ANAR works toward immigrant justice through three pillars: community education, legal advocacy, and advocacy. We work both nationally, and on a local level with a focus on Northern California and the Washington, D.C. regions. ANAR builds power through a model of services to organizing: we democratize access to information about the immigration legal process, and impacted community members in turn volunteer to assist others and help build narrative and policy change. Our legal services are offered primarily through large scale pro bono and pro se services, with direct representation, know your rights services, and more with a particular focus on humanitarian pathways for protection, and family reunification. We complement and expand the work of traditional community-based organizations, resettlement, and legal services agencies.
ANAR launched in August 2021 as a grassroots pro bono legal services project, utilizing a mutual aid lens to connect community members in need with attorneys we trained to support Afghans in seeking family reunification and refuge for their loved ones. We quickly paired this work with multifaceted advocacy. In the months that followed, we shifted to assist Afghan asylum seekers and refugees reaching the U.S., particularly those in immigration detention and removal proceedings. We occupy a unique position as a community organization with immigration legal expertise. Project ANAR is fiscally sponsored by Pangea Legal Services, a nonprofit immigration legal services organization serving communities in the Bay Area, California.
Our History
In August 2021, as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was underway, Afghans, particularly those in diaspora in the U.S., 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 immediately raised and distributed over $200,000 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 Afghans and all those seeking refuge and family reunification in the U.S.
Read more about how we started in our 2022 report
We are Project ANAR
ANAR is an acronym for “Afghan Network for Advocacy and Resources” and also means “pomegranate,” a fruit for which the region is known.
