A former aide to former Vice President Mike Pence blamed racist views of a top Trump administration official for the inability of many translators and other allies to get out of Afghanistan before the U.S. withdrew troops. //

Miller said in a statement Saturday that "the sole reason that anyone is stranded in Afghanistan is because Joe Biden stranded them there in the single most imbecilic act of strategic incompetence in human history."

"All the desperate lying liars in the world can’t change that one inescapable fact," he said.

Miller's wife, Katie, who was Pence's communications director, tweeted out a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service showing the number of special immigrant visas for Iraqis and Afghans was higher during the Trump administration than during the last four years of the Obama administration.

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R43725.pdf //

Olivia of Troye
@OliviaTroye
·
Aug 20, 2021
🧵There were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov’t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State.(1/7)

Olivia of Troye
@OliviaTroye
I tracked this issue personally in my role during my WH tenure. Pence was fully aware of the problem. We got nowhere on it because Trump/S. Miller had watchdogs in place at DOJ, DHS, State & security agencies that made an already cumbersome SIV process even more challenging.(2/7)

Pence, in a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, said the Biden administration’s “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is a foreign policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-pence-biden-broke-our-deal-with-the-taliban-11629238764

Pence said Biden had no plan to "facilitate the regional resettlement of the thousands of Afghan refugees who will now be seeking asylum in the U.S. with little or no vetting."

State Department spokesman Ned Price this week said the Biden administration inherited a special immigrant visa system that had chronic shortages in staffing, lacked a coordinating official and had a bureaucratic 14-step process that was enshrined in statute.

At Biden’s direction, Price said, the administration added resources and made enough changes to shave more than a year off the average processing time.

The number of visas issued went from 100 in March to 813 visas per week recently, according to Price.