The State Department asked a federal judge to vacate a court order to streamline its special immigrant visa (SIV) application process, citing chaos in Afghanistan as the reason for being unable to process a growing backlog of applicants.
The State Department’s request on May 24 comes in a dispute against a group called Afghan and Iraqi Allies, which sued the U.S. government in 2018 for taking an average of 2.5 years or longer to process SIVs—visas for eligible Afghan and Iraqi nationals who worked on behalf of the U.S. government in their home countries.
Afghan and Iraqi Allies—five anonymous Iraqi or Afghan nationals who led the class-action lawsuit—won a judgment in 2019, when a federal judge ordered the State Department to streamline the SIV process. State Department attorneys said on May 24 they are doing their best to comply with the 2019 court order, but that the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan complicated matters….