 I've lost more of my partner nation brothers than I have on my U.S. side. I've buried all of them. They would put their lives in front of mine and I would do the same for them. And that's going to continue for the rest of my life. A nightmare scenario amid the chaos engulfing the airport. Desperate people whore onto the runway. We can confirm an explosion. Parts of getting on them are growing slimmer and slimmer. My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. In August of 2021, as the U.S. government pulled out of Afghanistan, Air Force veteran Travis Peterson decided to go back into the country on his own. While everybody is trying to leave Afghanistan, you want to... I'm trying to get back into it. Before I knew it, I was jumping on an airplane. I had no idea what was going to happen after that. Peterson, who served two years in Iraq and ten years in Afghanistan, wanted to help the men and women he had worked with and fought with to escape. Afghans who had partnered with the U.S. government during the 20-year occupation could be eligible for special immigrant visas or SIVs. So for your special operation, guys, why do you think that the U.S. is obligated to bring them here? Because that's what you've been doing, right? There's a huge obligation to bring them here. I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for these guys. There's a thousand other individuals just like me that wouldn't be alive because of the intelligence on the battlefield as well of putting themselves in front of me. There's numerous occasions where they would yell at me for getting off the helicopter to go grab somebody because they knew it was a bad situation. Or they would surround me. They would encircle me as I was going to move to get to somebody. Eventually, Peterson would connect with a group of other veterans, private citizens, active duty military, and philanthropists who had also decided to take matters into their own hands. It just became this massive push to get these guys out. Many of these individuals were members of Afghan Special Operations Units trained and funded by the American military. They participated in direct combat against the Taliban and are currently in hiding because their lives are in danger. Because they weren't directly employed by the American military, the State Department hasn't evacuated them. We've talked about how most of these guys took on missions in collaboration with the US government. You have been training them this whole time. Why did you have to do this as a private effort? Where is the US government in this? It's different with the SIV process with interpreters because they worked for an entity, they worked for a company. My guys didn't, they worked for the Afghan military. If we could just redesignate these guys as being an SIV or on a humanitarian parole, we could have them out today. During that chaotic week following the US withdrawal, Peterson physically extracted some of the men he had worked with, picking them out of the crowds. He escorted them to a security checkpoint at the airport and verified their identities. Through private donations, he arranged for four flights out of Afghanistan over a two-week period. Peterson was at the airport in Kabul on the day it was attacked by ISIS, which killed an estimated 170 civilians and 13 US soldiers. I saw airplanes in the ditch. I saw airplanes on their sides. I saw helicopters completely destroyed. And I saw the terminal of the airport completely demolished. Not everyone who was able to escape had worked with the US forces. In the course of searching for his men, Peterson also encountered three siblings outside the Kabul airport trying to get on a plane, and he decided to help them. They now live in an East Coast city and asked that we not reveal their names or location. They looked as strong. So I kind of took these three under my wing and the other two that were with them. They got special treatment. Are you going to go back to university as well? Are you finished, yeah? Yes, my university is kind of finished. Just two of my two subjects remain. I'll take them online, maybe. When you get the diploma, I want to get a copy of it. When he got back to the US, Peterson connected with a growing community of volunteers, also committed to doing whatever they could to help stranded Afghans. Zach Van Meter, a venture capitalist from Florida, rented a conference room at the Willard Hotel in Washington D.C. in August to coordinate a private volunteer effort to get people out. It was the Peacock Lounge, which I'm not sure what it's exactly used for, but it is a couple thousand square foot space all next to the restrooms and away from everybody. And we set up tables and there were anywhere from 40 to 60 people working in there for a week straight, people sleeping on the ground. They convinced the United Arab Emirates government to help with the evacuation effort and it assisted in getting out 13,000 Afghans. The very first flight out was a young lady and her family who had been directly threatened by the Taliban and it was kind of a test for us and they went in, they got her, they walked her through the airport, they put her on a UAE military plane, like a C-130, it was a pretty neat moment and they flew her over and then the UAE said, let's do more. Private entities in the US government together worked to airlift out nearly 130,000 people. Most are now living in camps in the United States and other parts of the world, awaiting a lengthy vetting process. Tens of thousands are still in hiding. You guys are maintaining safe homes inside Afghanistan? Tell me how that works. So we keep the rent paid, we keep them warm, we try to keep them from getting bored. We'll send coloring books for kids, try to find activities, we keep food going and that's a constant struggle. Ben Awan is the founder of Flanders Fields, a nonprofit that helps resettle refugees inside the US and maintains a network of safe homes. We are trying to provide, not on how long we can continue to provide them. Flanders Fields is part of a network of nonprofits that maintains 60 safe homes in Afghanistan. Awan says he has taken out 23,000 in personal loans to cover their expenses. How much does it cost you, you know, roughly daily to keep these safe homes going? We go broke literally every single day. So some days we spend 10 grand, some days we spend 20 grand, some days we'll spend 300 bucks. Although the Biden administration is currently doing little to help with the evacuation efforts, there are many individuals within the US government who works directly with some of the stranded Afghans and are helping with private evacuation efforts. We have a mutual friend who literally is taking some of his government's salary to send money so people have food. He's never met them before. And then there's a lot of people who don't want to be in the press because they still work in a place where they're not supposed to. The guys that are pushing me to do this interview because they don't want to do it. They worked well on maternity leave. They worked well on vacation. The Afghans stuck in the country face a catch-22. To qualify for a special immigrant visa to leave, they must sit for an in-person interview, but the US doesn't conduct in-person interviews inside Afghanistan. Because we can't fly them straight from Afghanistan to America unless it's on a Department of State flight or some sort of trip sponsored by the Department of State. Josh Jenkins is an army veteran who served in Afghanistan for eight years. Now he works for the non-profit Amplio, which uses technology to fight poverty and is now helping with the evacuation efforts. We have no way of getting people across unless we have a third party willing to take them while they wait for their SIV or P1 or P2 or parole applications to be approved. Or we just send them to a different country that's willing to accept them instead. Awin Jenkins and 15 other non-profit organizations joined a federation started by Travis Peterson, called Moral Compass. The alliance seeks to better coordinate all of their funding, logistics, advocacy, and food programs by putting them all under one umbrella. With Moral Compass, we have these 15 organizations and then we have an advocacy organization on top of that, the umbrella which is the Special Operations Association of America. The federation, which relies exclusively on private donations, is exploring new strategies to help more Afghans escape, such as attempting to build a humanitarian village in Kosovo. A private citizen had donated 17,000 square meters of his land to us to build a humanitarian city. We had doctors, lawyers, everything from the top to bottom was covered and volunteers willing to just come out and volunteer their time to help these people and they had no expectations of being paid. Jenkins says the cause of our government said it would sign off. If the U.S. State Department agreed to issue a non-objection certificate establishing that it does not oppose the plan, it refused. Why should these guys, why should your guys qualify for a special immigrant visa? We made a promise to these people and if we want people to keep taking us seriously in the future we need to follow through on that. Thousands of Afghans are stuck in vetting stations on U.S. bases inside the U.S. and around the world. They have been awaiting processing for over six months now. If rejected, some will end up stateless. There are around 14,000 permanent residents and 400 American citizens still stuck in Afghanistan who have no pathway to immigrate or are unwilling to leave their families behind. During a press conference, Secretary Blinken felt like it was important to clarify that the American citizens who remain in Afghanistan carry dual citizenship. Most of the remaining American citizens are dual nationals whose home is Afghanistan and whose extended families live there. So it's no surprise that deciding whether or not to leave the place they call home is a wrenching decision. I've got a woman, an American citizen in Mazar right now who has two daughters with her. One's 20 and one's 23. The U.S. Department of State told her, yes, you're an American citizen, you can bring your daughter because they're both unmarried. Oh wait, one's 23, she can't come, she's got to stay. What mother is going to leave her 23-year-old gorgeous daughter in Afghanistan by herself? To give you an answer as to why I think it is? I have no fucking clue. So the problem is bigger than just us not letting people into the U.S. or not bringing people to the U.S. Nor you're not going to find a smoking gun, there isn't a person holding this up. There isn't a, you know, I mean you can say the buck stops here and it's all the president's fault but it's really not. There's literally a legal structure that's been established for how immigrants are allowed into this country. From when my ancestors came in to you came in. That's part of the process. Then compound that with the fact that it's a country on the other side of the world and you literally need to hop them somewhere. Or we need to open up our camps and, you know, stadiums and house hundreds of thousands of Afghanis and just be prepared for that. But I don't think our general population wants that. The Biden administration not only oversaw the disastrous withdrawal, it also has continued to enforce and defend a broken immigration system. In 2021 it admitted only 18% of the refugees allowed under its self-imposed cap. The Biden administration has a new program that will evacuate roughly 600 Afghans per week but there are an estimated 100,000 who qualify for SIV status, which means the evacuations could take years to complete and they'll still have to go through vetting facilities already backlogged with thousands of unprocessed applications. So a lot of people got left in the lurch. There were people that applied for SIV four or five years ago that were still waiting on their interview. So that process needs to be modified and changed. I understand that Congress is looking at ways to do virtual interviews and other things. We're going to be a joke. If every time we ask someone to help us, they're going to say, no, remember Afghanistan, only did you lose, but you left everyone behind. It's not going to get us anywhere. We need to come through and actually do what we said we'd do. They did everything that we've asked them to over the years and we need to be able to do what we told them we would do and honor that promise of taking care of them. They fought to the death every one of them and they're still fighting.