[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 105 (Wednesday, June 18, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Page S3455]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                    Detention of Afghan Interpreter

  Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I have come to the floor, briefly, to talk 
about two subjects.
  One relates to a situation that I have been updated on of a gentleman 
who has been detained by ICE out in California, and I want to talk a 
little bit about it. We have to go back to ``Retrograde.''
  When we were leaving Afghanistan several years ago, my office spent a 
lot of time working with various nonprofits and veterans' advocacy 
organizations to do our very best to get people out of Afghanistan who 
had served alongside U.S. servicemembers, and we met with a lot of 
success. Thank God for former special operators and others who were 
outside of the boundary. We were literally in a network of coordinating 
the positioning of families to get to the Kabul Airport--HKIA they call 
it. It was to get them to a specific gate and get them out, them and 
their families.
  Why were we doing that?
  It was because the people who helped special operators and forces in 
Afghanistan had marks on them. They would be murdered if they were 
found by the Taliban for supporting and working alongside American 
citizens, which they did, and many of them lost their lives.
  OK. I just became informed over the past day about the detention of a 
gentleman who had worked for the military as an interpreter, I think, 
for 3 years directly and then had worked with a contractor. 
Unfortunately, he was not one of the ones who got out. He was in 
northern Afghanistan at the time. He was not one of the ones who was 
fortunate enough to get out before the Taliban was allowed to overrun 
Kabul and subsequently murder and kill a number of people who had 
worked alongside Americans for many years.
  Well, it turns out this gentleman was in Afghanistan, as was his 
brother, and they had become targets because they knew that they were 
working alongside American servicemembers. They murdered his brother, 
so he decided to flee from Afghanistan to Iran, which was not a 
particularly friendly territory. Think about that. He was willing to go 
to Iran because it was a safer place to be than in Afghanistan, and 
then he subsequently got a humanitarian visa in Brazil.
  He did find his way to the United States. Unfortunately, he did so 
illegally. Instead of being in a safe third country, he did come here. 
He did violate our immigration laws, but he also stood alongside 
American servicemembers and was getting out of a horrible situation 
where, I think, anyone--everyone--would agree that he needed to get out 
of Afghanistan. I believe he used the CBP One app to try to apply for 
asylum, and he was paroled here under the Biden administration--and he 
did abuse the parole system while he was in office. At the end of the 
day, we have got a guy who served alongside American soldiers, who, 
undoubtedly, saved American lives in the process, and who was in this 
country illegally but who is now in a detention center in California.
  All I am trying to say, folks, is I want you to obey our laws. The 
majority of the time, if you come to this country illegally, then I 
want you to potentially be deported, but you can't cast everybody in 
that same light. He was also trying to apply for a special immigrant 
visa under the interpreter program.
  So all I am saying is things are moving quickly. It just disturbs me 
that we have got somebody in detention who served, by all accounts, 
admirably alongside American servicemen, and he probably saved their 
lives because those interpreters were embedded in the community. I 
think we owe it to this person to get him out of detention and into 
some status to determine what country he should go to. I am not 
necessarily arguing that he should stay in the United States, but I am 
arguing that he shouldn't be in detention in California after his 
service, indirectly and directly, to our country.
  That is all I have to say on that matter, but we are going to be 
tracking it very closely, and I thought it was important to say that on 
the floor.