12,000 More Visas for Afghans Who Helped US Military Included in New Funding Deal

The program that allows Afghan allies to immigrate to the U.S. would get 12,000 new visas under a government funding deal expected to be released in the coming days, lawmakers and advocates said.

While short of the 20,000 visas they were originally pushing for, supporters of the Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, program were elated that thousands more visas are on track to be approved after they feared the program could run out of visas for good.

"While this won't be enough visas to help all our Afghan allies, this gives us some breathing room and will show our partners in America's longest war that we won't leave them behind," Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and president of the #AfghanEvac coalition, an umbrella organization for hundreds of nongovernmental groups that help evacuate Afghans, said in a statement late Tuesday.