people in a timely fashion when th e working 24 hours a day to do the vetting necessary and reviews necessary to move people into the united states. now, i would remind you that there are a number of people, tens of thousands of people departing on afghanistan who are going to third countries. they only proceeded through serp steps of the immigrant visa process or the vetting process has not yet been completed. i can give you a bit more detail on the vetting process if that is helpful .
there are also a number of steps that are being taken by usda, hud, the va and hhs, including usda is working with owners of 400,000 rental units to mitigate all evictions. the va will expand rental support to at risk veterans from seven states to all 50 states. this is some of the examples of steps we re taking. go ahead. afghans with visas are risk death and facing beatings at the
what americans should be assured of is that there is no one coming in through any of these programs who is not gone through a background check process and has opinion vetted. that s our responsibility to the american people. we are grateful to the countries who are providing a place for a number of tens of thousands of people to be for this period of time. we have put a wide range of staff personnel and others on the vetting process from a range of agencies to ensure that we can take steps to expedite as quickly as possible. you re right. some of this is dependent on documents and is dependent on information being available. i will just close with and i may have missed some of your questions. this is incredibly difficult. we re very clear eyed about that. these afghans, many of them who are departing who are still in process made the decision and we
question? any concrete steps that you can give to people worried about whether they will be forgotten, left behind, disappeared once the united states withdraws the military and can no longer protect their safe passage to the airport or other livelihoods? the short answer is no. they will not be forgotten. we will use every diplomatic, economic assistance tool at our disposal working hand in hand with the international community first and foremost to ensure that those who want to leave afghanistan after the 31st are able to do so. as well as deal with other issues that we need to be focused on including counter terrorism and expectations of future afghan government. i mentioned a few moments ago that we got 114 countries around the world to make clear to the
fact it takes a year or two for the typical refugee to meet that burden. how can you not have this and where are you going to put these people? there s a lot of questions wrapped up in there. let me do the best i can. all good questions. first i would say even prior to the last month or two, we took steps to expedite processing in the siv pipeline. i will remind you for quite some time it was a program that was frozen in march of 2020. hardly anything was done. it wasn t a program they supported and also because of covid. as jake sullivan said the other day, it was not a program.