- Yet, it's important for Americans to know,
this war will not be quick, and this war will not be easy.
We're working hard in Afghanistan
and we helped the Afghan people recover from the Taliban rule.
- If I leave these guys here alone with no language
so there would be no communication
between them and the Afghans.
- Within the universe of people who served as interpreters,
fixers, drivers, advisors to the US military,
which is the largest group,
and the State Department, which is the next largest group,
that we're talking about a total universe
of 80,000 people or more.
- Hold up. - Hey, hey!
- Guys, guys, guys. - That was our voice there.
- Do you notice any regret not moving quicker to evacuate more
Afghan civilians who work in the United States?
- The Special Immigrant Visa program has been around
for a significant number of years
and it was never designed, as conceived by Congress,
for a mass-evacuation circumstance.
- This is an established State-Department-run program
and a Homeland-Security-run program.
It's incredibly cumbersome, but essentially what it does
is give a path to US relocation
and potentially, eventually citizenship for people
who have a direct
working relationship with the United States,
in this case in Afghanistan for a minimum of two years.
- The Special Immigrant Visa was in place in 2007,
but very few interpreters or Afghan Nationals
who were working for the US Government
could, you know, go through that process.
They were still a lot of, you know, bureaucratic steps
that you had to go through
in order to get a visa to come to the United States.
- Much of this program was originally set up
near the end of the Bush Administration
so it's been around for a long time.
It very quickly got extraordinarily bureaucratic
and bogged down.
The Obama people sorta tried to fix it,
it didn't really work.
So many people had been working their way through the system
for so many years since the start of it.
A lot of those cases, actually,
came due during the Trump Administration.
But it's not because they were trying super hard to do it.
It's mostly because of where people were in the process.
Then COVID hit.
Essentially, wherever you were, if you were a SIV applicant,
you were frozen in time during the period
that the Embassy was shut down.
- Once screened and cleared, we will welcome these Afghans
who helped us in the war effort over the last 20 years
to their new home in the United States of America,
because that's who we are.
- A lot of people took these jobs,
not because they were, you know,
dying to, you know, work for the United States
and put their lives at risk in the short term,
but because they were promised,
if they worked for the United States for two years
and ticked these boxes that they could come.
- These transit centers provide a safe place
for the SIV applicants and other vulnerable Afghanis
and their families to complete the paperwork
while we conduct security screenings and background checks
before the continue on to their final destination
in the United States or in another country.
- Fairly early on the Biden Administration
added people to the State Department team
in charge of processing SIV applications
and put some muscle behind fixing the program.
They thought they had, you know, a year, two years
if the Taliban were gonna regain control at all,
they certainly didn't think it would be now.
The thing that the Biden Administration
is getting the most criticism for is,
you know, you're leaving all kinds of people behind
who don't fit into one of these pretty narrow boxes.
What message does that send to our allies
who we asked to fight alongside us, and did.
And they also, you know, feel invested in the future.