The sister and brother, whose family has requested anonymity, are in the eighth and 11th grades, respectively, in Gwinnett County, a suburban county of almost a million residents. Riding the school bus home in the afternoons is a simple pleasure they are getting used to as the adopted children of their maternal aunt and her husband, both U.S. citizens.
The teens' parents died separately in 2020, after which the children relied on neighbors and extended family for help as they continued their schooling in Kabul. They were whisked away from the capital city in late August as the Taliban took charge of Afghanistan during the withdrawal of American troops, thanks to the quick thinking of a Georgia immigration attorney.
Hall Booth Smith PC partner Ashik R. Jahan was representing the children's aunt in Atlanta in her effort to adopt them following her sister's death. He had to pivot on short notice when the withdrawal of American soldiers from Afghanistan abruptly caused greater instability in Kabul.
Jahan told Law360 that the teens arrived at Kabul's international airport the day it was bombed. The Islamic State Khorasan Province claimed responsibility for the airport suicide bombing on Aug. 26, which killed more than 180 people, including 13 members of the U.S. military.
Jahan said the teens were on a flight to Albania within 24 hours, where they spent about 10 weeks while he secured them humanitarian parole on an emergency basis to enter America.
"It was a unique challenge and the first time I've handled something of this magnitude," said Jahan, who has been an immigration attorney at Hall Booth Smith for about 13 years. "It's one of the most rewarding things I've done in my career. This is why I wanted to do immigration law in the first place, to be able to help families like this."
The teens arrived in the United States just before Thanksgiving, and were officially adopted by their aunt and her husband on Dec. 9, just a few days before the brother turned 18. The emergency adoption helped preserve his immigration rights as the child of U.S. citizens.
The aunt told Law360, through Jahan, that her adopted children are loving life with their new siblings, the two children she has with her husband, who are about the same age. She drops them off at school in the mornings and they enjoy riding the bus home, she said.
"They are very happy to be with their adopted parents, sister and brother here," the aunt said. "Having extended family and being able to attend family gatherings gives them a lot of joy."
Jahan said he worked with the office of U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, as well as government and immigration officials in America, Afghanistan and Albania, to get the teens to Georgia.
He said they have a way to go before gaining residency and citizenship in the United States, but their story is already successful, given everything they went through to get to America.
"I've never had to deal with humanitarian parole and these types of unique adoption issues before," Jahan said. "I didn't expect the different U-turns and change of strategies and approaches that we had to do in this case, because it didn't go as we planned, because of outside factors we had no control of."
Jahan said that because Afghanistan was under Islamic law and did not recognize the legal concept of adoption that Americans were familiar with, he had to convince authorities there to recognize the teens' aunt as their guardian to satisfy U.S. immigration requirements for their visas.
The aunt was about to visit Kabul for a court hearing on her guardianship petition when "everything fell apart in Afghanistan," he said.
"As the Taliban were preparing to take over and then marching towards Kabul, everything kind of shut down," Jahan said. "And then there was a mad rush to get the kids out of there."
Ossoff's office was contacted about the situation and helped to secure the necessary documentation for the teens to be airlifted out, Jahan said.
Once the children were in Albania, under that country's protection, their aunt flew there and was able to visit them in the government center where they were housed.
"They would not release the kids into her custody, because she was not their guardian," Jahan said. "She wasn't their adoptive parent yet. That's when we shifted gears and instead applied for them to get humanitarian parole on an emergency basis, to get into the United States as orphaned children who had really nowhere else to go."
Jahan said the children had Afghan passports, but without American visas they needed humanitarian parole, which is granted in special circumstances.
The Albanian government and U.S. immigration officials ultimately approved the request on Nov. 10, with some persuading by Ossoff's office and U.S. consulate staff, Jahan said. The Albanian government wanted assurance that the children were not being trafficked or released into the wrong hands, he said.
The teens flew from Albania to America with their aunt on Nov. 19, and started settling into their new life. The eighth grader is looking forward to joining her siblings in high school next year, and her brother wants to go to college after graduation.
Jahan said he would continue to work on the children's residency and citizenship, relieved that there was no longer any urgency in their case. International adoptions are something he's worked on before, though he tends to deal more with visa sponsorship and naturalization.
"Whenever this type of case pops up, I'm very eager to help," he said.
--Editing by Marygrace Anderson and Karin Roberts.
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