Sultan's family needs your help
We are fundraising to help Sultan and his family as they wait for a decision from the USA on their visa to resettle here. Sultan is one of the countless cases Kirk pushed with the State Dept. His story is both devastating and infuriating. We're hoping to raise funds to help him sustain his family and get them to safety while hopefully getting seats on one of the Operation Allies Refuge planes very soon.
**100% of donations will go to Sultan and his family.
As Kirk stated in his piece in The New Yorker , Sultan started working for the U.S. military and U.S.A.I.D. in the early days of the war, in 2002. After surviving an I.E.D. attack in 2004 and a targeted assassination by the Taliban in 2007 that killed his brother, who had a newborn, Sultan took responsibility for the baby alongside his own five children, and returned to work with the Americans. In 2010, he applied for a U.S. visa, but, when he went in for his interview, seventeen months later, things went south immediately. Within minutes, the polygraph examiner’s translator was struggling to convey a detail about Sultan’s work. When Sultan interjected in fluent English, the examiner grew furious, ordering him to answer in Pashto. At one point, the examiner exclaimed “This is not my job!” before telling Sultan that he’d failed the polygraph test.
Two months later, his petition was rejected. He filed a request for reconsideration, submitting a raft of recommendation letters from American aid workers, Foreign Service officers, and soldiers vouching for him, but was rejected. He submitted an appeal, then another, and was rejected each time. For the entire decade that he’s been trying to get a visa, he has continued to work on U.S. government-funded programs; his current job will end when the funding runs out in September. “I don’t regret what I have been doing. . . . but, in return, I receive such inhuman behavior from the robotic people in the system,” he said. Sultan has been working for the Americans for eighteen years—making him arguably one of the longest-serving local employees in the entire war on terror—but there is almost certainly no seat for him on any of the planes