In late April, Mahnaz and Ellie made their way down the East Coast to a small town outside Atlanta where they met up with four former Afghan female soldiers and a few former United States special operations soldiers. Together they hiked through the woods and ate s'mores, just doing "fun American things," Ellie said.

"This weekend we were just hanging out," Ellie said when she spoke to Law360 the following Monday.

Ellie and Mahnaz, an Afghan soldier who has immigrated to the United States following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban forces, are both engaged in an organization called Sisters of Service, which works to support female Afghan soldiers as they navigate the United States' immigration process.

As she is currently petitioning for asylum in the United States, Mahnaz has chosen to be identified by only her first name. Ellie, a U.S. service member, is identified by a pseudonym for job security and safety, as she continues to be on active duty.

In addition to meeting up socially for some much-needed downtime together, the organization's members are largely focused on asylum applications and resettlement assistance. Since launching the organization in August of last year, Ellie and her co-founder have been confronted with the challenges posed by the United States immigration process, as well as the difficulties associated with finding pro bono representation for the Afghan women the organization works to support.

"I would say in the last few months is when we really realized we can't wait on these backlogged systems. We now need to figure out asylum applications for these women as well," Ellie said. "And so here we have a group of Army females with no background in immigration asylum packets trying to figure out this system because it's just so backlogged and so confusing and there's so little hands-on help for the Afghans all across the United States right now."

Before the United States' withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer, special operations women involved in the military's Cultural Support Program worked alongside a tactical platoon composed of about 50 Afghan women with the aim of protecting women and children throughout the country during night missions.

Mahnaz became a Female Tactical Platoon commander in 2014 after she began working with the military around 2011. She remained in that position until the fall of Kabul.

Recognizing the danger faced by the women who were part of this platoon once the Taliban gained control of the country, Ellie and Ruthie, two special operations members who were on Cultural Support Teams, knew they had to do something to try to support Afghan women like Mahnaz. Ruthie wished to be identified only by her first name.

"As U.S. troops started withdrawing from Afghanistan, we came together as a loose network of U.S. women talking with these Afghan women and deciding we need to do something — these women are going to be extreme targets as Afghanistan falls to the Taliban," Ellie said.

In partnership with the Pentagon Federal Credit Union Foundation, Ellie and Ruthie founded Sisters of Service once it became apparent it was necessary to evacuate the women they fought alongside from their home country to the United States and help them navigate the notoriously complicated immigration process.

"Ruthie and I came together and decided that we need something more robust to keep up with this," Ellie said. "Like we are not legal experts, we are not immigration experts; we are just military women that really care about our Afghan sisters." 

When the initial evacuation was underway, Ellie and Ruthie worked to secure priority one status for the Afghan women they fought alongside to get on flights to the United States and resettle in the country as refugees.

Once in the U.S., women like Mahnaz found themselves scattered across the country in military bases, where they waited to be notified of their final resettlement locations. When Mahnaz first arrived in the country, she was first housed at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin for two months before she reached her final destination in Maryland with her nieces.

Mahnaz described living in the Army barracks in Wisconsin as challenging, saying the living conditions were crowded and cold, and many Afghans did not like the food. When she was told she'd be heading to Maryland, Mahnaz said she was able to feel happy again because she was leaving the resettlement camp and could start looking for a job and studying English.

In Maryland, Mahnaz faced another challenge with communication — or the lack of it — with her caseworker, who was working for a resettlement agency. Mahnaz said she believed the caseworker was eventually fired, and she was matched with someone new.

Ellie said many other women had issues receiving Social Security cards because they were either sent to the wrong location or to the wrong resettlement agency.

"These women just kept asking us like, hey, are we going to get deported? What's going to happen? There was little explanation to the Afghan refugees themselves of, this is how the process works," Ellie said.

When Ellie spoke with Law360 in April, only six of the 39 Afghan women the organization supports had resettlement agencies tell them they had connections to some kind of lawyer or some kind of process to help them with an asylum packet.

"It's pretty mind-boggling that we have to be so hands-on with this process to help when we have nearly 100,000 Afghans in the United States right now all facing the same issue," Ellie said.

Each of the 39 Afghan women Sisters of Service works with are paired with mostly female veterans. The organization also works to support the families that migrated to the U.S. with the Afghan women.

Besides aiding with asylum applications and searching for pathways to citizenship for the Afghan women, Sisters of Service provides English-language education and help with résumés and job applications. Many of the women are even hoping to join the military again, Ellie said, adding that Sisters of Service has focused on figuring out how to make that happen.

"Just knowing the typical pathway of a refugee having to start over in the United States, we knew we wanted these women to be able to reach their fullest potential again," Ellie said.

According to Mahnaz, two of the biggest challenges faced by Afghan refugees in the United States are the lack of clarity and options in regard to their immigration status and the absence of English language skills. Thus far, many Afghan refugees, including the women supported by Sisters of Service, have been ineligible to receive Special Immigrant Visas, Mahnaz said, highlighting the importance of legislation like the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would allow certain Afghan refugees to apply for permanent residence after having been in the U.S. for one year.

Outside of Sisters of Service, Mahnaz works with the Immigrant Advocates Response Collaborative as a project manager in Maryland. The project she is currently working on involves surveying Afghans and recording their responses in order to gather information to advocate for the Afghan Adjustment Act.

Immigrant ARC works to provide legal assistance to immigrants across the United States, including women like Mahnaz. One of the main challenges they face is finding pro bono lawyers, Mahnaz said.

Since its creation, Sisters of Service has also been pushing for the enactment of the Afghan Adjustment Act. The organization has drafted letters that organization mentors can send to their congressional representatives, advocating for the bill's passage, Ruthie said.

Ellie noted the importance of the Afghan Adjustment Act in providing much-needed security and support for Afghan refugees like Mahnaz, but said beyond that the resettlement agencies across the country also need additional legal support to be able to match up Afghans with pro bono attorneys.

So many Afghans are confused by the asylum process and fear deportation, and additional pro bono legal support would provide clarity and security, Ellie said.

Through her work with Immigration ARC, Ellie noted, Mahnaz has been able to help explain the asylum application process to other Afghan women refugees Sisters of Service works with.

Other work that Mahnaz has focused on has been teaching attorneys about Afghan culture in order to better represent and understand their Afghan clients.

In terms of legal support that has been provided to the organization, Ellie said Sisters of Service has been working with Paul Hastings LLP and its pro bono counsel Renata Parras to organize workshops on how to navigate the asylum system and the different types of applications, as well as how to build a narrative to explain why these women qualify for asylum.

In addition to advising the organization as a whole, Paul Hastings and Parras have taken on the cases of two Afghan women associated with Sisters of Service, one of whom is Mahnaz.

"At the time that the Afghan crisis hit, those women were particularly vulnerable to persecution because of their position and because of their gender," Parras said.

Guided by Parras, Ruthie said they've been able to go through the asylum process step by step in order to break it down for the program's mentors.

"The idea is that through that work we're going to create what we hope is a scalable model for other law firms and for other organizations to use when representing some of the evacuees from Afghanistan," Parras said.

Ellie said the work of Paul Hastings and Parras has been incredibly helpful, but without support from additional lawyers, the organization and the women it focuses on can only do so much. Recently, an organization called Human Rights First agreed to schedule intake screenings for the Afghan women affiliated with Sisters of Service to match them with pro bono attorneys and help them apply for asylum, Ellie said.

Mahnaz said that if she or her nieces are not granted asylum, she fears being separated from her family and the persecution they would face should they find themselves back in Afghanistan.

Sisters of Service can be contacted through its email address, ftpassist@gmail.com.

--Editing by Robert Rudinger.

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