President Donald Trump’s administration is expanding its immigration crackdown in the aftermath of the shooting of a pair of National Guard members in Washington.
The two guard members remained in critical condition on Thursday after they were shot in an ambush Wednesday near the White House. The suspect is Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, an Afghan national who was subdued and taken into custody shortly after.
Federal authorities have launched a sprawling, nationwide terrorism investigation into what Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for DC, called a “brazen and targeted” attack. Police scoured the scene of the shooting, while authorities searched homes in Washington state and California.
Trump, Vice President JD Vance and others in the administration quickly blamed the Biden administration for letting Lakanwal into the US and seized on the case to push for deeper immigration curbs, including halting reviews of Afghan immigration proceedings and ordering a review of those already in the US. That raises the prospect that settlement rights for Afghan allies of US forces may be curtailed.
“We must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here or add benefit to our country,” Trump said in a recorded video address published by the White House Wednesday.
On Thursday, Joseph Edlow, the head of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in a social media post that his agency, under Trump’s orders, is conducting “a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern.” He didn’t name specific countries.
Even before Wednesday’s shooting, the Trump administration had moved to slash legal migration to the US. Trump’s second term has seen the administration severely lower its refugee cap, end temporary protected status for migrants from numerous countries, impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas heavily used by tech companies and universities to bring over high-skilled workers and revoke thousands of visas. It also plans to review the cases of all refugees resettled under the Biden administration, according to an internal Nov. 21 memo seen by Bloomberg News.
Read More: Trump to Review Refugees Admitted Under Biden in New Crackdown
The calls for further steps came swiftly after Wednesday’s shooting, even as the investigation is in its early stages. Authorities are treating it as a terror case but haven’t publicly described his specific motive. On Thursday morning, they said that interviews and search warrants were still being carried out.
Lakanwal lived in Washington state with his wife and, authorities believe, five children. They say he drove to Washington, DC — a cross-country trip of nearly 3,000 miles — with the intent of carrying out the attack. He then drew a revolver and fired at two national Guard Members from West Virginia, blocks from the White House. The two victims are Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Andrew Wolfe, 24; both remained in critical condition Thursday.
Lakanwal was evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021 around the time of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal. AfghanEvac, a nonprofit group dedicated to supporting resettlement of US allies in Afghanistan, said he served in an elite Afghan counterterrorism unit operated by the CIA with direct U.S. intelligence and military support to support their fight against the Taliban.
Lakanwal arrived in the US in September of that year “due to his prior work with the U.S. government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement.
Lakanwal arrived under humanitarian parole and was granted asylum earlier this year by the Trump administration, according to AfghanEvac.
But the administration’s response raises the prospect that it will seek to block or even revoke status of Afghan nationals who helped US forces fight the Taliban.
The US immediately suspended processing of immigration requests related to Afghan nationals and is reviewing all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration, according to Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary of homeland security.
Trump called for reviewing every person who came to the US from Afghanistan under the Biden administration, while Vance said they will “redouble our efforts to deport people with no right to be in our country.”
And several top aides said that Lakanwal’s work with the CIA and other American agencies should not have meant that he was afforded residency or status in the US.
Ratcliffe said “this individual — and so many others — should have never been allowed to come here” while Attorney General Pam Bondi called Lakanwal a “monster who should not have been in our country” during a Fox News interview Thursday. FBI Director Kash Patel said at the Thursday press conference that “you miss all the signs when you do absolutely zero vetting” and Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for Washington, DC, said “this is what happens in this country when people are allowed in who are not properly vetted.”
But while the Trump administration said it was a failure of vetting, the Afghan settlement rights group said there is vetting and that Lakanwal was a bad apple.
“Afghan immigrants and wartime allies who resettle in the United States undergo some of the most extensive security vetting of any population entering the country,” AfghanEvac President Shawn VanDiver said in a written statement.
The group supports “fully supports the perpetrator facing full accountability” and “rejects any attempt to leverage this tragedy as a political ploy to isolate or harm Afghans who have resettled in the United States,” VanDiver added.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, said the anger over the crime must be directed at the perpetrator and not every Afghan national in the US or seeking to move to the US. “Using this horrific attack as an excuse to smear and punish every Afghan, every refugee, or every immigrant rips at something very basic in our Constitution and many faiths: the idea that guilt is personal, not inherited or collective,” the group said in a written statement.
Aside from immigration reform, the political fallout from the attack could widen. Bondi also signaled that the administration may scrutinize Democrats who had criticized the deployments.
Speaking on Fox News on Thursday morning, Bondi criticized Democratic lawmakers, without naming any, and media figures who have criticized Trump’s use of the National Guard.
“They should be praising our men and women in law enforcement. And we are looking at everything they have said, and why they said it, and if they encouraged acts of violence,” she said, without elaborating.
The administration is already seeking to court-martial Senator Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, after a video in which Democratic lawmakers told US service members that they can refuse unlawful orders. Trump has called the video “seditious” and reposted calls for the lawmakers to be killed.
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, meanwhile, condemned the shooting and pledged that the suspect will be prosecuted, but also hinted at her unease with the deployment. “These young people should be at home in West Virginia with their families,” she said. She didn’t elaborate.
Pirro, separately, declined to discuss the issue. “I don’t even want to talk about whether they should have been there” she said. “We ought to kiss the ground and thank god that the president said it’s time to bring in more law enforcement.”
Politics8 years ago