At a news briefing Monday, Sullivan asserted that not a single such visa has been processed by the Trump administration since March 2020. That comment jumped out at us because a homeland security adviser to former vice president Mike Pence had charged that the Trump administration, specifically immigration hawk Stephen Miller, sought restrictions on the program — a claim Miller has denied.
State Department reports show that hundreds of SIVs were processed in the last nine months of the Trump administration, though at a much slower rate. The White House says Sullivan misspoke — that he meant to refer to interviews. That’s a line also offered by the State Department on Aug. 20: “When we took office, not a single SIV interview had been conducted since March of 2020.”
But that may not be accurate either.
The quarterly reports filed on the State Department website show that a trickle of SIVs was approved in the first few months after March 2020 — after the global coronavirus pandemic struck — and then slowly regained steam in the second half of the year.
The total government processing time crept up to 996 calendar days in the last quarter of Donald Trump’s presidency — almost three years.
“On March 20, 2020, the Department of State temporarily suspended routine visa services at all U.S. embassies and consulates due to the global COVID-9 pandemic,” one of the quarterly reports notes. “Embassies and consulates continued to provide emergency and mission critical visa services, which included SIV services, where possible. However, the limited staffing as well as local safety conditions directly related to the COVID-9 pandemic impacted the number of SIV visa application interview appointments and issuances and increased processing times during this quarter.”
In all three reports, the number of people interviewed for the visas was listed as zero — in Kabul. But the reports show two Afghans were scheduled to be interviewed during the June-September period and nine were scheduled to be interviewed in October-December, apparently outside Afghanistan, according to the reports.
“There were relatively few interviews this quarter because U.S. Embassy Kabul was closed for in-person visa services due to the prevalence of COVID-19 in Afghanistan,” said the report for the quarter that ended in December. “In all nine cases, the applicants requested to have their interview conducted at an alternate post.”
The State Department was unable to immediately tell The Fact Checker whether the interviews actually took place. But the reports call into question the previous claim that “not a single interview had been conducted” in the last nine months of the Trump administration.
“U.S. Embassy Kabul reopened in-person immigrant visa services in February of 2021 following the suspension of visa services due to the global COVID-19 pandemic,” said the report covering the first quarter of the Biden administration. “This quarter, the U.S. Embassy Kabul scheduled 131 applicants whose interviews had been cancelled in March and April 2020 when the Embassy suspended in-person visa operations due to COVID-19.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price said in May: “We approved a temporary increase in consular staffing at our embassy in Kabul in order to conduct interviews and process visa applications.”
The coronavirus-related delays have led to a traffic jam of visas.
“Only 16,000 Afghan SIVs have been issued since 2014 despite the availability of 26,500 total authorized visas during that time,” said the International Rescue Committee. “There are more than 18,000 applications in the current pipeline, impacting a potential total of 53,000 individuals including family members.”
During the Trump administration, according to the Congressional Research Service, 2,134 Afghan interpreters and family members were admitted in 2017, 524 in 2018, 248 in 2019 and 98 in 2020. As for former U.S. government workers, 16,170 principals and dependents were admitted in 2017, 7,234 in 2018, 9,741 in 2019 and 7,823 in 2020. (Note: These are fiscal years, so the numbers for 2017 include three months of the Obama administration.)
Last week, Price told reporters: “We were processing more than 800 visas per week.”
The Pinocchio Test
As regular readers know, we tend not to award Pinocchios when officials admit error. Sullivan is rather busy these days and probably sleep deprived. A slip of the tongue is easily understood.
Nevertheless, the White House has yet to correct the transcript, noting the mistake. For the historical record, this is important. Mistakes in transcripts can live on forever, as former president Bill Clinton discovered with one error that was corrected by the White House immediately — but not in the transcript. So we would expect this error to be corrected in the official transcript before it is repeated.
Moreover, it appears the sweeping claim that no interviews were conducted at all in the final months of the Trump administration may not be correct either. Nine Afghans appear to have had interviews outside Kabul. Obviously that is a very small number — the result of the pandemic, not necessarily Trump administration malfeasance. But official government reports suggest the administration’s language is too sweeping.
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