![]() ![]() A Grand Island meatpacker brought in six families – 41 people total – to central Nebraska so the adult males could work in the plant. Some hiccups have resulted from well-meaning people trying to help new arrivals. More than half had to go into temporary housing, some for a significant period of time, Martin said. They must change to another status or face potential deportation. The vast majority came in under a humanitarian parole status that allowed them to stay for up to two years. Many Afghans arrived with their documentation in disarray – or no documentation at all. “It was the first time I had ever heard of Omaha,” he said. An immigration agent told him he was going to Omaha. Sadat and his wife wanted to go to Virginia, but Virginia had reached its limit of Afghans. Gratz)įor many, an arrival in Nebraska was a bureaucratic accident. Kubra Haidari, a case manager at the Refugee Empowerment Center (REC), right, mimes “stop” while teaching a class of refugee women from Afghanistan how to drive at the REC on Wednesday, April 27, 2022, in Omaha, Neb. “Every day we were working, from like early morning…till 12 o’clock at night,” she said. Kubra Haidari, a former Afghan refugee and current case manager for Omaha’s Refugee Empowerment Center, said chaos reigned from August until February. “In a normal world, that’s a very structured process.” “Because the airlift happened over a quick, two-week, period … there was very little time of actually very little structure around how those resettlement efforts would happen,” said Matt Martin, assistant vice president for refugee and immigrant programs at Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska. In the last nine months, following an abrupt pullout from Afghanistan by the Biden Administration, they have been forced to quickly swing into action. These agencies faced years where they were starved of federal funds and received almost no refugees because of Trump Administration policies that severely limited refugee numbers. So many arrived in such a short time that it overwhelmed local resettlement agencies. Those that came during the sudden Afghan influx faced confusion and chaos once they landed in Nebraska. “The passport department is crazy nowadays.” “Everybody is just trying to get out of Afghanistan because of the restrictions and poverty,” said Sayed Omar Sadat, 27, who fled Afghanistan because his wife worked in the U.S. People are still desperately trying to leave. Others fled because they could see no future under the Taliban. Some are educated professionals like Karimi, who fled because they were Taliban targets. As of last week, state officials say that 1,214 have resettled in Nebraska. Roughly 75,000 Afghans have come to the United States since then. The fall of Kabul late last summer spurred a mass exodus from Afghanistan. But he knows he will need to take a lot more English classes and haul many more boxes in Omaha before he steps behind the ivy walls in Massachusetts. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, something he dreamed of long before relocating to the United States. He wants to attend the prestigious John F. He wants to become a citizen and make something of himself here. A former government official in Afghanistan, Karimi fled the country as a refugee in August of 2021 when the Taliban took over. Mujtaba Karimi looks around while studying in Criss Library on campus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha on Monday, April 25, 2022, in Omaha, Neb. Now he works for Walmart, pushing forklifts loaded with boxes from trucks into the store. He once worked for his nation’s president. Today he works second shift and is up past midnight studying English. In Afghanistan he could leave work at 4 p.m. He takes English classes at the University of Nebraska at Omaha – today he’s much more comfortable with English than that perilous day in August.īut in other ways, it’s not so great.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |