Strolling the aisles at a Kohl’s department store near his home in Rochester, N.Y., Azizullah Sharifi spoke Pashto with his daughter Marwah as they picked through shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops for the summer. The father and daughter stopped to check their shopping cart, when a woman next to them muttered, “Speak [expletive] English” in a low growl. Once Sharifi realized she was talking to him, he quickly pushed his cart away without responding. But he wasn’t fast enough. Though she was only 7, Marwah recognized that the woman had “said something really bad.” “Just ignore her,” Sharifi told her. It was a drastic shift from the way he was treated in his home country of Afghanistan, where American service members, with whom he had worked closely, treated him with respect. Much of his experience in the United States has been positive, but sometimes, “you feel Islamophobia, the racism — not all people, but you can feel it,” Sharifi said.

Sharifi, who worked as an interpreter for American forces in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2014, is one of more than 48,600 Afghans who have been admitted to the United States through the Special Immigrant Visa (S.I.V.) program. Recognizing the incredible risks taken by Afghans like Sharifi who were helping the American-led coalition during the war, Congress passed a bill in 2009 to provide special visas to interpreters and civilians who had worked for at least one year — later changed to two years — for the American government and who could prove there were imminent threats on their lives. Similar legislation was enacted for Iraqi interpreters in 2008.

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More than 17,000 Afghans who have applied for the S.I.V. over the years are still waiting for an answer from the State Department as their applications crawl through the grueling vetting process. About 1,240 applicants were rejected in the first three quarters of this fiscal year, mostly for insufficient proof of employment by an American company or failure to provide evidence of the“faithful and valuable service” to American forces that the special visa requires. When applicants appeal, their application is moved to the bottom of the list, but half the initial denials are overturned. For those who receive a visa, the move to the United States raises a new set of problems, like finding employment, housing and a community that makes them feel welcome. While the State Department’s United States Refugee Admissions Program gives refugees funding for the first 90 days after arrival, people have to rely on their own resourcefulness and on nonprofit organizations for help acclimating to a new country and culture that’s vastly different from the one they fled.