigration and health webbing processes while they stay at bases, frequently for months, until tense exile associations can place them in the community. The government established seminaries for the children who make up about 40 percent of the deportees on the New Jersey base.
The Homeland Security and Resettlement Organization, the main civil agency in the trouble, has set a thing of getting everyone off the base by February 15. This is a challenge because of the failure of affordable casing, the reduction of the exile program under President Donald Trump and the sheer number of deportees.
Utmost of the deportees have settled in established Afghan communities in northern Virginia and the girding Washington area, as well as Northern California and Texas.
States where between and have settled include Arizona, New York, Florida, Georgia, Colorado, Nebraska and Pennsylvania, according to State Department data attained by The Associated Press.
DHS preliminarily said about 40 percent of Afghans would qualify for special emigrant visas for people working as military practitioners or for the US government in some other capacity during America's longest war.
Utmost of the rest, still, don't yet have legal endless occupancy in the US because they aren't under the exile program but are admitted under a type of exigency civil authorization known as philanthropic parole.
Lawyers for deportees, including a number of prominent stagers' groups, are prompting Congress to give endless occupancy with"Afghan adaptation measures," analogous to what has been done in the history for Cuba and Iraq.
When are they eligible to vote?
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