For Trump, Even the National Guard Shooting Is About Immigration
And he won’t let the facts get in the way of his agenda.
FROM THE MOMENT THE NEWS BROKE of the attack on two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., the commentary has been missing something. It’s been treated as a straight-up terror attack, but it’s not that simple.
Donald Trump’s response was characteristically hysterical and incendiary, immediately labeling the shooting a “terrorist attack” and vowing a day later that he would “permanently pause migration from all third world countries.” In an echo of his response to the San Bernardino attack in 2015 when he declared that we should halt all Muslims from entering the country until we figure out “what the hell is going on,” he announced following the D.C. shooting that:
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. If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them.
But let’s be honest: even if they do love our country, MAGA doesn’t want them. Put a pin in that.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services followed up with an announcement that “Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review,” and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow upped the ante, declaring that the green cards of every alien from “countries of concern” would be subject to a “full scale, rigorous reexamination.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was trotted out for the Sunday shows to claim that the Biden administration was at fault for failing to vet Afghan immigrants sufficiently. Asked to account for why the suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was actually granted asylum under the Trump administration, she offered that he had been radicalized since coming to the United States, apparently not realizing that, if true, that vitiates the argument that Biden is at fault for inadequate vetting. CIA Director John Ratcliffe also seems to have gotten the memo, saying “this individual—and so many others—should have never been allowed to come here. Our citizens and servicemembers deserve far better than to endure the ongoing fallout from the Biden administration’s catastrophic failures.”
The administration and much of the press has treated the despicable attack on the two guardsmen (resulting in Specialist Sarah Beckstrom’s death) as an act of terror because the alleged perpetrator was an Afghan. That may turn out to be right, but at the moment, there is little evidence that the motive was political—or, rather, that it was only political. Though many conservative outlets and the government’s charging documents say that Lakanwal shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he shot Beckstrom and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, that is based on the account of just one MAGA-adjacent reporter. Early scourings of Lakanwal’s social media posts do not hint at radicalization or ties to terrorist organizations.
What the available evidence does show is a desperate refugee who was experiencing a financial and then a mental health crisis. Lakanwal had served with U.S. counterterrorism forces in Afghanistan and had been vetted over and over again. He engaged in fierce firefights against the Taliban and was considered a “stellar soldier.” The U.S. left behind too many of the Afghan allies who served with us. We relied upon Afghans to help us in our war in their country, and many an American veteran has pleaded for the translators, scouts, and fighters who had their backs during the long conflict.
After the U.S. withdrawal, Lakanwal, who had received death threats from the Taliban, was evacuated with his wife and five children and settled in Washington state. But things unraveled when his humanitarian parole expired but his asylum status did not permit him to work. According to a number of accounts from those who interacted with him, his personality turned dark in 2024 as he became desperate about providing for his family. He borrowed from friends and relatives but became increasingly desperate.
None of that excuses his murderous acts, not for a second—but it does cast doubt on the “Islamist terrorist” narrative making the rounds. It’s possible that something made Lakanwal snap and reverse his lifetime opposition to the Taliban, but at this moment, there is no evidence for that.
Lakanwal was reported to feel that the CIA had abandoned him once he arrived in the United States, so he might well have become radicalized, but not in the familiar way; not by Islamists but by the actions of the Trump administration. Days before the shooting in D.C., the Trump administration had announced its intention to review the status of all refugees admitted during the Biden administration. As Shawn VanDiver, founder of AfghanEvac, told NBC, the decision was “unprecedented and cruel” as “these individuals have already passed the most exhaustive vetting processes in the world—multiple agencies, biometric checks, layered security reviews. They rebuilt their lives here. They trusted the system.”
Under Biden, the United States welcomed 200,000 refugees, of whom 76,000 were Afghans. (Under Trump, total refugee admissions have plunged to 7,500, nearly all of them white South Africans.) Every one of those Afghan refugees has solid reasons to fear being deported into the arms of the Taliban.
No one in this feral administration seems to feel the slightest sympathy for people who have escaped persecution and violence. The image of the United States as a beacon of freedom and a haven for the oppressed leaves them cold. But they are happy to exploit a crime to fulfill their agenda regarding immigrants of all stripes.
Trump demonizes immigrants wholesale. On Truth Social, he claimed that “This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.),” and during Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, he ranted about Somalis: “They contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88 percent or something. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
It’s naked bigotry and ignorant to boot. Only a fool would reduce our problems with schools, crime, urban decay, and so on to refugees, who comprise less than less than 1 percent of the population. Oh, and about those “facts”: One report found that 42 percent of Somali immigrants receive food stamps (compared with 30 percent of native-born Americans). Utterly predictable for Trump to simply double a number and lob it like a stink bomb. The tragic murder of those guardsmen is becoming the pretext for something this administration has been pining for—ethnic cleansing, American style.