With shaking hands, Rolla Alaydi flipped through the stack of papers she received in the mail in early June.
The names of her nieces — Haya, 6; Alma, 6; and Ola, 4 — topped each letter. What followed were nearly identical denials of humanitarian parole from the U.S. government.
“We carefully reviewed your application in accordance with the law, regulation, and USCIS policy and determined that parole is not warranted for the following reasons.”
“You have failed to establish, by a preponderance of the evidence, that there are urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit reasons that would justify a favorable exercise of discretion to parole the beneficiary into the United States.”
“Based on the reason or reasons indicated above, your request for parole is denied.”
It has been more than a year of praying, waiting and watching her family starve through a phone screen. The sliver of hope Alaydi held — a chance of bringing her relatives to safety as war devastates Gaza — was erased by boilerplate rejection letters from U.S. immigration officials.
“Failed to establish, by a preponderance of the evidence” was the response to applications that cost thousands of dollars in processing fees and included photos and medical records meant to document the Alaydi family’s life under what outlets such as New York Magazine have described as “Israel’s undeniable war crimes.”
Now Alyadi, a Pacific Grove resident, said she is just waiting for her family’s death sentence.
“My family has become just names [on] paper,” she said. “They are denying their right to live.”
Alaydi, an American citizen who was born in a refugee camp in central Gaza and has lived in Northern California for nearly seven years, has been spent the past two years fighting for the survival of her 21 family members amid a siege that the United Nations, in late 2024, described as “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.”
The current 21-month-long military assault began after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel by Hamas-led militants, who killed roughly 1,200 people and took about 251 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. More than 100 hostages have since been released or rescued.
The Israel Defense Forces have subsequently killed over 57,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. A vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced. The hospital system has collapsed, offering little care for the wounded and sick, intensifying a humanitarian crisis. Food is scarce, and according to eyewitnesses and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, soldiers have fired on Palestinians gathering at aid distribution sites.
Around the world, members of the Palestinian diaspora have scrambled to help their loved ones in Gaza. For Palestinian Americans like Alaydi, humanitarian parole was a major route to temporarily bring family members out of crisis.
Humanitarian parole, registered through Form I-131, allows someone outside the U.S. to seek entry on urgent humanitarian grounds, such as a medical emergency.
Filing a humanitarian parole application costs around $630. But it is not an immigration visa, said Alaydi’s lawyer, Maria Kari. People on humanitarian parole may stay in the United States for varying periods, but the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it is typically granted for no more than one year.
It “allows you to escape a humanitarian emergency … and safely come to be in the U.S. for a brief period of time,” she said. “It exists to address the type of emergencies that we’re seeing in Gaza right now.”
For example, in 1975, around 130,000 people were given humanitarian parole after the United States withdrew from Vietnam.
Processing times are lengthy. According to the USCIS website, “petitioners should expect processing delays. It will take time for us to work through the unprecedented number of parole requests we have received since Fall 2021 and return to normal processing times.” In the fall of 2021, the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took over its capital, Kabul.
USCIS data shows that 80% of I-131 applications in California’s service center take 12 months to process.
That’s time that many Gazans don’t have. “These are emergency applications. You’re taking well over a year to even get us a decision on them,” Kari said.
Filing humanitarian parole applications has been the primary tactic for lawyers supporting Palestinians in America — citizens and green card or visa holders — trying to assist families in Gaza, said Ban Al-Wardi. She is one of the lead attorneys on Project Immigration Justice for Palestinians, which is supported by the Bay Area’s Arab Resource and Organizing Center.
Al-Wardi said Project Immigration Justice for Palestinians is a coalition of over 400 legal volunteers that have filed around 2,000 cases over nearly two years. Volunteer attorneys have reported three approvals and about 17 denials, but the organization hopes to learn more about how USCIS has been processing the applications through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“We have only seen a very, very small amount of cases result in decisions,” she said. “And the majority of the decisions that we’re receiving are denials, but on a very blanket level basis.”
Al-Wardi’s clients got the same kind of letters Alaydi received: “This kind of language is really kind of indicative of how hollow the review of these cases has been … did not include USCIS even asking for additional evidence, or even citing specific reasons for the denial.”
Kari, who is part of the Gaza Family Project run by the Arab American Civil Rights League in Michigan, said she has seen almost 10 clients receive denials and anticipates “we will see blanket denials for all of these people.”
“There’s just no due process, no consideration of the dozens and dozens of pages that we have submitted to show why humanitarian parole in this institution was warranted,” Kari said. “I very rarely nowadays get to give good news to any of my clients.
“It’s an insult. It’s going to be a deadly consequence for Rolla’s family.”
The denials have left people like Alaydi devastated. She recalled talking with her niece, 6-year-old Alma, weeks earlier, promising her she would soon be safe — that she would be in school, have new friends and eat three meals a day.
“She said, ‘Oh, I already started learning some English — I love you and good morning in English,’” Alaydi said. “I’m just now afraid even to hear her voice. Before, I was comforting her that she will be in a good place. I don’t know what to tell them now.”
Both Kari and Al-Wardi say the system has been historically difficult for Palestinians and Palestinian Americans to navigate — often due to a lack of “political will,” Al-Wardi said. Even before October 2023, Palestinians faced numerous barriers to leaving the region.
Lawyers working with clients at the start of the Gaza siege said assisting them was difficult, as it required coordination with multiple governments, including Israel and Egypt.
Some politicians have called for the expansion of humanitarian parole for Gazan relatives of U.S. citizens. However, when the siege of Gaza began during the Biden administration, many lawyers pointed out that a program was created for Ukrainians amid Russia’s invasion, but no comparable support was offered for Palestinians. Under the Trump administration, Ukrainian refugees now face an uncertain future in America.
“It’s not a paperwork issue,” Al-Wardi said. “It’s not because we’re missing evidence, or we’re missing paperwork, or not all of the T’s were crossed and the I’s were dotted. It’s a very systemic, multi-president, multi-administration form of exclusion that we’ve seen historically against Palestinians and just immigrants from communities that are not white or European.”
Another route was stopped in its tracks: the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Around the end of 2023, Kari said she and her colleagues found that some of their clients were getting referred to the refugee program, which gave “us a lot of hope.”
“When [President Donald] Trump won, we were hearing from the U.S. refugee offices in Egypt, ‘Hey, let’s get your clients’ interviews done before December.’ We were quickly prepping everybody,” she said.
In January, the Trump administration moved quickly to suspend USRAP, which has existed since the 1980 Refugee Act.
“The program’s dead, everything has stopped,” Kari said. “The immigration system has been completely dismantled from the pipeline that begins overseas.
“We’re aware of the way ICE is operating in our cities … this administration’s taken a hammer and destroyed refugee admissions processing.”
Telling someone who received a denial that they’ve reached the end of the road — and shouldn’t spend hundreds more dollars to appeal — has been “just heartbreaking,” Kari said.
“Some of these families are starting to look at other countries and other ways to get their families to safety,” Kari said.
Al-Wardi said that she has told some families, “If we’re not gonna get an approval, we’re filing all of these and documenting these abuses and violations for accountability.”
It’s “a huge project that’s going to just document and hold institutions accountable for their failures,” she said. “That’s valuable … I know that our clients [are] willing to be a part of that, but at the same time, devastated, because it doesn’t protect anybody that they love.”
During these times, communities have stepped up for their Palestinian neighbors and put pressure on their representatives. A petition with over 1,000 signatures urges Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Santa Cruz, “to act with utmost swiftness and leverage his influence to advocate for a humanitarian evacuation from Gaza of the family of one of his constituents.” Al-Wardi explained that “congressional advocacy actually can really, really help” speed up case reviews or improve tracking.
Since October 2023, pro-Palestinian activism has swept the Bay Area and Northern California. From college campuses to bridges to highways, residents and advocates have expressed their outrage at the United States’ financial and military support of Israel. Much of the heat has targeted congressional representatives who voted to fund Israel and accepted donations from pro-Israel lobbyists.
Christine Hong of Santa Cruz organized the petition in support of Alaydi, a resident of Panetta’s district. Hong said she and fellow activist Sean Molloy will be accompanying Alaydi in a meeting with Panetta’s staff later this month.
“There’s such a desperation about everything that Rolla is going through,” Hong said. “She’s constantly having to appeal to figures, entities and the government of a perpetrator country,” that allies itself with Israel.
“Nobody should have to petition the government to prove that they’re human and deserving of life,” Molloy added.
In a statement to KQED, Panetta said he remains committed to advocating for constituents on federal issues and will continue pressing agencies for answers. “My heart continues to go out to Dr. Alyadi, and it is my hope that she appeals the Administration’s decision so that we can continue to fight on her behalf,” he said.
Panetta called humanitarian parole requests “some of the most complicated and restrictive immigration petitions under current U.S. policy,” especially in conflict zones like Gaza. He noted that USCIS is administratively backlogged and under-resourced — challenges worsened by the pandemic, the 2021 influx of Afghan allies seeking refuge, recent executive orders and USCIS workforce reductions. In May, Panetta joined more than 100 lawmakers to secure $700 million in funding to help USCIS address its case backlog.
In emails shared with KQED, Alaydi has been in contact with a caseworker from Panetta’s office. In a message sent on June 16, the caseworker wrote, “Per your request, below you will find USCIS’s response to our inquiry dated June 13, 2025. As we discussed, I encourage you to seek legal counsel to review the recent denial of I-131’s … filed in March 2024.”
Alaydi said she wants the chance to meet face-to-face with elected officials like Panetta and California’s senators to talk about her family. After a denial, an applicant has 33 days to consider an appeal.
“I’m not ready to give up,” she said. “I’m gonna try all the possible solutions.
“I’m overwhelmed. I am drained physically, emotionally, in all levels, and even financially. But I’m not ready to give up. I’m not gonna just sit and just watch them get bombed and starve.”
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