For a young family still new to Buffalo, each day has settled into a quiet routine. The two boys head off to school. Their uncle, Nasim, rises in the morning to prepare for his job at Walmart, then returns to care for a toddler daughter, Parasto, while his wife Shafiqa leaves for English lessons at Erie Community College.
They both study a new language while keeping the curious and energetic Parasto occupied. Shafiqa, 28, has a list of English phrases hanging from a kitchen window, so she can work on them while she does the dishes – not far from the life goals she taped to a cabinet, as reminder and inspiration.
Those dreams all revolve around a call they have anticipated for months – one their 14-year-old nephew, Mojtaba, finally received a few weeks ago. He was granted legal asylum, putting him among a tiny handful of new Afghan arrivals in Buffalo to reach that plateau.
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To Shafiqa and Nasim, Mojtaba's news is a landmark for a couple for whom 2021 equated to a frightening ordeal, touched off when the old government collapsed amid the Taliban's rise to power. Mojtaba's call was also a flash of hope for Julie Kruger and Kelsey Reff, the lawyers providing the family with free representation.
According to advocates for refugees, some 600 newcomers from Afghanistan – many who directly supported American military personnel, diplomats and aid workers – found safety in greater Buffalo after the Taliban took over. But almost none have achieved asylum, which carries life-changing importance.
For reasons tied to friends and relatives in Afghanistan, Reff asked that Nasim and Shafiqa's last names be kept out of this piece. They are both of the Hazara, an historically oppressed people in their homeland. Nasim, 31, served with the government and often worked closely with Americans. Shafiqa was an outspoken activist for women's rights and also held a government position.
Any of it was enough to put their lives at risk.
Dim Lam Lun made the decision the first time she touched the keys. She was a teenager in Burma, forced to seek an education far from home amid sweeping reprisals in 1988 that shut down government schools. She enrolled at a seminary school that had a piano, the first one Dim had ever seen. In a place where she
They are among about 80,000 Afghan refugees granted humanitarian parole by the Biden administration after Kabul fell, a status that most will lose in early autumn. Jennifer Rizzo-Choi, executive director of the International Institute of Buffalo, said the hope was the "higher obligation" of pure conscience – these were people who put themselves in danger, to aid Americans – would accelerate the asylum process.
Instead, advocates say only a few cases, at most, have reached decisions from federal Citizenship and Immigration Services administrators. Rizzo-Choi calls it “a limbo period.” Without federal intervention, she said, adult refugees could lose the legal right to work, which is how they care for their families day to day.
She described the best potential options as asylum or extending humanitarian parole, while Gretchen Gonzalez, executive director of the Erie County Bar Association Volunteer Lawyers Project, said such alternatives as special immigration visas are limited and would not protect entire families.
“You can’t get a more sympathetic situation than people being forced out of their own country because they put themselves in danger by helping ours,” said Gonzalez, whose office provides the largest free immigration counsel for new Americans in the state outside of New York City, which is how Kruger and Reff connected with Nasim and Shafiqa.
Gonzalez said her agency has provided dozens of lawyers within a collective legal effort involving many Buffalo organizations with longstanding commitments to immigrants and refugees. They are working cooperatively to make sure anyone in this new Afghan community "who wants a lawyer, has a lawyer," as Rizzo-Choi puts it.
Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, said he has written to immigration administrators, urging new focus on the logjam facing this community. He said he witnessed the selfless and courageous aid provided by many Afghans on visits to that nation.
Higgins was a House of Representatives co-sponsor of the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bipartisan attempt to ease the route to permanent residency that has not made it out of Congress. This situation – where returning to their birthplace could mean death – ought to transcend ideological differences, Higgins said, even in a fiercely divided nation.
"If someone makes themselves susceptible to persecution on behalf of all of us, then morally we have an extraordinary obligation," he said.
Gonzalez, of the Volunteer Lawyers Project, also works closely with Paul Buchanan, a former Erie County Family Judge now representing Abdul Khalid Andish, 26, a young Afghan journalist. Andish made a harrowing escape from Kabul, helped by the international Committee to Protect Journalists – a flight to safety that Lucy Westcott, the CPJ’s emergencies director, mentioned in a digital diary.
Andish worked in both television and radio. He wanted to “reach the voices of those unheard to officials,” he said through an interpreter in a recent interview. He produced stories on opportunities for women and the struggles of the Hazara, work that hardly endeared Andish to the Taliban.
He lost both a cousin and a friend, a cameraman, when a suicide bomber attacked a Hazara rally. As Kabul fell, he bid a fast, clandestine farewell to his family, who grieved but were pleased “my life would be out of that misery,” he said.
Lost in the Christmas weekend blizzard, Fidele Dhan was led to safety by a family who set out looking for him. Some of his rescuers offer this thought as both a fact and a point of wonder: He was saved, without question, because of the three kings.
Trapped, Andish took shelter for days in a friend's apartment. He finally reached a hotel protected by the Qatari army. From there, he said, the CPJ helped him escape.
“I was lucky to get out alive,” said Andish, who arrived in Buffalo with a single duffel bag. He lives now in Niagara County, where he works as a truck driver and aspires to be a journalistic "voice for this generation of young Afghans."
None of it will happen without asylum – a status Buchanan believed Andish would achieve months ago. He said lawyers within the process have told him the delay is based on a lack of enough federal staffing to do fast, safe and thorough security reviews of each applicant. "That's what's holding a lot of people up from establishing their lives," he said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees that process, wrote in an email that departmental officials remain "committed to supporting Afghan nationals paroled under Operations Allies Welcome, and we continue to explore opportunities to provide avenues for humanitarian relief.” Homeland Security, the spokesperson wrote, hopes to "provide guidance" to those refugees "as soon as possible."
In Buffalo, that would include Shafiqa and Nasim, parents to young Parasto, who still carry the fear of almost being separated as they left Afghanistan. They have also cared for their nephews, 17-year-old Hamed and his younger brother Mojtaba, since just before their 2021 flight from Kabul.
The boys’ parents were traveling and far from home when the city fell. Nasim and Shafiqa say they were all at high risk because of their heritage, danger compounded by their careers before the Taliban takeover. That led to a desperate choice: Through friends, they found a taxi driver willing to drive through chaotic streets to the airport.
Shafiqa was entirely covered in a burka. Taliban soldiers, she said, routinely banged on the windows and asked where they were going. “I was terrified to say anything,” she said, though whatever faith she had about refuge at the airport quickly dissolved.
Every entrance was overrun by frightened people, jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder. Afghan soldiers used rifles or rods to beat back the crowds. The driver managed to reach the far side of the airport, where American soldiers were doing their best to check papers before letting anyone in, a trickle through two gates maybe 500 feet apart.
Tear gas hung in the air. There was barely room to move. In their effort to push through, the couple was torn apart, struggling toward separate gates.
Nasim, frightened he might never again see his wife or nephews, sought help from a young American soldier, who made a lightning-quick decision: He took Parasto in his arms, held the child high and pushed into the crowd.
The soldier was gambling: He figured the one chance they had was that a mother would somehow spot her child, even within madness.
It worked. “I turned and saw my wife,” Nasim said of a moment that will stay with him forever.
They were able to climb onto a military transport aircraft, packed with refugees. For 24 hours, as they waited, they had water but no food. When the plane finally touched down in Qatar, hundreds of desperate, hungry travelers burst into applause, and for an instant Nasim wondered:
Why applaud being torn away from home?
He realized they were cheering “because they had saved their lives.”
From Qatar, they flew to Germany and then to Washington, where the couple faced one last, wrenching hurdle. Immigration officials, checking passports, asked about their bond with their nephews. Because Nasim and Shafiqa were not the actual parents, they were temporarily separated from the boys.
The couple was led toward a car and away from their nephews, Shafiqa said, when a woman in an administrative position saw her weeping. "What's wrong?" asked the woman, who reacted with compassion and somehow intervened.
“We took the kids back,” Shafiqa said of her sister's children, “and were happy.”
The family spent several months in Wisconsin before embracing the chance to relocate in Buffalo. Nasim found his job, and Shafiqa this week received long-awaited authorization to work. Every day, she reads that handwritten list of goals – dreaming of a career in journalism or public service – and her hope intertwines with the gratitude they both express:
“We are lucky to be here.”
That defines asylum, though it will not feel real until they get the call.