UC Davis Law Works to Assist At-Risk Afghans

By Carla Meyer 

Members of the UC Davis Law community are working diligently on behalf of Afghan nationals put at risk by the fundamentalist Taliban’s takeover of their country. 

Staff attorneys and students in UC Davis Law’s world-renowned Immigration Law Clinic have started filing applications for Afghans who might qualify for humanitarian parole. 

“Humanitarian parole is a mechanism under the law that allows a person to get a temporary travel document to come into the United States,” said Professor Holly Cooper, who directs the Immigration Law Clinic with Professor Amagda Pérez

Parole can be a stopgap measure for those who have not yet completed the long immigration process. In August, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas began using his parole authority to allow some of the thousands of Afghans evacuated to the United States during the pullout of U.S. forces to remain in the country legally.

The Immigration Law Clinic just helped draft parole applications for several family members in Afghanistan seeking to reunite with relatives in the U.S., Staff Attorney Monica Julian said. 

“The family has been directly attacked and threatened since the Taliban takeover due to one family member’s cooperation with the U.S. government and work in the civil service,” Julian said. The family is in hiding. 

Julian and clinic students worked last week for a different client whose family members had worked with the U.S. government. One had been “seriously physically assaulted since the takeover,” Julian said. 

Because of the threat facing these families, the clinic has requested expedited review of their applications. 

Northern California is a primary hub for Afghan immigrants in the United States. According to the Migration Policy Institute, Sacramento County holds the largest population of foreign-born Afghans of any U.S. county, followed by Fairfax County, Va., Alameda County and Contra Costa County. 

“We are getting calls all day long” at the clinic, Cooper said, primarily from people with relatives still in Afghanistan. “We are trying to address the need, but it is overwhelming in terms of the resources we have.” 

The clinic has discussed a potential partnership with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and received assistance from Stanford on parole applicant psychological evaluations. For now, the clinic handles cases mostly on its own, continuing the humanitarian parole work it initiated after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Encouraged by President Joe Biden’s more progressive stance on immigration – in contrast to former President Donald Trump’s hardline approach -- the clinic began using its humanitarian parole project to assist Afghans after the U.S. military started withdrawing troops.

The clinic has worked on behalf of at-risk Afghans for years as part of a project led by the law firm Reed Smith, Cooper’s former employer. Through this partnership, clinic attorneys and students first prepared parole applications for Haitians at risk after the 2010 earthquake. 

Cooper later visited refugee camps in Greece, interviewing displaced Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians and others for a mini tribunal weighing their potential return to Turkey. The Reed Smith project expanded to camps in Jordan, and over the past decade has resettled more than 300 survivors of sexual violence or torture.

Cooper returned in June to Greece, where “we are screening for the most severe cases of torture and sexual-based violence” as part of Lamp Lifeboat Ladder, Reed Smith’s public-private resettlement partnership with Canada. Clinical students have helped prepare parole applications throughout the clinic’s association with Reed Smith.

UC Davis Law Associate Dean for International Programs Beth Greenwood works with Scholars at Risk, an organization that provides sanctuary and assistance to scholars worldwide by arranging temporary research and teaching positions within its network. 

Greenwood has spoken to colleagues from other University of California campuses about their approach to assisting Afghan scholars and will be part of a Davis campus committee on the topic. The UC Davis Office of the Chancellor and Provost has committed to assisting an Afghan scholar and family members, and the law school could follow suit. 

UC Davis Law Professor Karima Bennoune, the U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, has been emphatic in urging the international community to assist at-risk Afghans, including artists and cultural workers. 

In an August press release from the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Bennoune warned of a “cultural disaster” in Afghanistan. Appearing on CNN in early September, Bennoune addressed the reported killing of singer Fawad Andarabi by the Taliban and the threat posed to other Afghan artists.  

On a recent episode of the UC Davis podcast The Backdrop, Bennoune discussed her personal efforts to help artists and cultural workers leave Afghanistan.  

Working with cultural partners, “we have tried everything we could think of … filled out all the forms, went from government to government,” Bennoune said. Although they had “some successes,” Bennoune reported, they have identified more than 800 artistic and cultural figures still in the country and “gravely at risk.” 

Known for its highly influential immigration law faculty, UC Davis Law is educating the next generation of attorneys who might play key roles in humanitarian crises like those now occurring in Afghanistan, at the U.S.-Mexico border, and in Haiti, which was rocked by another massive earthquake in August.

In addition to courses in immigration and refugee and asylum law, the law school will offer the Spring 2022 seminar Trauma Informed Lawyering, which should be of help to students who will work in refugee law. 

Dean Kevin R. Johnson, one of the nation’s foremost experts on immigration law, has written extensively about the Afghan situation on the ImmigrationProf Blog. On his Dean’s Blog, Johnson includes a helpful list of resources for Afghan nationals compiled by his colleague at Penn State, Professor Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia.  

UC Davis Global Affairs also has compiled a list of resources, for both the Afghan and Haitian communities. 

Primary Category

Tags