Afghan vetting after D.C. shooting

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: re-vetting Afghan refugees.

Following the shooting of two National Guard servicemembers in Washington, D-C last week… the Trump administration says it will revamp security vetting on refugees who came to the US under the Biden administration, particularly Afghans.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Until then, immigration officials will pause all processing of green card applications, asylum requests, and other immigration-related efforts made by Afghans.

But experts are divided on whether a wholesale re-vetting of Afghans is necessary.

REICHARD: WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

OFFICER: I need everybody to push back please…

JOSH SCHUMACHER: The day before Thanksgiving, a 29-year-old man shot West Virginia National Guard soldiers Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe at a metro stop near the White House. Beckstrom later died from her injuries, while Wolfe remained in critical condition.

While the two soldiers’ condition drew media attention, much of the discourse after centered on the identity of the shooter. Rahmanullah Lakanwal is an Afghan national who came to the United States during the Biden administration in late 2021.

Following the shooting, Trump administration officials claimed that the attack was proof that the Biden administration hadn’t properly vetted Afghan nationals entering the United States after the fall of Kabul.

Here’s President Donald Trump speaking about the shooter just hours after the attack:

TRUMP: He was flown in by the Biden administration in Sept. 2021, on those infamous flights that everybody was talking about. Nobody knew who was coming in, nobody knew anything about it.

Days before the shooting, the Trump administration had already announced plans to re-vet every refugee who came to the United States under President Joe Biden. After the shooting, the administration doubled down on those plans—saying it would halt the processing of all immigration-related requests for Afghan refugees in the United States until extensive re-vetting of Afghan nationals in the country could take place.

Here’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on ABC News’ “This Week” days after the shooting.

NOEM: He was brought into the country by the Biden administration through Operation Allies Welcome and then maybe vetted after that, but not done well.

But some advocates say that’s not the case. They say that the shooter—and other Afghan refugees—were thoroughly vetted by the Biden administration.

Shawn VanDiver is president of AfghanEvac, a nonprofit that advocates for America’s wartime allies from Afghanistan.

VANDIVER: He was brought here by the CIA. And that's the thing is the Trump administration vetted this guy. They granted him asylum in April 2025. The Biden administration and the Trump administration vetted him over and over again.

In Afghanistan, the shooter fought against the Taliban in an Afghan military unit commanded by CIA. He had to undergo vetting before he joined that unit.

After the U.S. military withdrawal in 2021, the shooter was airlifted out in the early weeks of Operation Allies Welcome. That year-long multi-agency effort focused on vetting, evacuating, and resettling Afghan nationals who worked with the U.S. government or who would face persecution under a Taliban regime.

Federal agencies conducted background checks and interviews with people before they arrived in the United States. Afghan arrivals were then cross-checked against federal agency watchlists and subject to intelligence agency background checks. The government also gathered biometric data—such as fingerprints, photos, and iris scans—about each person both before and after they brought them into the United States.

That leads VanDiver and others to suggest that we may be looking at the wrong problem:

VANDIVER: I don't think that there's anything wrong with the vetting. I think that this guy snapped for some reason. We don't know why.

In June 2025—during Trump’s own administration—the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General touted the effectiveness of the vetting strategies the FBI used in Operation Allies Welcome.

That report said the FBI’s counterterrorism teams followed vetting best practices, and in several dozen instances, found individuals who were terrorist threats among the crowds of people trying to enter the US through the program.

But VanDiver says the vast majority of individuals who made it into the US aren’t threats.

VANDIVER: Like, we're not seeing these folks commit crimes in large numbers.

And while other experts agree that, by and large, Afghans as a whole aren’t a threat to society, some do say it would be prudent to find any other “bad apples” that might be out there.

VAUGHAN: Yeah, that’s a very wise move…

Jessica Vaughan is the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies. She told WORLD she supports the Trump administration’s decision to review the cases of Afghans who entered the country during Biden’s time in office.

VAUGHAN: Some of them were vetted more than others, but we do know from congressional investigations and government audits that the vetting process for the Afghan evacuees was changed so as to speed up their entry and release into the United States and that certain protocols were abandoned in the interest of processing people quickly.

Specifically, Vaughan says there was no way to fact-check the identities of anyone who came to the United States through the evacuation program. That’s because, at the time, the Afghan government was in chaos. She adds that she doesn’t think Afghanistan had adequate systems that could reliably verify the claims individuals were making about themselves.

VAUGHAN: No more than 10,000 and I think probably a few less than that were people who had actually worked for the government the US government you know and their family members. Most of the evacuees were just anybody who could get on a plane.

Vaughan says many Afghans who came to the United States are likely good people trying to live good and upstanding lives, but ensuring there are not more bad actors warrants a process to re-vet refugees.

VAUGHAN: We know that procedures were lifted by policy under the Biden administration, that adjudicators were told not to do certain things that were standard practice before. And so we should go back and look at the people that were handled that way. You know, just to make sure, just to see if mistakes were made. I mean, there are always mistakes made.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

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