Do all Afghan refugees need to be vetted again?

Hours after an Afghan national allegedly shot two National Guard members on the streets of Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it would halt the processing of all Afghan refugees’ immigration-related requests.

The announcement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services came less than a week after agency chief Joseph Edlow ordered a review of all refugee cases—not just for those from Afghanistan—from the Biden administration timeframe. Together, the actions highlighted a growing unease in President Donald Trump’s administration over refugees admitted to the United States by his predecessor.

Speaking about the suspect in Wednesday’s shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal “one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome … under the Biden administration.” President Trump, in a speech at Mar-a-Lago Wednesday night, added that Lakanwal entered the United States on one of “those infamous flights that everybody was talking about—nobody knew who was coming in. Nobody knew anything about it.”

Amid what appears to be the kickoff of a widespread federal campaign to scrutinize thousands of refugees already resettled in the United States, Wednesday’s deadly ambush attack on National Guard members has brought into sharp contrast divergent views on the U.S. resettlement program for former Afghan allies. While immigration advocates insist the shooting suspect is an outlier and that all Afghan refugees should not be judged for one man’s actions, others say a reinvestigation of Afghans who came into the United States under Biden is justified.

At a news conference on Thursday, Trump announced the death of Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, one of the two National Guard members shot while on patrol near the White House the day before. (The other victim, Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains hospitalized in critical condition.)

At the news conference, a member of the press asked Trump about a Department of Justice Inspector General Office report that Trump’s DOJ published earlier this year. The June report found that the FBI and other agencies had effectively vetted all Afghan nationals who had entered the country under Operation Allies Welcome. The reporter asked why Trump blamed the Biden administration for Lakanwal’s actions.

“Because they let them in,” Trump said. “Are you stupid?”

Trump later that evening vowed to permanently pause all immigration from what he described as Third World countries. He also claimed that taking immigrants from developing countries had eroded technological gains and saddled U.S. taxpayers with increased welfare costs.

The Biden-era program Operation Allies Welcome was a multi-agency effort that lasted for roughly one year, from August 2021 to October 2022. Its purpose was to evacuate and resettle Afghan refugees into the United States after the disastrous U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul in the Taliban’s takeover of the country.

The program brought in humanitarian parolees as well as Afghans who worked with the U.S. military on the ground in Afghanistan, fighting against the Taliban. It involved a vetting process that took place before individuals came to the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Authorities then flew the individuals to military installations within the United States and connected them with refugee resettlement agencies while USCIS worked to get them access to health insurance and work authorization papers.

Within roughly its first six months, Operation Allies Welcome had brought roughly 90,000 Afghan evacuees into the country. Lakanwal arrived in the United States during the early weeks of the program, according to Noem.

After Operation Allies Welcome wrapped up in late 2022, Operation Enduring Welcome commenced. Unlike Allies Welcome, which was essentially an evacuation mission, Enduring Welcome sought to continue resettling and vetting Afghan refugees coming to the United States. Republican and Democratic members of Congress earlier this year called the program the “safest, most secure legal immigration pathway to the United States.” Only thoroughly vetted individuals were allowed to enter the United States through the program.

Before arriving in the United States and resettling in Whatcom County, Wash., Lakanwal served in an Afghan special operations unit that, at the direction of the CIA, fought against the Taliban. He initially arrived in the United States under humanitarian parole. Lakanwal then applied for asylum, which he received under the Trump administration in April 2025.

During the asylum process, Lakanwal had to complete background checks, biometric and social media vetting, in-person interviews, and an individualized risk assessment regarding his eligibility under U.S. law.

“The Biden administration and the Trump administration vetted him over and over again,” noted Shawn VanDiver, president of AfghanEvac, a nonprofit that advocates for America’s wartime allies from Afghanistan. “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. We don’t know any reason.”

But some say the background checks were not enough. Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, explained that U.S. officials couldn’t properly vet Afghans who came to the United States during Operation Allies Welcome because of conditions in Afghanistan.

“Some of them were vetted more than others,” Vaughan told WORLD. “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, the Biden administration suspended database checks, Vaughan said. There was no way for Americans to verify the identities of individuals coming into the United States because the Afghan government was in chaos and the United States didn’t have diplomatic relations with the Taliban.

“I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think they even had adequate systems that would be reliable for us to verify claims that people were making,” Vaughan said.

In addition to halting Afghan refugees’ immigration requests, USCIS cited Wednesday’s shooting when it said it will allow immigration authorities to consider “negative, country-specific factors” for refugee applicants from 19 countries, including Afghanistan.

VanDiver argued the administration’s clampdown wasn’t because of a single shooter. “That would be stupid,” he said. “If that’s how they reacted to things, then young white men wouldn’t be allowed to do anything.”

He also argued that Lakanwal was responsible for his own actions and other Afghans shouldn’t pay the price for his behavior. “One person doing something bad shows that that person is bad, not their community,” he said. “Overwhelmingly, Afghans have lower crime rates, lower everything than the average American.”

“We believe that the perpetrator should face due justice under the law,” World Relief, a Christian agency that has helped resettle refugees in Whatcom County, told WORLD on Friday. “Regardless of the alleged perpetrator’s nationality, religion, or specific legal status, we urge our country to recognize these evil actions as those of one person, not to unfairly judge others who happen to share those same characteristics.”

The day before the shooting, World Relief issued a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s efforts to review the cases of Afghans and other refugees, calling the maneuver “needless.”

Vaughan from the Center for Immigration Studies agreed that it wasn’t fair to generalize Lakanwal’s behavior as representative of all Afghans who entered the United States under the Biden administration. But she argued it was a wise move for the Trump administration to vet individuals again.

“Plenty of the people who came are happy to be here and will be self-sufficient, fully functioning, and contributing members of our society,” Vaughan said. “But there were also people that we let in that we’ve had problems with.”

VanDiver said he met one Afghan national who had driven 10 hours from Indiana to visit the U.S. Capitol to see if someone would help him bring his wife and children to the United States. The man was separated from his family when he arrived in the United States in August 2021 and resettled in Indiana, according to VanDiver.

“He’s going to be impacted by this,” he said. “He’s been begging for help, and nobody has helped him. These people, we’ve left them in limbo for so long, and it’s just a horrific situation.”

U.S. authorities should not penalize other Afghans and their families just because of Wednesday’s violence, he argued.

“If the shooter was from Missouri, then they wouldn’t be saying all Missourians need to be banned, right? Every community has lunatics and bad apples,” said VanDiver. “What we have to do with those folks is identify them, isolate them, and excise them. We can’t sit around and punish every single Afghan who served our country faithfully.”