Almost three years after Esmatullah Sultani rushed to Kabul’s international airport, at the time besieged by Taliban forces who were seizing control of Afghanistan, the 24-year-old man walked into a busy neighborhood market near Sacramento, California.

Sultani greeted many of the stallholders, fellow Afghans, and ordered kebabs for lunch in Dari, a language spoken by more than 35 million people in Afghanistan.

Since the United States ended its 20-year military presence there, Afghanistan has become a country where those who assisted American forces are in danger of persecution and where women are deprived of fundamental rights, including education.

“This is the closest I am to home,” Sultani said, walking through aisles packed with canned food from the Middle East and an area adorned with colorful rugs and long-sleeved dresses known as kameez.

“But here in California, we are safe. My little sister can go to school. I go on picnics with my whole family and we even play soccer.”

While the Biden administration helped to airlift, screen and resettle tens of thousands of Afghans in the US, three years after the chaotic withdrawal of the US military, many continue to live in uncertainty, with only short-term legal protections amid fear of being returned to the country they were obliged to flee.

More than 77,000 Afghans have been relocated to the US under an immigration authority known as parole, according to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. Sacramento county is home to the largest Afghan community in the US, with a population of almost 17,000, according to statistics from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan thinktank in Washington.

Sultani’s father had worked as a civil engineer for several US military construction projects in Afghanistan and, thanks to a work certificate he brought with him to Kabul’s airport, Sultani managed to get on a US aircraft and evacuate as the Taliban closed in.

His humanitarian parole status was meant to be a quick, temporary fix, valid for two years, with evacuees instructed to apply for special immigrant visas, or for asylum.

Asylum offers refuge to immigrants fleeing persecution based on certain factors such as their race, religion and political views. The visas, on the other hand, are available to Afghans who served American forces as translators, as interpreters or in other roles. Both benefits offer recipients and their immediate relatives permanent legal status.

Sultani applied for asylum and waited anxiously.

“My asylum was approved, and then I applied for a green card, but until the day it comes in the mail the idea of going back to Afghanistan won’t disappear,” said Sultani, who is getting an associate degree in computer information science at American River College in Sacramento. With his father still in Afghanistan and his mother and siblings in the US, Sultani also works to help his family in both countries stay afloat.

More than 21,000 Afghan evacuees across the US have submitted asylum applications, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is reviewing a total of 1.2m pending asylum cases.

The Biden administration has created various temporary avenues for those Afghans in limbo, including extending temporary work permits and protections from deportation. Also, a temporary protected status program for Afghans in the US allows them to work here legally under a different law designed to protect immigrants from countries beset by armed conflict or other crises.

So far, 3,100 Afghans have successfully extended their temporary protected status through May 2025, according to the DHS.

But much uncertainty remains. The US military withdrawal should not end America’s commitment to vulnerable Afghans, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, who served as a policy director for Michelle Obama and is now the president of Global Refuge, an immigrant rights group.

“The bottom line is that our current system has proven insufficient for extending Afghans permanent protection in a timely manner,” she added, saying: “Three years later, thousands of Afghan allies have yet to secure a long-term status through asylum or special immigrant visas. And that’s because Congress failed to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act last year.”

Global Refuge has helped resettle more than 23,500 Afghans in the US, said Timothy Young, the director for public relations at the organization.

The Afghan Adjustment Act would have created a path to permanent status for evacuees such as Sultani, but the initiative, which received bipartisan support, has been stalled in Congress for more than two years.

Advocates say Afghans have been treated differently from similar refugee groups who have been offered permanent status under adjustment acts passed by Congress, such as Cubans escaping communism, Hungarians fleeing Soviet repression and Vietnamese refugees following the fall of Saigon.

The day that Kabul fell, Jaber, 24 – who asked for his last name to be withheld out of concerns for the safety of his family, who remain in Afghanistan – planned to go to the international airport with his siblings, hoping to get evacuated by US military aircraft. Instead, he had to stay home because two suicide bombers and gunmen killed 60 Afghans and 13 US marines.

Jaber is part of the long-persecuted Hazara ethnic minority group and said he had been an intern for a journalistic association in Afghanistan.

One month before the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, the United Nations discovered mass graves of Hazaras in Bamiyan, part of an ethnic-cleansing campaign. After the Taliban swept back into power more than 20 years later, Jaber and his family lived in fear.

Having failed to get evacuated, Jaber fled to Iran, where he stayed for seven months with a visa. He then traveled to Brazil and, after two weeks of sleeping in churches and parks, he decided to head for the US.

Like hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees, he embarked on a perilous land journey, traversing Peru, Ecuador, the deadly jungle between Colombia and Panama known as the Darién Gap and the entirety of Central America before reaching the US-Mexico border in August 2022.

“I slept under benches with dogs. I remember my shoes had holes in the soles, and I had no money,” said Jaber, who now lives in northern California and works as a dispatcher for a security company.

“After I left Afghanistan, Taliban members came to our house and searched for any documents that would lead to the arrest of any of my family members.”

One of Jaber’s siblings escaped to Germany, but others remain in Afghanistan.

With the help of the International Rescue Committee, a resettlement organization that has assisted 11,621 Afghan evacuees, Jaber was granted US asylum this summer. His dream, he said, was to pursue a career in journalism, a job that might have gotten him killed in Afghanistan.

“For those coming up over the southern border, there are even fewer resources for them. They don’t have the same access to benefits as those that are paroled in,” said Tara Winter, executive director of the IRC’s chapter in northern California.

“They don’t qualify for the same family reunification benefits as other refugees do, and they experience so much anguish as they read about the worsening humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. It’s just a sort of unending legal limbo that makes it really hard for people to focus on rebuilding their lives here.”