Earlier this month, a draft majority opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito was leaked to the public indicating the court was poised to overturn its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a move that would allow individual states to outlaw abortion. Several states have so-called “trigger laws” in place to ban abortions the moment the high court issues such a ruling, and several other states are expected to follow suit if a federal guarantee of abortion rights is rescinded. 

 

While cheered by social conservatives, the draft opinion has caused panic in other sectors, and not only because it would scuttle a nearly 50-year nationwide right to abortion. Many worry the reasoning used by Alito could be applied to overturn other rights the Supreme Court has affirmed as constitutionally protected. 

 

Many of those rights arise from a fundamental principle the court set forth in Roe v. Wade and multiple subsequent decisions: that Americans have a right to privacy that is implied but not stated in the U.S. Constitution. Alito’s draft ruling attacks that reasoning. 

 

“If Alito is saying that Americans don’t have an inherent right to privacy, then it opens the door to every bedroom in the country,” Rebecca Robb, a Boulder, Colorado, beauty shop worker, told VOA.  

 

“I’m concerned that our right to contraception will be threatened,” she said, “and that marriage equality will be next. I’m scared LGTBQ+ rights will be stripped, that marriage and segregation laws for people of color will be revisited, and that immigrants will be treated unfairly by the courts.” 

 

While many Americans share Robb’s fears, there are others who believe those fears are exaggerated or misguided. They point to Alito’s own words in the leaked draft, where he wrote, “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” 

 

“It’s just another example of liberals using fear to create doubt and try to get what they want,” said Cathy Pridgen, a grandmother in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. “They’re trying to use scare tactics to protect abortion, but it won’t work.” 

 

Precedent and a domino effect 

The right to privacy as a general concept has served as the underpinning for a multitude of specific rights many Americans have come to take for granted in modern-day life. 

 

“I’m afraid that any right tied to a right to privacy could be taken away if Roe is overturned,” Morgan Jameson, an English-Spanish language interpreter in Portland, Oregon, told VOA. “Gay marriage, interracial marriage — the Supreme Court works on precedent, so every decision is built from a previous one.” 

 

In 1973, for example, when deciding Roe v. Wade, the court explained the right to privacy was acknowledged in previous cases, such as Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). Griswold used that right to determine the Constitution protects the liberty of married couples to buy and use contraceptives without government interference.

Jameson and others worry that, if Roe is overturned, their right to contraceptives could also be in danger, as could a number of other rights. 

 

Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based LGBTQ advocacy group, said that is a concern Americans need to take seriously.

“The 14th Amendment has been interpreted over the years to protect fundamental rights — known as substantive due process rights,” she said. “The idea is that these rights are so entrenched in American society, it would be unreasonable for laws to be written that would take them away.”

Privacy, Warbelow said, is one of those rights.  

 

“In the past the judicial system would have protected these rights, but that’s not the case in this draft,” she explained. “If one is overturned, the whole idea of due process rights becomes less certain.” 

 

Warbelow said it is important to acknowledge Alito’s draft explicitly distinguishes between the right to an abortion and other rights, which she said could be reason for hope. Still, she believes civil rights activists and concerned citizens must remain on guard.  

 

“I do think we have to take the threat seriously that other rights — rights to contraception or to intimate relationships among same-sex couples — could also be challenged. If you knock down one domino, many could fall.” 

 

‘What will be the next case?’ 

Tulane University constitutional law professor Stephen Griffin said a domino effect is common in jurisprudence, but not in the direction progressives currently fear.  

 

“It’s something constitutional law professors like to debate: What will be the next case?” he said. “But the dominos typically fall in the direction of the courts giving more rights. They don’t usually like to strip rights away.” 

 

Many experts say the right to contraception will be the next to be challenged should Roe v. Wade be overturned. 

 

“If abortion is banned, some forms of contraception could probably be made illegal by states without even going through the judicial system,” Griffin explained. “Things like the ‘morning-after pill’ can just be reclassified as an abortifacient instead of as a contraceptive. If the life of the fetus is protected from [the point of] fertilization, then those kinds of pills could be considered abortion and would be banned.” 

 

Same-sex marriage, which the Supreme Court legalized nationwide in 2015, could also be challenged, according to Louisiana State University law professor John Baker. 

 

“Without Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which created a right to ‘same-sex marriage,’ would never have occurred,” he said.

Similarly, legal scholars say the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision that states may not criminalize intimate relationships between people of the same sex could also be revisited based on Alito’s draft opinion. 

 

Emboldened response

“I think it will embolden state lawmakers to see how far to the right they can go on issues of abortion, contraception, intimacy and more,” said HRC’s Warbelow.  

 

Thomas Jipping believes the worries are overblown. He is a senior legal fellow for the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, which is part of the Institute for Constitutional Government at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. 

 

“In my opinion, no lawyer can read Alito’s draft and reasonably claim he wants to overturn other rights,” Jipping told VOA. “He doesn’t just explicitly write that his decision should have no effect whatsoever on any other rights — he wrote it twice. He couldn’t have been clearer.” 

 

Robb, the Colorado beauty shop operator, said she would not take the court at its word. 

 

“It’s just lip service and I don’t trust it,” Robb said. “Justices [Neil] Gorsuch and [Brett] Kavanaugh both said in their Supreme Court confirmation hearings that they respected Roe as precedent and the law of the land, but now it appears they’re voting to overturn it. Why should I trust the court’s word?” 

 

Jipping believes liberals are attempting to connect a reversal of Roe with a possible overturning of additional rights in order to damage confidence in the Supreme Court and to mobilize Democrats in advance of this year’s midterm elections. 

 

Democrats deny that assertion. Either way, voters may still be energized. 

 

Lizzy Shephard is a Democratic voter in New Orleans, Louisiana, who sees the Supreme Court’s ideological leanings as dangerous and damaging for the most vulnerable in society. But she also sees a backlash brewing.  

 

“I believe so passionately that bodily autonomy is a right,” said Shephard, who runs a local nonprofit organization. “Even if the Supreme Court takes that away for a while, I think it will strengthen our community to react so powerfully, one day this won’t even be a debate we have anymore.”
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President Joe Biden tended to both business and security interests Sunday as he wraps up a three-day visit to South Korea, showcasing Hyundai’s pledge to invest at least $10 billion in electric vehicles and related technologies in the United States.

Before visiting U.S. and South Korean troops monitoring the rapidly evolving North Korean nuclear threat, Biden said the U.S. was ready for any provocation that Kim Jong Un might deliver.

Hyundai’s investment includes $5.5 billion for an electric vehicle and battery factory in Georgia.

Appearing with Biden, Hyundai CEO Euisun Chung said Sunday his company would spend another $5 billion on artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicles and other technologies.

“Electric vehicles are good for our climate goals, but they’re also good for jobs,” Biden said. “And they’re good for business.”

The major U.S. investment by a South Korean company is a reflection of how the U.S. and South Korea are leveraging their longstanding military ties into a broader economic partnership.

Biden said he was not concerned about any possible provocation by North Korea while he is touring the region.

“We are prepared for anything North Korea does,” Biden said in response to a reporter’s question. “We’ve talked through how we’d respond to whatever they do so I am not concerned, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

The U.S. president has made greater economic cooperation with South Korea a priority, saying on Saturday that “it will bring our two countries even closer together, cooperating even more closely than we already do, and help strengthen our supply chains, secure them against shocks and give our economies a competitive edge.”

The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February has forced a deeper rethinking of national security and economic alliances. Coronavirus outbreaks led to shortages of computer chips, autos and other goods that the Biden administration says can ultimately be fixed by having more manufacturing domestically and with trusted allies.

Biden’s meeting Sunday with Hyundai’s chief comes after the president made an earlier stop at a computer chip plant run by Samsung, the Korean electronics giant that plans to build a $17 billion production facility in Texas.

Hyundai’s Georgia factory is expected to employ 8,100 workers and produce up to 300,000 vehicles annually, with plans for construction to begin early next year and production to start in 2025 near the unincorporated town of Ellabell.

But the Hyundai plant shows that there are also tradeoffs as Biden pursues his economic agenda.

The president earlier in his term tried to link the production of electric vehicles to automakers with unionized workers. As part of a $1.85 trillion spending proposal last year that stalled in the Senate, Biden wanted extra tax credits to go to the buyers of EVs made by unionized factories. That would have provided a boost to the unionized auto plant owned by General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis NV at a vital moment when union membership nationwide has been steadily decreasing.

During the Samsung visit, Biden called on Korean companies building plants in the U.S. to hire union workers. In addition to its coming Texas plant, Samsung has a deal in place with Stellantis to build an electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant in the U.S.

“I urge Samsung and Stellantis and any company investing in the United States to enter into partnerships with our most highly skilled and dedicated and engaged workers you can find anywhere in the world: American union members,” he said.

There so far has been no guarantee that the Hyundai Georgia plant’s workers will be unionized.

Katie Byrd, the press secretary for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, noted in an email that the state is “Right-to-Work,” which “means that workers may not be required to join a union or make payments to a union as a condition of employment.”

A Hyundai spokesperson did not respond to an email asking if the Georgia plant would be unionized. A senior Biden administration official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, said there was no contradiction between Biden encouraging investors to embrace union workforces while his administration does “whatever it can” to encourage investment and bring jobs to the U.S.

Before meeting Hyundai’s CEO, Biden attended Mass at his hotel in Seoul along with some White House staff. Biden will also meet with service members and military families at Osan Air Base and address U.S. and Korean troops. Biden and Korean President Yoon Sook Yeol on Saturday announced they will consider expanded joint military exercises to deter the nuclear threat posed by North Korea.

The push toward deterrence by Biden and Yoon, who is less than two weeks into his presidency, marks a shift by the leaders from their predecessors. President Donald Trump had considered scrapping the exercises and expressed affection for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. And the last South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, remained committed to dialogue with Kim to the end of his term despite being repeatedly rebuffed by the North.

Biden decided to skip a visit to the demilitarized zone on the North and South’s border, a regular stop for U.S. presidents when visiting Seoul. Instead, Biden, who had visited the DMZ as vice president, was more interested in visiting Osan to see an installation “where the rubber hits the road” for U.S. and South Korean troops maintaining security on the Korean Peninsula, said White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Yoon campaigned on a promise to strengthen the U.S.-South Korea relationship. He reiterated at a dinner on Saturday in Biden’s honor that it was his goal to move the relationship “beyond security” issues with North Korea, which have long dominated the relationship.

“I will try and design a new future vision of our alliances with you, Mr. President,” Yoon said.

Biden heads to Tokyo later Sunday. On Monday, he will meet with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and lay out his vision for negotiating a new trade agreement called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.

A central theme for the trip, Biden’s first to Asia as president, is to tighten U.S. alliances in the Pacific to counter China’s influence in the region.

But within the Biden administration, there’s an ongoing debate about whether to lift some of the $360 billion in Trump-era tariffs on China. Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said some of the tariffs are doing more harm to U.S. business and consumers than they are to China.

Sullivan said the president’s national security and economic teams were still reviewing “how to move beyond the trade approach of the previous administration.”

On Tuesday, Japan will host Biden at a summit for the Quad, a four-country strategic alliance that also includes Australia and India.
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Roger Angell, the celebrated baseball writer and reigning man of letters who during an unfaltering 70-plus years helped define The New Yorker’s urbane wit and style through his essays, humor pieces and editing, has died. He was 101.

Angell died Friday of heart failure, according to The New Yorker.

“No one lives forever, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that Roger had a good shot at it,” New Yorker Editor David Remnick wrote Friday. “Like the rest of us, he suffered pain and loss and doubt, but he usually kept the blues at bay, always looking forward; he kept writing, reading, memorizing new poems, forming new relationships.”

Heir to and upholder of The New Yorker’s earliest days, Angell was the son of founding fiction editor Katharine White and stepson of longtime staff writer E.B. White. He was first published in the magazine in his 20s, during World War II, and was still contributing in his 90s, an improbably trim and youthful man who enjoyed tennis and vodka martinis and regarded his life as “sheltered by privilege and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck.”

Angell well lived up to the standards of his famous family. He was a past winner of the BBWAA Career Excellence Award, formerly the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, an honor previously given to Red Smith, Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon among others. He was the first winner of the prize who was not a member of the organization that votes for it, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

His editing alone was a lifetime achievement. Starting in the 1950s, when he inherited his mother’s job (and office), writers he worked with included John Updike, Ann Beattie, Donald Barthelme and Bobbie Ann Mason, some of whom endured numerous rejections before entering the special club of New Yorker authors. Angell himself acknowledged, unhappily, that even his work didn’t always make the cut.

“Unlike his colleagues, he is intensely competitive,” Brendan Gill wrote of Angell in Here at the New Yorker, a 1975 memoir. “Any challenge, mental or physical, exhilarates him.”

Angell’s New Yorker writings were compiled in several baseball books and in such publications as The Stone Arbor and Other Stories and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell, a collection of his humor pieces. He also edited Nothing But You: Love Stories From The New Yorker and for years wrote an annual Christmas poem for the magazine. At age 93, he completed one of his most highly praised essays, the deeply personal This Old Man, winner of a National Magazine Award.

“I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse,” he wrote. “The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.”

Angell was married three times, most recently to Margaret Moorman. He had three children.

Angell was born in New York in 1920 to Katharine and Ernest Angell, an attorney who became head of the American Civil Liberties Union. The New Yorker was founded five years later, with Katharine Angell as fiction editor and a young wit named Andy White (as E.B. White was known to his friends) contributing humor pieces.

His parents were gifted and strong, apparently too strong. “What a marriage that must have been,” Roger Angell wrote in Let Me Finish, a book of essays published in 2006, “stuffed with sex and brilliance and psychic murder, and imparting a lasting unease.” By 1929, his mother had married the gentler White and Angell would remember weekend visits to the apartment of his mother and her new husband, a place “full of laughing, chain-smoking young writers and artists from The New Yorker.”

In high school, he was so absorbed in literature and the literary life that for Christmas one year he asked for a book of A.E Housman’s poems, a top hat and a bottle of sherry. Stationed in Hawaii during World War II, Angell edited an Air Force magazine, and by 1944 had his first byline in The New Yorker. He was identified as Cpl. Roger Angell, author of the brief story Three Ladies in the Morning, and his first words to appear in the magazine were “The midtown hotel restaurant was almost empty at 11:30 in the morning.”

There were no signs, at least open ones, of family rivalry. White encouraged his stepson to write for the magazine and even recommended him to The New Yorker’s founder, Harold Ross, explaining that Angell “lacks practical experience but he has the goods.” Angell, meanwhile, wrote lovingly of his stepfather. In a 2005 New Yorker essay, he noted that they were close for almost 60 years and recalled that “the sense of home and informal attachment” he got from White’s writings was “even more powerful than it was for his other readers.”

Not everyone was charmed by Angell or by the White-Angell family connection at The New Yorker. Former staff writer Renata Adler alleged that Angell “established an overt, superficially jocular state of war with the rest of the magazine.” Grumbling about nepotism was not uncommon, and Tom Wolfe mocked his “cachet” at a magazine where his mother and stepfather were charter members. “It all locks, assured, into place,” Wolfe wrote.

Unlike White, known for the children’s classics Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, Angell never wrote a major novel. But he did enjoy a loyal following through his humor writing and his baseball essays, which placed him in the pantheon with both professional sports journalists and with Updike, James Thurber and other moonlighting literary writers. Like Updike, he didn’t alter his prose style for baseball, but demonstrated how well the game was suited for a life of the mind.

“Baseball is not life itself, although the resemblance keeps coming up,” Angell wrote in La Vida, a 1987 essay. “It’s probably a good idea to keep the two sorted out, but old fans, if they’re anything like me, can’t help noticing how cunningly our game replicates a larger schedule, with its beguiling April optimism; the cheerful roughhouse of June; the grinding, serious, unending (surely) business of midsummer; the September settling of accounts … and then the abrupt running-down of autumn, when we wish for — almost demand — a prolonged and glittering final adventure just before the curtain.”

Angell began covering baseball in the early 1960s, when The New Yorker was seeking to expand its readership. Over the following decades, he wrote definitive profiles of players ranging from Hall of Famer Bob Gibson to the fallen Pittsburgh Pirates star Steve Blass and had his say on everything from the verbosity of manager Casey Stengel (“a walking pantheon of evocations”) to the wonders of Derek Jeter (“imperturbably brilliant”). He was born the year before the New York Yankees won their first World Series and his baseball memories spanned from the prime of Babe Ruth to such 21st century stars as Jeter, Mike Trout and Albert Pujols.
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While President Joe Biden travels in Asia, his administration is scrambling to salvage next month’s summit focused on Latin America.

The Summit of the Americas, which the United States is hosting for the first time since the inaugural event in 1994, has risked collapsing over concerns about the guest list. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has threatened to boycott if Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua aren’t included. Unlike Washington, which considers the three autocratic governments as pariahs, Mexico’s leftist leader maintains regular ties with them.

A hollow summit would undermine efforts by the U.S. to reassert its influence in Latin America when China is making inroads and concerns grow that democracy is backsliding in the region.

Now Biden is considering inviting a Cuban representative to attend the summit as an observer, according to a U.S. official who declined to be identified while speaking about sensitive deliberations. It’s unclear if Cuba would accept the invitation — which would be extended to someone in the foreign ministry, not the foreign minister himself — and whether that would assuage López Obrador’s concerns.

López Obrador reiterated Friday that he “wants everyone to be invited,” but indicated that he was hopeful about reaching a resolution, adding that “we have a lot of confidence in President Biden, and he respects us.”

Even if López Obrador attends, there could still be a notable absence in Los Angeles: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who leads Latin America’s most populous country, hasn’t said whether he’ll attend.

The uncertainty is a sign of chaotic planning for the summit, which is scheduled to take place in a little more than two weeks in Los Angeles. Normally, gatherings for heads of state are organized long in advance, with clear agendas and guest lists.

“There’s no excuse that they didn’t have enough time,” said Ryan Berg, a senior fellow in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is our chance to set a regional agenda. It’s a great opportunity. And I’m afraid we’re not going to take it.”

The National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment. Ned Price, speaking for the U.S. State Department, said the first wave of invitations was sent out Thursday, but there could be additions. He declined to say who had gotten invitations.

He said speculation about who was attending was “understandable,” noting that Biden will be the first U.S. president to attend the summit since 2015, when President Barack Obama went to Panama.

President Donald Trump skipped the next summit in Peru in 2018, sending Vice President Mike Pence in his place.

“Our agenda is to focus on working together when it comes to the core challenges that face our hemisphere,” Price said, including migration, climate change and the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

Cuba’s participation is often a controversial issue for the summit, which has been held every few years and includes countries from Canada to Chile. The island nation was not invited to the first gathering in Miami, but Obama made headlines by shaking hands with Cuban President Raul Castro in Panama.

Questions about Biden’s approach to Latin America are piling up when his attention has been elsewhere. He’s taken a lead in responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, helping to forge an international coalition to punish Moscow with sanctions and arm Kyiv with new weapons.

Biden is also trying to refocus U.S. foreign policy on Asia, where he views the rising power of China as the country’s foremost long-term challenge. He’s currently on his first trip to the continent as president, visiting South Korea and Japan.

Berg argued that neglecting Latin America could undermine Biden’s goals, since China has been trying to make inroads in the region.

“It’s always been difficult for Latin America to get its due,” he said. “But we’re pretty close to being in a geopolitical situation where Latin America moves from a strategic asset for us to a strategic liability.”

Instead of putting the finishing touches on the schedule for the Summit of the Americas, administration officials have been racing to ensure it doesn’t devolve into an embarrassment.

Chris Dodd, a former U.S. senator from Connecticut chosen by Biden as a special adviser for the summit, spent two hours on Zoom with López Obrador this week.

There’s also been a steady drip of announcements adjusting U.S. policies toward the region.

For example, the U.S. is moving to ease some economic sanctions on Venezuela.

In addition, administration officials said they would loosen restrictions on U.S. travel to Cuba and allow Cuban immigrants to send more money back to people on the island.

The discussion about Cuba’s potential participation in Los Angeles reflects a difficult diplomatic and political balancing act.

Biden faces pressure to invite Cuba from his counterparts in the region. In addition to López Obrador, Bolivia’s President Luis Arce has threatened to skip the summit.

But Biden risks domestic backlash if Cuba is included, and not just from Republicans. Sen. Robert Menendez, a Cuban American Democrat from New Jersey who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is an outspoken critic of the Cuban government.
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A federal judge on Friday ruled that a pandemic-related public health order must continue, allowing the federal government to turn away migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, including those seeking asylum.

U.S. District Judge Robert Summerhays of Louisiana sided with the 24 Republican-led states that sued the federal government to keep the guidelines in place. He said the states had established a “significant threat of injury” that lifting the order would have on them.

“The record also includes evidence supporting the Plaintiff States’ position that such an increase in border crossings will increase their costs for healthcare reimbursements and education services,” Summerhays wrote. “These costs are not recoverable.”

The judge’s ruling likely means that the Title 42 restrictions won’t end Monday. The Biden administration can appeal, but the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Louisiana, has ruled against the administration on several policies.

Title 42 is a health policy, part of the Public Health Service Act of 1944, that gives authorization to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to put in place measures to stop the spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States.

The policy was imposed in March 2020 under the Trump administration at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has denied migrants a chance to request asylum under U.S. law and international treaty on public health grounds.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in April that it would terminate the Title 42 order on May 23 because it deemed it “no longer necessary” as COVID-19 cases decreased and as vaccines became widely available. ((https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0401-title-42.html))

After the CDC announcement, Louisiana, Arizona, Missouri and 21 other states sought to bar the administration from rescinding the Title 42 order.

 

Republican-led states argued in court that the Biden administration should have gone through a formal notice and comment-taking process to end the Title 42 policy, even though the CDC under the Trump administration had said it could stop enforcing the policy at any moment.

In April, migrant encounters at the southern border led to about 97,000 migrant expulsions. Under Title 42 U.S. border officials may quickly expel migrants to Mexico or their home countries without processing their asylum claims.

According to U.S. government data, migrants have been expelled about 2 million times since Title 42 was put in place in 2020.

Immigration advocates have often criticized the U.S. use of Title 42 as a deterrence policy, saying it has harmed those seeking safety at the southern border.

“It is a failed policy no matter how you look at it, and keeping Title 42 in place is basically a guarantee of continued chaos, high repeat crossings, and continued inability to actively make the changes we need to make to our asylum system,” according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.
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During the mayhem of his evacuation flight from Kabul last year, Sultan Ahmad was separated from his wife and his elderly mother.

“It was so chaotic, and women couldn’t get through to the airport,” Ahmad said, recalling events of August, when thousands of fearful Afghans rushed to Kabul airport to board U.S. military planes.

Over the past several months, as he received settlement assistance in the state of Virginia, Ahmad asked almost everyone for assistance to reunite his family with him.

“I fear for their safety and well-being in Afghanistan,” the young Afghan man told VOA as he spoke about his wife and mother.

Their immediate reunification appears unlikely, if not impossible, partly because of Ahmad’s temporary status in the U.S. and also because evacuation and resettlement programs for Afghans still remaining in Afghanistan have nearly stalled, according to refugee support organizations.

Last year, the U.S. government brought tens of thousands of Afghans to the U.S., most of them lacking travel documents, and offered them humanitarian paroles.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security started a Temporary Protected Status registering process for Afghan evacuees.

“To be eligible for TPS under the Afghanistan designation, individuals must demonstrate their continuous residence in the United States since March 15, 2022, and continuous physical presence in the United States since May 20, 2022,” DHS said in a statement.

About 72,500 Afghan evacuees may be eligible for the TPS registration, the statement added.

The DHS announcement came days after the U.S. House of Representatives dropped a provision in the Ukraine support bill that sought a legal pathway for Afghan evacuees to become permanent residents. On Thursday, the Senate approved the bill without the Afghan provision.

Dwindling support?

Congress often puts changes into or rejects parts or all of a proposed bill.

Lawmakers’ decision to remove the Afghan settlement provision from the Ukraine support bill, however, can also be a sign of eroding bipartisan support for Afghan evacuees, some advocates say.

“Unfortunately, it seems that the same rhetoric we hear about immigrants, any kind of immigrants, is what we’re hearing about Afghans here, despite them having stood with us for years and years,” Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and founder of AfghanEvac, an umbrella organization supporting Afghan evacuees, told VOA.

The provision might have been dropped because it could be perceived as unrelated to the Ukraine support bill, which specifically asked for funding for the Ukraine’s resistance against the Russian invasion, said Robert Law, director of regulatory affairs policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Last week, when asked what alternate avenues would be explored for the eventual settlement of Afghan evacuees, Jen Psaki, former White House press secretary, said, “We have been having conversations with congressional leadership about this — they are ongoing — on the best path forward for this and other priorities that were not included in the package.”

But with the White House focused on the war in Ukraine and the lawmakers facing midterm elections in the next few months, experts say neither side will be interested in undertaking a new immigration bill for the Afghans.

“I think the likely outcome for the next couple of years is going to be a continuation of the temporary parole,” Law told VOA.

Since many of the Afghan evacuees do not fall under the established immigration programs such as the Special Immigration Visa, Congress will need to approve a new legal pathway for their permanent settlement.

“Our immigration laws, as they are currently structured, do not accommodate this type of population,” said Law, adding that only those Afghans who have come to the U.S. through SIV or refugee programs “as defined by the law” have a path for permanent settlement.

Thousands wait

U.S. officials have said Afghan nationals who qualify under the SIV program or whose life is at risk in Afghanistan because of their affiliation with the U.S. before the Taliban seized power will be helped to migrate to the U.S.

“We’ve worked intensely to evacuate and relocate Afghans who worked alongside us and are at particular risk of reprisal. We’ve gotten many out, but many are still there. We will keep working to help them. Our commitment to them has no deadline,” U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken said August 30, when announcing the end of evacuation flights from Kabul.

It’s unclear how many Afghans will be assisted to migrate to the U.S. under the SIV and a Priority-2 program in the future, but Afghans have reportedly submitted more than 45,000 applications for humanitarian parole entry into the U.S.

“The SIV program and P2 have been stalled, and we’re also concerned for those Afghans who do not have a history of working with the U.S. government and may not be eligible for SIV or P2, including the 45,000-plus Afghans who have pursued humanitarian parole,” Laila Ayub, an immigration attorney and a coordinator with Afghan Network of Advocacy and Resources, told VOA.

Like other Afghans who want to migrate to the U.S., Sultan Ahmad’s wife and mother will need to travel to a third country and submit their applications. Their wait will be long because tens of thousands of applicants are already ahead in the line in neighboring Pakistan, and it’s not clear if they will ever be issued visas.
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