(VOA) As recently as last week, the U.S. immigration service was using six officers to process about 14,000 humanitarian requests for Afghans seeking relocation to the United States following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August.
That’s what the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told congressional staff, Congressman Jim Langevin, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said Thursday during a House Homeland Security Committee meeting.
“I want to say that again: 14,000 humanitarian parole applications with just six officers,” Langevin said. “That is completely and utterly unacceptable, and I call on USCIS to address the shortcoming immediately.”
The number has continued to surge in recent days, with the agency receiving nearly 20,000 such requests as of Friday, more than 10 times the number of humanitarian applications submitted from around the world in a typical year, according to a USCIS official.
