Speech #1140109941

President. I am thankful to my colleague from Arizona. I am pleased to be here on the floor because in a few minutes I am going to be offering a motion to instruct the conferees for the NDAA to extend the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Program and to authorize additional visas for deserving applicants. For those of us who remember the debates we had on the floor during the NDAA. we will remember that we had come to an agreement. The opponents of this program had agreed with JOHN MCCAIN and me that we needed to keep the promises we had made to so many of those Afghan interpreters who made a lifeanddeath difference in helping our service men and women on the ground in Afghanistan as they fought the Taliban. This is a program that Senator MCCAIN and I have worked on for several years. We have been successful in previous years in getting this extension and keeping the wordthe promise we made to those Afghan interpreters and keeping the word of the American Government that we are going to help those who helped us. Yet we go into this NDAA conference without an extension of the Special Immigrant Visa Program. Without congressional action. the Afghan SIV Program will largely sunset around December. It will leave thousands of Afghans who stood alongside our men and women and other government personnel at severe risk. I talked to a woman this morning who told me the story of an Afghan interpreter who just arrived in the United States last night. She said he had been waiting 3 years to get his special immigrant visa. During that time. he was so worried about his family that he slept in another room at night when he went to bed so that if the Taliban found them. they would kill only him and not the rest of his family. This country owes a great debt to the Afghans who provided essential assistance to our mission in Afghanistan. the thousands of brave men and women who. like this man who just arrived in the United States. put themselves and their families at risk to help our soldiers and our diplomats accomplish their mission and return home safely.