CLEVELAND, Ohio — It's been two years since the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan amid chaos at the Kabul airport. When they left, troops took tens of thousands of refugees with them, and Cleveland's been a new home for them as hundreds came to Ohio.
We don’t just report the initial story—we follow through to its conclusion. Read and watch our previous reporting on this story below and see more stories that we've followed through on here.
As groups helped the refugees settle into a new life, we've learned through revisiting how our region helped them find a sense of home, even as some fear it could all be ripped away again.
Time is our greatest resource, and Ibrahim Sahil is running out of it. During the fall of Afghanistan, he had minutes to leave his home country.
"The airport was the only place where you could survive," said Sahil, an Afghan refugee, through U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) translator Akbar Shenwari.
And two years later, he is still waiting to figure out where to build a future. Sahil explained that he's had to start over in Cleveland, an unfamiliar place, while his immediate family is stuck in a collapsed country.
"All of us have been going through a lot of problems. We are stuck here. They're stuck there. My brothers and sisters and Taliban are there. They are in fear," Sahil said.
Sahil and his father have been in the U.S. for two years, trying to build that new foundation for their family, but the race against the clock threatens to crumble everything again.
"We do not know what's going to happen next," he said.
Sahil is one of over 70,000 Afghan refugees who came to the United States under humanitarian parole. Darren Hamm, the director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Cleveland Field Office, said that humanitarian parole is like a permission slip.
"So, individuals arriving to the United States in emergency actions, let's say the evacuation of Afghanistan or individuals arriving from Ukraine and active war zones are granted a temporary permission slip to remain here in the United States," said Hamm.
That permission slip has benefits: food assistance, medical assistance, a temporary social security card and most importantly, safety, but it has a time limit.
"They have 24 months to file to adjust their status for parole to be either re-granted or to achieve some other sort of a pathway, like the legal permanent residency pathway," said Hamm.
The immigration system has been overwhelmed by a tsunami of applications from the fall of Afghanistan, followed by the war in Ukraine, which brought hundreds of thousands of refugees to the U.S., all hoping they won't be sent back.
"That's our fear. I mean, once they get stripped of the status, and they no longer have this renewal of the ability to remain this permission slip, we call it, they lose the benefits that are associated with that," said Hamm.
After almost two years, Sahil's father got a green card, but he is still waiting for his papers to return. He was on his father's application as a child, but during the waiting period, he got too old and had to apply independently.
"It's really hard for each of us who are here in the United States; they cannot go back to Afghanistan. If they go, the minute they land there, the next day, they could be killed," said Sahil.
So Sahil sits waiting and hoping his time doesn't run out.
"We want to stay here for a long time. We want to have our own business. We want to have our own house. We want to be unified with our families who were left behind," said Sahil.
Hamm says the only way this can be resolved is with legislation granting Afghan refugees long-term benefits and asylum in the U.S.
For information about USCRI, CLICK HERE.
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