“Lawyers at the nonprofit Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project work to secure visas for several hundred Afghan and Iraqi interpreters at a time. They say the approval process is complicated and lengthy, and spans several government agencies, but that applications are getting mired at the initial approval stage under the State Department.
“Over and over again, that’s where we saw people waiting for 18 months, two years,” said Katie Reisner, national policy director for the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, which has helped bring more than 1,800 Iraqis and Afghans to the U.S. in the past five years.”