Mrs. Mohammed and her new husband were attacked three times when they rushed to Baghdad from Tikrit, Iraq in 2014 — once with a bomb and twice with gunfire.

They decided to move to Tikrit after they got married earlier that year, but just as they settled into their new home, ISIS took over the small city along the Tigris River, north of Iraq’s capital.

“We left everything behind — just took whatever papers we needed, turned on the car and left,” Mohammed, who asked the Houston Chronicle not to release her first name for safety concerns, recalled while sitting in her Houston apartment.

Once they arrived in their hometown, the newlyweds decided it was time to leave.

As a former civil engineer on a U.S. military project, Mohammed, 36, qualified for and eventually received a special immigrant visa (SIV), designated for people who worked with the U.S. military in war zones, most commonly as interpreters. Most SIVs today are granted to Afghans, with a few still being granted to Iraqis.

There are tens of thousands of people, like Mohammed, who work with the U.S. military during wars in their home countries, putting their lives and their family’s lives in grave danger and forcing them to sometimes need to flee as a result. But the numbers of special immigrant visa granted have been slashed in half nationwide between fiscal years 2017 and 2018 — a drop advocates say is an affront to the service those who qualify have provided to the U.S.

Despite SIVs’ loyalty and sacrifice, their ability to find safety in the U.S. has been hindered by an increasingly back-logged and arduous visa application process.

“Many of these people have served shoulder-to-shoulder literally in the trenches with U.S. soldiers,” said Betsy Fisher, policy director at The International Refugee Assistance Project. “They’re a group of people who not just stand to contribute, but who have already sacrificed for the U.S.”

SIV arrivals across the nation fluctuated throughout 2017, with the biggest drop going from roughly 2,000 in November to 1,000 in December. In December of this year, just 583 SIV holders entered the country.

In Texas, the number of Afghan SIV arrivals dropped by 800 between fiscal years 2017 and 2018. And while 16,000 SIVs were granted to Afghans in fiscal year 2017 out of roughly 19,700 applications, only 7,200 were granted in fiscal year 2018.(The number of applications has not been published yet.)

This is yet another instance of lower numbers of refugees and immigrants to the U.S. in the Trump era.

When Trump took office in 2017, he slashed the ceiling of refugees allowed from 110,000 during Obama’s final year in office to 50,000. The cap dropped to 45,000 for fiscal year 2018 — but only 22,491 refugees arrived, with about 1,500 coming to Texas, according to the State Department. The administration proposed a 30,000 ceiling for fiscal year 2019, which is expected to lower the number of refugee arrivals even more.

In June, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote an unprecedented order to disqualify those fleeing domestic and gang-based violence for asylum in the U.S., a ruling lawyers say violates asylum law. In August, the number of families arrested for crossing the southern border illegally jumped 38 percent. And in October, Trump vowed to sign an executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants in the United States illegally, even though most analysts say it would violate the Constitution and immediately be tied up in lawsuits that likely would ultimately fail.

Saving missions and lives

The only reason Matt Zeller is here today, he says, is because of Janis Shinwari, the Afghan interpreter he worked with while serving as a first lieutenant in the Afghanistan War.

While exchanging crossfire with Taliban fighters one day in April 2008, two men took aim at Zeller. Shinwari then pushed the U.S. soldiers to the ground and shot at the two Taliban fighters trying to kill him.

“I owe him a life debt,” said Zeller, who went on to found a nonprofit organization to help SIVs resettle in the U.S. called No One Left Behind.

But Shinwari’s service nearly cost him his life — the Taliban started hunting down Shinwari and his family and had put bounties on their heads. So Zeller sponsored Shinwari for an SIV in 2009, the year the program started. Four years later, Shinwari and his family made it to the U.S. safely.

“This has been a very public promise that has been made to these people for a decade,” Zeller said. “If we fail to keep this promise, they’re going to be murdered by the people we asked them to help us fight against.”

Those who qualify for SIVs are not only literal lifesavers, like Shinwari, but also help U.S. missions to be more productive.

Benjamin Baran, a professor at Cleveland State University and commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve, said Afghan interpreters “were indispensable to our mission there and getting stuff done” when he was adviser to the Afghan National Police in 2013. It wasn’t just about the linguistic knowledge, Baran said, but also the cultural knowledge and local connections the made the difference.

And having a local in the roles the military is attempting to fill, as opposed to deploying an active U.S. military member, is more cost efficient, according to Fisher. While deploying a U.S. military member would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, “SIVs are being paid hundreds of dollars a month maybe,” she said.

‘Killing the program’

Mohammed and her husband started preparing all their documents for the visa application: verification that she worked with the U.S. military for at least one, original and translated copies of birth certificates, passports and marriage licenses, a statement on the threats she faces because of her involvement with the U.S. and a letter of recommendation from a U.S. military member she worked with.

Mohammed and her husband received their visas in January 2017, after a two-year wait. That’s well more than the nine months that the application process is supposed to occur in, according to a 2013 Congressional amendment to the SIV programs.

The International Refugee Assistance Project filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 2015 and again in June of this year for its continuously dragged out application process, arguing that it’s putting the lives of SIVs in danger. There are more than 17,000 Afghans in the pipeline, according to a statistic published in The Atlantic in July.

“While we have always seen delays in access of statutes, the timelines have certainly gotten longer under the current administration,” Fisher said.

The extended timelines can be partially faulted to stricter requirements.

Last year, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sent out a notice to U.S. embassies around the world to tighten their screening for visa applications. Tillerson wrote that applicants must provide prior passport numbers, phone numbers over the past five years, and travel history, home addresses and jobs held over the last 15 years.

“Many Afghans can’t even read or write, they don’t have contracts that prove they rented a house in Kabul 15 years ago,” Zeller said. “This is purposely designed to prevent people from effectively making it through the program. The ramifications in process are there isn’t really an SIV program anymore.”

Mohammed ended up leaving for the U.S. in June 2017 — she and her husband decided to wait and see how Trump’s travel on Muslim-majority countries would play out.

But days before their planned trip, her father-in-law had a heart attack. Mohammed’s husband stayed behind to take care of his father, and urged his wife to go before the end of their six-month deadline to move to the U.S. He would have to go through the application process all over again — and Mohammed hasn’t seen him in the year and a half since.

For many SIVs, though, making it to the U.S. is just the first of many struggles.

‘Paying it forward’

Tears started rolling down Mohammed’s cheeks as soon as the pilot said, “Welcome to Houston.”

As the plane tires neared the tarmac in June 2017, Mohammed experienced an out-of-body feeling, as if her life were a movie.

“I was looking at Houston from the sky and wondering, ‘What’s waiting for me?’” she recalled. “‘What challenges will I have?’”

The biggest challenge she ended up facing, like many other SIVs, was finding a job.

Mohammed was a talented engineer, with 12 years of experience under her belt at the time. But she struggled with the American job application process — particularly resumes and cover letters.

“I know I’m qualified, but how am I going to show these people?” She wondered to herself while scrolling through job listings. “I have to tell them through paper, encourage them to pick up the phone and talk to me.”

She got a “survival job” as a floor helper at Banana Republic earning about $9 an hour as she continued her attempts to land her dream job, but her phone didn’t ring.

Then she was introduced to Upwardly Global — a nonprofit organization that works with mainly under- or unemployed immigrants and refugees to connect them to the workforce.

“We find that a lot of SIVs have skills, but employers don’t recognize them,” CEO Jina Krause-Vilmar said. “It’s so hard to value a degree from the University of Baghdad and understand how that compares to somebody with a degree from an American university.”

So Upwardly Global helps clients translate their skills and credentials, and also trains them on the cultural aspects of job searching in the U.S. — such as interviewing, resumes, cover letters, networking. They also work with employers to better understand the backgrounds of these candidates and build bridges.

The organization, which provides its services for free, has worked with 173 SIVs so far and thousands of other skilled immigrants and refugees. Krause-Vilmar said that on average, the SIVs were earning a $9,000 annual salary when they started with Upwardly Global, and ended up getting placed into jobs with an average $50,000 annual salary.

“This is a population that can and is meeting expectations for jobs in high demand, so they’re not taking jobs away from anybody,” Krause-Vilmar said. “We’re just creating a platform for them to compete.”

She added that SIVs, and other skilled immigrants and refugees, are not only essential to the U.S. economy by filling needed jobs, but also by “paying taxes, becoming consumers, so they really are paying it forward to the economy.”

The 915 people Upwardly Global served across the nation last year generated about $42 million in tax and consumer spending, she said.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services agrees, finding that refugees brought in $63 billion more revenue to federal, state and local governments than they cost between 2005 and 2014. In another study, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Migration Policy Institute found that refugee men were more likely to work than U.S.-born men, and refugee women were just as likely to work as their U.S.-born counterparts. And in Texas in 2015, refugee spending power totaled to more than $17 billion, according to New American Economy.

“These people are work-authorized. They come here legally through the SIV program because they have sacrificed for the U.S. military, at great risk to themselves and their families,” Krause-Vilmar said. “Our response is once they come here, they face barriers to being able to access the work force and integrate. Those barriers need to be addressed.”

Meanwhile, Mohammed secured a job as a field inspector for the Texas Department of Transportation after months of training with Upwardly Global, where her annual salary is nearly $40,000. She lets out a dreamy sigh and her face beams when she talks about her new career.

“Construction is my passion,” she said.

massarah.mikati@chron.com