
Culture & Community | Downtown | Immigration | Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) | Refugees | Elena's Light
Fereshteh Ganjavi.
Fereshteh Ganjavi can still remember the way her heart stopped in her chest when she learned that Herat and Kabul, Afghanistan, had fallen to the Taliban. For a moment, she couldn’t move. Then, she picked up the phone to call an uncle who was still there, working with the U.S. Military.
“I said, ‘Run,’” she remembered.
Three years later, she is working to help pass legislation that makes it easier to seek refugee status and asylum in the U.S., and to earn a living after resettling in a new country.
Ganjavi, who came to the U.S. as an Afghan refugee and now runs the organization Elena’s Light, brought that story to The Study at Yale Thursday morning, as several former refugees, asylum seekers, and resettlement advocates pushed for the Afghan Adjustment Act, Refugee Protection Act, and Asylum Seeker Work Authorization Act.
That push is a collaboration between Elena’s Light and We Are All America, a national, non-partisan organization that seeks to make the U.S. more welcoming to a growing number of newcomers in its midst. In addition to initiatives for leadership and development in the refugee community, it hosts national “advocacy days,” during which the organization uses storytelling to advocate for more progressive policy.
“These legislative efforts are more than just gains,” Ganjavi said Thursday, speaking in a small art gallery tucked into the back of the Chapel Street hotel. “They represent our collective commitment to ensuring safety, dignity, and opportunity for those who have sought refuge within our borders. As we stand here today, we do so with millions of refugees and asylum seekers.”
All three pieces of legislation directly affect how refugees and asylum seekers are able to earn a living, seek permanent residency, and support their families in the U.S. First proposed in July 2023, the Afghan Adjustment Act would create a new path to permanent residency for tens of thousands of Afghan nationals, who currently have no clear-cut path to applying for permanent immigration status and residency in the U.S.
It stems from Operation Allies Welcome (OAW), which in 2021 welcomed 76,000 Afghans who had worked with U.S. troops as Kabul fell to the Taliban. At the time, the U.S. granted them something called “humanitarian parole” instead of refugee status—a move to expedite their path out of Afghanistan. The problem is that parolees have temporary permission to stay in the U.S., rather than a path to citizenship.
The Afghan Adjustment Act is just one way, Ganjavi and fellow speakers explained, that legislators could ease the shock and difficulty of arriving in a new country. First proposed in 2022 (the bill is currently dead and would need to be reintroduced), the Refugee Protection Act would expand the Refugee Act of 1980, including the definition of who and can apply for refugee and asylum seeker status, and for which reasons.
The Asylum Seeker Work Authorization Act, meanwhile, would shorten the time that asylum seekers must wait before accessing the work permits that make safe and legal employment possible in the U.S. Currently, asylum seekers must wait 180 days, or six months, for work permits—a gap that leaves many families in financial limbo, or seeking work under the table because they have to make ends meet. The act proposes 30 days, or one month.
From left to right: Santa Vasquez, Fereshteh Ganjavi, Reverend Jean-Fritz Guierrer, Rachel Kornfield, and Nour Al Zouabi.
Rachel Kornfield, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Jewish Family Services of Greenwich, explained how transformative such legislation could be. Since 2021, the organization has helped welcome 1,100 humanitarian parolees, trying to navigate a system in which their legal rights and route to residency hang precariously in the balance. Meanwhile, the legal resources to serve their needs are finite, and seem forever stretched past their breaking point. There are never as many lawyers as client needs, she said.
“The barriers that we are constantly facing on behalf of our vulnerable clients and the agencies that are charged to serve them is just mind-numbing,” she said. “With legislative change, we will minimize the suffering of our new neighbors right here in Connecticut.”
That frustration is also present in JFS’ work with asylum seekers, and has informed how she understands and advocates for policy beyond the Afghan Adjustment Act. When asylum seekers come to the organization “from the bus or the train, seeking asylum and seeking support,” they often want to know how quickly they can start working.
It still boggles her mind when the answer is six months. While nonprofits like Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), JFS, Elena’s Light and several others have stepped in to help with financial and logistical resources, they don’t close the gap. They can’t: the level of need is more of a chasm.
“The most common question that we get [is], ‘How do I live? How do I feed my children? What am I supposed to do?’” she said. “The question never gets easier, and the answers are totally irrational, even for educated people who have all of the resources to help specific populations. If we don’t allow our new neighbors the ability to earn a living, how can they live?”
Other speakers emphasized the impact that immigrant, refugee and asylum seeker status has had on their own lives—and the need to ease the path forward for current and future refugees. Now a student at the Yale School of Public Health, Nour Al Zouabi noted how deeply being a refugee has molded every contour of her life.
In the summer of 2012, Al Zouabi fled Syria with her mom, dad, and four siblings as part of a mass exodus that ultimately totaled over 100,000 people in one month. For four years, they lived in Irbid, Jordan, pushing through multiple interviews with the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) before ultimately traveling to the U.S. in 2016.
In New Haven, Al Zouabi nurtured twin interests in human rights and public health, from IRIS’ annual Run for Refugees to her studies at UConn, which ultimately led her to immigrant aid work in El Paso, Texas, in 2023. At the Yale School of Public Health, she is studying epidemiology, with a focus on barriers to care that immigrants, refugees, and other vulnerable populations face.
Nour Al Zouabi.
For her, she said Thursday, that research is a way to turn objective data about social determinants of health into more humanitarian policy.
“Today our values are under threat,” she said. “Global crises remind us of the urgent need to bring back the most vulnerable, yet we are seeing policies that undermine our commitment to humanity.”
“We cannot be complicit in the destruction of lives,” she added, calling for an expansion of the U.S. Refugee Admission Program and creation of more public policy that benefits refugees and asylum seekers from across the globe. “These bills are a lifeline for those who have already endured so much.”
Santa Vasquez, who arrived from the Dominican Republic in 2021, also picked up that thread of fierce advocacy. Before leaving the D.R. three years ago, Vasquez faced threats of violence from the father of her youngest child, who is now five. Afraid that he would kill her, she fled the country with only two suitcases and three children, sharing a room with her kids when she arrived in New York, and later Rhode Island.
When Vasquez started looking for work, she learned that she didn’t have the proper documentation, meaning that no job would legally take her. It didn’t make sense to her, she said: in the D.R., she’d worked for over a decade in finance. Out of desperation, she took jobs under the table, working long hours in a supermarket for less than minimum wage.
She also rented an Uber account, a process by which she had to rely on the account’s owner for payment. After a few months, she said, he closed the account unexpectedly. She lost roughly $1,000 in the process.
“So imagine, bills to pay. Three kids to feed, and no work,” she said. “I cried almost every day, because I didn’t know how I’m going to raise my kids here. New for me, new country, I don’t know no one here.”
Then she learned about IRIS. The organization helped her apply for asylum, and helped her with housing and finances as she navigated the 180-day pause on a work permit. She still remembers the day she received her EAD (Employment Authorization Document) card, giving her the right to work legally in the U.S.
“You don’t imagine how it feels,” she said. Within weeks, Vasquez was working as a client services ambassador and interpreter with IRIS. She took on an additional job as a server at Dunkin Donuts to help support her kids. Her day starts at 3:30 in the morning, and ends at 5 p.m. Then she heads home for her third shift as a mom.
“One hundred fifty days is too much,” she said. “Imagine you are an immigrant. You can’t work. People just take advantage of you, because you have to take whatever they offer you. If they want to pay under $15, then you take it, because you have kids. So that’s why we’re here, because we are asking to reduce this time. That’s our fight.”
For Ganjavi, the choice to advocate is also deeply personal. In 2011, she came to the U.S. with her mother as an Afghan refugee, after years of living outside of her home country of Afghanistan (her family is originally from Herat, a large city in Western Afghanistan). As she looked around John F. Kennedy airport for the first time, “I told myself, now I’m in the land of opportunity,” she remembered. “I can change what I really want, and create a better life for myself and many people.”
At first, however, Ganjavi struggled to adjust. “It was a new world, honestly,” she said. When she tried to navigate public transportation to downtown New Haven, for instance, she got lost. It was her mom who encouraged her to take a breath, stand up, and learn how to ask for help.
Slowly, she built a life in New Haven. Her husband, then her fiance, was able to make the journey to the U.S. from Iran, where he was living. In Connecticut, the two were able to start a family. When Ganjavi started an educational nonprofit for refugee women in December 2017, she named it after her eldest daughter, Elena. It was a nod to the work she hopes to do with and for other women here in New Haven.
“I feel we should do something for our community,” she said. “One woman gets a driver’s license, that changes my world. One woman gets a job, that means everything. That’s what I can do.”
That work has also informed her path to advocacy. Ganjavi was in London, visiting her sister and pregnant with her third child, when she learned Herat and Kabul had fallen to the Taliban. Her world stopped. Her mind went to family members who were still living there, including those who had worked with the U.S. Military.
“I was like, ‘What? What’s happening?’” she remembered. “I was sitting in the corner of the kitchen and couldn’t move.”
She called an uncle, begging him to run before it was too late. She thought about the way power struggles, imperialism and war have festered in the country for decades, since before she was a little girl leaving her home. She mourned a cycle of violence that felt like it had no end in sight. For three years, she has grieved as women’s rights are taken away from them, including and most violently education.
“This is not for us one day or two days,” she said. “It’s for 40 years. It’s been my whole life.”
“There are a lot of refugees and immigrants and asylum seekers still in camps, still behind the doors,” she had said just minutes before, and the words resonated. “Still waiting to receive this support from one and all of us.”