Nick Schifrin:
Two hundred and twenty-one Special Immigrant Visa applicants, and that includes 70 children, arrived via this bus at Fort Lee in Virginia.
They will be staying at facilities, including hotels, on the base prepared by the military as they complete their visa applications, which is expected to last about a week. And these are people at the very end of a 14-step, years-long process.
And they are a fraction of the 5,000 Special Immigrant Visas issued by U.S. Embassy Kabul this year and the tens of thousands of Afghan family members who are in this SIV pipeline.
And advocate say this evacuation is a matter of life and death. Remember that these people worked with the U.S. military, they worked on the front lines, risking their lives for the U.S. over the last 20 years. They have been targeted, threatened and even killed in some cases by the Taliban.
And some national security experts also say that, if the U.S. doesn’t evacuate them, prospective U.S. partners in future wars won’t trust that the U.S. can protect them either.