State Department is having “minor” problems.
Via Washington Post
The cases of thousands of Afghan interpreters who worked with the U.S. military and hope to relocate to the United States are in limbo because the government will soon run out of visas designated for the resettlement program, State Department officials said Thursday.
Worried about the welfare of linguists who are under threat for their affiliation with the U.S. government, State Department officials are asking Congress to allow the issuing of more visas during the remainder of the fiscal year and to extend the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, which is set to expire in September.
About 6,000 applicants are in the pipeline, including about 300 whose cases have reached the final stage of the process. Congress set a cap of 3,000 visas for 2014. The State Department expects to have issued that many visas within days, well ahead of the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.
“We owe these people this opportunity to be out of harm’s way,” Heather A. Higginbottom, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, said in an interview. “This program and our commitment to them is incredibly important.”
The State Department’s current predicament is to a large degree one of its own making. The visa program was beset for years by interagency debates, security concerns and bureaucratic processing delays. In the fall of 2012, for instance, the State Department had granted just 32 visas among more than 5,700 applicants for the immigration pathway, which Congress established in 2009.