Remember the story: concern was raised when three Afghan military trainees went AWOL in Massachusetts.
The first one to go before an immigration judge has been denied refugee protection in the US. He says he fears the Taliban. Well, he shouldn’t! According to Obama and his State Department the Taliban is not a terrorist group!
From Olean Times Herald:
BUFFALO (AP) — An immigration judge denied asylum Friday for an Afghan military officer who sneaked away from a U.S. training exercise in Massachusetts to avoid returning to Afghanistan, where he said he had been threatened by the Taliban.
The judge ruled that Maj. Jan Arash did not qualify for certain protections because the Taliban is not a government, his lawyer said, nor had he proven that he would be persecuted, rather than legally prosecuted, by the Afghan government.
“If he gets deported and hung for desertion, that’s OK under the law,” attorney Matthew Borowski said.
“We have no choice but to appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals,” the attorney said. The process could take several months.
In the meantime, Arash will continue to be held at the Buffalo Federal Detention Center, where the asylum case was heard.
Arash is one of three Afghan military officers who were detained in September after being denied entry into Canada, where they had planned to seek refugee status.
[….]
The three soldiers took a cab more than 500 miles from Massachusetts to the Canadian border in Niagara Falls while in the United States for a training exercise at Joint Base Cape Cod. In interviews with The Associated Press shortly after they were detained, they described being targeted by the Taliban because of their work with U.S. soldiers.
If granted asylum, Arash will be eligible for the Cadillac treatment all refugees receive—virtually all forms of welfare, healthcare, job counseling and training, etc. by one of the hundreds of federal contractors operating in over 180 cities in the US. He would be able to bring his family from Afghanistan to join him.