The White House is doubling down on its aggressive immigration insurance policies that helped ship President Donald Trump a second time period, launching an interagency federal investigation into the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, DC, whereas additionally directing the administration to take steps to stem migration into the US.
The suspect in Wednesday’s shooting, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan nationwide who got here to the US in 2021 underneath “Operation Allies Welcome,” the Biden-era program to resettle Afghans within the wake of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. He utilized for asylum in 2024, which the Trump administration granted in April 2025.
Starting in 2011, Lakanwal labored with US forces, together with the CIA. A senior US official informed NCS the person had been vetted by intelligence companies and was “clean on all checks” previous to working with US forces and being admitted into the nation.
Lakanwal will face a homicide cost in reference to the shooting.
Within hours of the Wednesday shooting, Trump started laying the groundwork to considerably bolster his crackdown on immigration, one thing that’s been a significant precedence of his return to the Oval Office.
“This heinous atrocity reminds us that we have no greater national security priority than ensuring that we have full control over the people that enter and remain in our country. For the most part, we don’t want them,” Trump stated whereas addressing troops on Thanksgiving from Mar-a-Lago.
Trump and his group consider they’ve a mandate to toughen immigration enforcement, with vows of deporting tens of hundreds of thousands of individuals central to his platform as he returned to the White House. That has included removing flights, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in US cities together with Chicago and Los Angeles and an government order suspending the refugee program, although there has been frustration over lagging immigration arrests.
On Wednesday night, he swiftly forged blame on his predecessor for permitting the suspect into the nation as he known as for the reexamination of each one who entered the US from Afghanistan underneath the Biden administration. Trump has additionally expressed openness to deporting the suspect’s spouse and kids, telling reporters, “We’re looking at that right now – we’re looking at the whole situation with family.”
The president’s pledge solely compounds efforts already underway from his administration. Earlier this week, NCS reported previous to the shooting that the administration was shifting to reinterview sure refugees admitted to the US through the Biden administration as a part of a complete evaluation of their circumstances.
By Thursday, US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow announced that at Trump’s course, he had ordered “a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern.” Asked for extra particulars, together with which international locations are thought-about to be “of concern,” USCIS pointed NCS to 19 international locations listed in a June presidential proclamation, together with Afghanistan, Iran and Venezuela.
Edlow additionally introduced up to date steering that authorizes USCIS officers “to consider country-specific factors as significant negative factors when reviewing immigration requests.” That coverage, USCIS stated in a statement, will permit officers “to more meaningfully assess whether an alien is a threat to public safety and national security.”
Hours later, the president intensified his rhetoric, calling for what he described as “reverse migration.”
“I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries,” Trump stated in a prolonged post to social media late Thursday night, including that he would “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.”
NCS has reached out to the White House and State Department on which international locations would particularly be impacted.
The announcement appeared to mark a significant coverage shift for the nation – however one according to the president’s marketing campaign path guarantees to basically reshape the US immigration system. Trump allies and aides recommended the transfer.
“This will prove to be the president’s most politically popular policy, ever,” said Andrew Kolvet, spokesman for Turning Point USA, the group based by slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk that caters to youth on American campuses.
Advocates, in the meantime, have warned that Trump’s rhetoric and actions may hurt the Afghan neighborhood within the US.
Shawn VanDiver, the CEO of AfghanEvac, stated that the suspect’s “isolated and violent act should not be used as an excuse to define or diminish an entire community.”
More than 190,000 Afghans have resettled within the United States since August 2021, in keeping with the State Department.
Criticism of the administration’s efforts within the wake of the shooting that has claimed the lifetime of a minimum of one of many victims drew a powerful response from Trump’s influential deputy chief of workers — and the highest architect of his immigration coverage.
In response to an op-ed revealed by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board arguing that Afghan refugees “shouldn’t be blamed for the violent act of one man,” Stephen Miller called the assertion “the great lie of mass migration,” whereas offering perception into how he views broadly views immigration.
“You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” he argued.