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Washington, D.C. – House Foreign Affairs Committee Lead Republican has released the following statement on President Biden’s announcement of a Priority 2 (P-2) program for a select group of Afghans under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) . This allows eligible Afghans to apply for refugee status through an employer referral. However, processing of that application will only take place once the applicant makes it out of Afghanistan without support from the United States, despite the fact the Taliban has taken control of several border crossings and many commercial flights have been grounded. The move comes after President Biden dragged his feet for months to come up with a solution for how to help our partners who assisted the United States mission in Afghanistan. Rep. McCaul has been one of the Administration’s most vocal critics on their failure to properly plan for the fallout the withdrawal from Afghanistan will cause, and has been calling on them for months to evacuate those Afghans who risked their lives to help the United States. 

“Any opportunity to help the people who risked their lives to support the United States should be taken. But this should not be perceived as a success story for the Biden Administration. President Biden created additional risk for our Afghan partners by failing to plan for the problems that everyone knew would arise from this ill-timed and haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan. Now, they are leaning on this P-2 program they are scrambling to implement, which leaves our partners on their own to get out of the deteriorating security environment Biden accelerated.

“On top of my concerns about this P-2 program, we still have no announced agreements with third countries to house the next tranche of SIV applicants. This has been an utter failure on the part of President Biden and he will own the dire consequences that comes from it.”