Feds overwhelmed with the influx of illegal aliens.
WASHINGTON
Frodo lived in fear for nine years.He knew when two men showed up at his front door to threaten him in 2006 that his family would continue living in danger because of the three years he spent as an interpreter for U.S. forces in Iraq, including some of the most violent years of the war.
“[Militants] said to my parents and my family that we know your son was in the U.S. forces so when we catch him we will kill him,” Frodo said. “I worried about my kids and my family and I had a lot of nightmares that they’d come and catch me and my family and they kill my family.”
Frodo chose to go by this nickname to protect his identity from those who threaten his life.
Although the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad recognized Frodo as facing a “serious threat” and gave him “chief of mission approval,” the first step of the visa process, in August 2011, it wasn’t until a month ago that he finally got approval to travel, with his family, to the United States.
During the time his application remained in “administrative processing” his country was devastated by a new war that saw thousands more deaths and the rise of the Islamic State.
Frodo is not alone. Long wait times and a shortage of available visas for a huge backlog of applications remain major issues for the U.S. government’s Special Immigrant Visa program intended to ease entry to the United States for Iraqis and Afghans who served as interpreters or performed other duties for the United States in each country. While waiting, they remain targets for terrorist operatives from al Qaida or the Taliban.[…]
Although the State Department and Congress have made changes to the program in hopes of speeding the issuance of visas – requiring, for example, that background checks be completed within nine months of an application’s completion – the program’s problems persist.
Since fiscal year 2008, the U.S. government issued 11,599 visas under the special immigrant program for Iraqis and Afghans employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government. But thousands of visas that could have been issued between 2009 and 2013 weren’t – about 6,500 for Afghans and about 19,000 visas for Iraqis.