Feds shut down first U.S. camp used for Afghan evacuees

The final Afghan evacuees who’d been housed at Fort Lee, the first evacuee camp set up on U.S. soil, have now been processed and resettled in the country, the Biden administration announced Wednesday.

The Virginia military base was tapped in late July to temporarily house Afghans being flown out of their home country as the U.S. prepared to withdraw its final troops. The Taliban’s faster-than-anticipated takeover of the country in August sparked a surge of people, forcing the administration to open seven other camps at other military bases around the country.

Being able to shutter the Fort Lee operation is a “historic milestone,” said Robert J. Fenton Jr., the Homeland Security Department’s senior response official for Operation Allies Welcome.

All told, 25,000 evacuees have been processed and released from the eight bases, with 45,000 more still in the pipeline.

The Afghans were flown out amid the chaos of their country’s collapse, and questions still swirl around who actually made it out, and who got left behind.

Initially billed as an airlift for people who assisted the 20-year U.S. war and reconstruction effort and were eligible for a special visa, in actuality a majority who made it out do not qualify for the visa, government officials have revealed.

Instead, they were considered “at risk” of retaliation by the country’s new Taliban leadership and are being treated similar to refugees.

But Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week acknowledged that the Afghans are not being given the same scrutiny that refugees would have had before reaching the U.S.

Every potential refugee typically faces an in-person interview overseas, where a trained officer evaluates their story and the credibility of their claims. Security experts say interviews are the backbone of the system for weeding out potential bad actors.

In the case of the Afghans, though, they most reached the U.S. without facing an in-person interview, undergoing only database checks. Those checks can screen out people who have come to the attention of U.S. authorities in the past, but cannot flag anyone who has not been on the radar of American intelligence or law enforcement.

“They have not all been given interviews,” Mr. Mayorkas acknowledged to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We have to be mindful of the fact that we were in an emergency situation.”

He wasn’t able to say what percentage were interviewed.

Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, said of the people trained for the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., only one was subjected to an in-depth interview. “That person did not enter the country,” he said.

Since they didn’t qualify for special visas and weren’t processed as refugees, the vast majority of the 70,000 or so Afghans who reached the U.S. came under Mr. Mayorkas’s power of “parole,” a tentative legal status that allows them to remain here and obtain work permits.

The Washington Times has reported on two Afghan evacuees who made it to the U.S. despite having been previously deported from the country for aggravated felony convictions, including one man who committed rape.

Though they reached the U.S., both were flagged by Customs and Border Protection officers at the usual arrival inspection at Dulles International Airport. It’s not clear how they made it past the initial screening overseas to board an airplane.

Mr. Mayorkas said he believed, in the rape case, that Afghan evacuee has already had his parole canceled.

His department is not, however, deporting people to Afghanistan, so it’s not clear what will happen to the man.