Yesterday, I wrote about Janis Shinwari, an Afghan who served as an interpreter for the U.S. Army for seven years, bravely and honorably, saving the lives of several American soldiers, including Lieutenant (now Captain) Matt Zeller. I heard about Shinwari and Zeller through Becca Heller of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project. There are thousands of cases of Iraqis and Afghans who risked their lives for the U.S., only to have their chance at an American visa endlessly delayed or denied. Shinwari’s story struck me as particularly unjust, because of his extraordinary record of service, and because he had actually received his visa a few weeks ago, only to have it revoked on Saturday, just after he had quit his job, sold all his possessions, and was preparing his family to start a new life in Virginia.

Shinwari and Zeller got nowhere when they tried to find out who or what had destroyed his hopes. It’s a maddening feature of these cases that life-changing determinations are made by unknown officials operating under the cloak of the empty but omnipotent phrase “national security.” No one is even sure which agency of the U.S. government has made the decision. Afghans (and Iraqis) are left to face death threats and despair in their own country without a clue as to the reason they’ve been left behind. It’s a little like being arrested and imprisoned without knowing the charge or ever appearing before a judge.

“I became very angry,” Shinwari told me by phone from Afghanistan on Monday. “I said, ‘Why this happened to me?’ I asked, ‘Who sent a wrong e-mail to the Embassy?’ ” His and Zeller’s suspicions fell on the Taliban. Shinwari is on a death list, and it wouldn’t have been hard for a Taliban to hear of his imminent departure and send an anonymous tip to the Embassy to sabotage him. I could not believe that this was the case.

Incredibly, though, it really would have been as easy as that. In Iraq and Afghanistan, security “hits” against locals working with the U.S. can be introduced into American intelligence databases in any number of ways: by a soldier mistyping someone’s name, by mistaken arrest, by confused identity, or by someone—American or local—wanting to settle a score. For example, an American contractor allegedly sexually harassed his female Iraqi employees and then fabricated derogatory information about the ones who rebuffed him to raise red flags on the security database. Even if a tip, anonymous or not, is thoroughly investigated—seldom the case—the “hit” is rarely expunged from the database but remains there, a permanent black mark. This is the operating procedure of a bureaucracy that is looking for any reason not to issue a visa to a friend of America, without ever having to say why.

Zeller is shaking every tree in the U.S. government to bring his friend’s fate to the attention of someone who can help. Now that it’s a matter of “national security” and has disappeared down the black hole of the intelligence agencies, that someone will probably have to work high up at the White House.

This is just one interpreter’s story. There are thousands of Iraqis and Afghans who earned the trust of their American counterparts under fire and whose visa applications are lost in bureaucratic limbo. Due to inaction in the Senate and ideological extremism in the House, it looks like the Iraqi Special Immigrant Visa program will die on schedule with the end of the fiscal year, at 11:59 P.M. on Monday, September 30th. That will leave unfilled the seventeen thousand visa slots that were mandated by Congress six years ago—a colossal failure of political will in the Bush and Obama Administrations. There’s a chance that the program will be revived in December through the National Defense Authorization Act, but at this point only a fool bets on Congress doing the right thing. The Afghan S.I.V. program is scheduled to end on September 30, 2014—and is on track to, again, leave thousands of visa slots unfilled. One of them should go to Janis Shinwari.

Photograph by Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty