Thanks to years of long days working with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, Qismat Amin speaks with an apple-pie accent that almost makes you forget how much life changed for him when he landed at San Francisco International Airport this February.
But his first month in America was marked by surprise at nearly every turn, from regular garbage pickups to walking the Dish to senior citizens running a marathon to the fact that the lights always work you flip the switch. “Every single day I step out this door and my adventure begins,” he says.
It’s all a very long way from his fraught former existence in Jalalabad, near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan. For four years, Amin lived squeezed between fear of being killed as a former American translator and desperation that his only means of escape—an application for a U.S. visa—was lost in a bureaucratic black hole.
“I was waiting for something I thought was never going to happen,” he says. “I was totally lost.”
The vise tightened with the emergence of the Islamic State. In fall 2015, ISIS affiliates confiscated his family’s farmland as punishment for alleged collaboration with the enemy.
But hope returned when he received an email from an old Army friend, Matthew Ball. Now a Stanford law student and a captain in the Reserves, Ball had worked closely with Amin during his first deployment to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011.
Rallying friends and classmates, Ball led a campaign to write letters and exert whatever influence they could muster. Ultimately they persuaded 12 members of Congress to file inquiries into Amin’s case. When those seemed to fizzle, Ball drummed up media interest to put new focus on Amin’s plight.
Like so many soldiers, Ball relied on his translators to help him do his job—and at times to keep him alive. He says there’s a moral duty to make sure those who served America—and who, in Amin’s case, were also wounded doing so—aren’t persecuted for their trust. “Anybody who has fought alongside Americans and received praise for doing so, that is the best vetting I can think of.”
Nearly four years after applying, Amin picked up his visa two days after President Trump’s first executive order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries. Afghanistan wasn’t targeted, but the order revealed how shaky the ground under immigration policy had become. Unwilling to risk delay, Ball bought Amin a $1,000 ticket to leave the country as soon as possible. Ball and his wife, Giselle Rahn, were lead among the supporters who welcomed Amin at the San Francisco airport. For now, Amin lives with the couple, who converted the office in their off-campus apartment into a bedroom; they have also helped raise a $27,000 starter fund for him through the website GoFundMe.
Even in Palo Alto, Amin isn’t beyond the reach of strife in his home country. The day before talking to Stanford, Amin learned that a friend of his—a doctor—was killed in an Islamic State attack on a hospital in Kabul. Amin still fears for his family, including a brother who also served as a U.S. translator but whose visa was denied.
But he has the hope of one day bringing them over. For now, his short-term goals are getting basics like a Social Security card and a driver’s license and an entry-level job with opportunity for advancement. Then he wants to return to college for a master’s degree in business. It’s a life with a future, all thanks, he says, to Ball. “He’s just like a brother to me,” Amin says.
