About Us
Project ANAR (the Afghan Network for Advocacy and Resources) is an Afghan community immigration justice organization formed and led by Afghan American women, in partnership with other immigration lawyers, that focuses on legal services, community education, and advocacy and engagement. Project ANAR’s objectives include obtaining permanent status for Afghans in the U.S., advocating for the expansion of pathways for those seeking refuge, and seeking an end to the systems that displace our community. Project ANAR works primarily in the Bay Area, California and in the DMV region, but also engages in national level advocacy and legal services coalition work.
Project ANAR is fiscally sponsored by Pangea Legal Services, a nonprofit immigration legal services organization serving communities in the Bay Area, California.
Our Work
Since launching last summer as an emergency response effort focused on assisting Afghans with completing humanitarian parole applications for their loved ones, Project ANAR has been laying the groundwork to more sustainably assist the Afghan community in the U.S. over the next two years with pressing immigration legal needs.
Our team provides technical assistance and support to our own volunteers as well as other practitioners. We organize legal workshops and clinics, and offer Know Your Rights and information sessions to Afghans and those who serve them. We assist Afghans who arrived through the evacuation as well as those forced to cross the Southern border. In addition to our direct partnerships with community, immigration, resettlement, and human rights organizations, our team has both engaged in and taken on leadership roles within coalition spaces related to Afghan resettlement and evacuation.
In addition to legal services, we made waves exposing the government’s disparate treatment of Afghan and Ukrainian war refugees, advocating for policy change, and working in coalitions to advance the rights of Afghans seeking a pathway to protection and family reunification. Project ANAR has led national advocacy efforts to put pressure on the U.S. government to process Humanitarian Parole applications and create a pathway for vulnerable Afghans. In addition to a series of letters sent to the administration and key members of Congress, signed by more than 200 organizations, Project ANAR has held public demonstrations, a Congressional briefing, and months of closed-door engagement with agency officials. Alongside other Afghan American community organizations, we filed an amicus brief in federal court through the Center for Constitutional Rights. Our efforts have been covered in national and local media, including PBS, Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera, and Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Background
In August 2021, as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was underway, Afghans scrambled to equip themselves and their loved ones with immigration resources that the U.S. government failed to provide. For many, that included basic information about the immigration pathways that exist for those who have been displaced and refugees whose situations suddenly became more urgent.
Because most efforts related to Afghans are focused on U.S.-allied or U.S.-affiliated individuals, the Afghans leading this project saw a direct and urgent need to file U.S. humanitarian parole applications as their only option to ensure the safety of their loved ones. Given decades of Afghans being inconsistently viewed as worthy of refuge, and years of erosion of the refugee system, humanitarian parole was one of the only pathways available to Afghans urgently seeking refuge.
Afghan lawyers and organizers, together with immigration lawyers from Centro Legal de la Raza and Pangea Legal Services, coordinated emergency response pro bono legal assistance efforts to train volunteer lawyers in a matter of days, and have since paired hundreds of Afghans directly with pro bono lawyers. We distributed thousands of dollars in filing fee assistance, and viewed our humanitarian parole project through the lens of mutual aid. We then began to—and continue to—push back on the government’s abandonment of Afghan Humanitarian Parole seekers and all those seeking refuge and family reunification in the U.S.
We are Project ANAR.
ANAR is an acronym for “Afghan Network for Advocacy and Resources” and also means “pomegranate,” afghanistan’s national fruit.