From Church World Service (http://www.churchworldservice.org):
Following the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Afghans were left behind, at risk of violence and persecution. The Biden Administration began receiving a surge of individual applications for humanitarian protection, called humanitarian parole, filed on behalf of at-risk Afghans abroad. In response to the high number of applications, the administration indicated that it would wrongfully and arbitrarily apply a particularly high standard requiring third party evidence of a risk of serious harm to applicants either in Afghanistan, or if they managed to flee the country, in the country where they are residing. This standard is higher even than that required under U.S. asylum or refugee laws, and some applicants have begun to receive overwhelmingly unfavorable responses to their humanitarian parole applications from USCIS, indicating a potentially disturbing trend of application denials.
The administration has a moral obligation to establish a special parole program for Afghan nationals, remedy harm against individual humanitarian parole applicants, and establish complementary humanitarian pathways for Afghans who remain left behind overseas.
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