WASHINGTON – 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.
Olivia Troye tweeted that Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to former President Donald Trump, teamed up with “enablers” to undermine anyone trying to get the allies out by “devastating” the special immigrant visa system at the departments of State and Homeland Security.
“Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan,” tweeted Troye. She described Pence as “fully aware” of the problem.
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“We all knew the urgency but the resources had been depleted,” tweeted Troye, who was a homeland security, counterterrorism and coronavirus adviser to Pence before leaving the administration in August of 2020.
In February 2020, Trump negotiated an agreement with the Taliban to pull U.S. troops out this year.
Troye has been outspoken in her criticism of the administration’s handling of the pandemic and other issues. She’s been accused by other Pence aides of being “disgruntled.”
Pence, in a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that does not mention the situation of Afghans trying to get out, 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.”
Other critics have asked why the Biden administration hasn’t done more to evacuate Afghani allies.
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.
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