After DC shooting, Trump blames Biden-era Afghan refugee policy

US President Donald Trump attributed the shooting of two National Guard members near the White House by a suspected Afghan national to Biden-era policies that welcomed immigrants without adequate vetting and asserted that lax migration laws pose the greatest national security threat to his country. The two National Guard members are critically wounded and hospitalised. The suspected attacker, 29, who suffered injuries in retaliatory firing, is now in police custody.

The Trump administration, which has been routinely clamping down on migrants with visa irregularities, through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has immediately paused processing requests for emigration from Afghan nationals. “Processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols," the US Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement. ICE has recently come under criticism for its alleged high-handedness and insensitivity in handling family cases.

Earlier, the Department of Homeland Security said that the suspected shooter is a man named Rahmanullah Lakanwal who entered the US in 2021 under a Biden-era initiative for Afghans called Operation Allies Welcome.

Vice-President JD Vance, too, immediately posted on X, lashing out at Biden. “I remember back in 2021 criticizing the Biden policy of opening the floodgate to unvetted Afghan refugees. Friends sent me messages calling me a racist. It was a clarifying moment,” he wrote, adding that “they (many Afghan nationals allowed in under that specific policy) shouldn't have been in our country.” He went on to say, “We're all heartbroken over our brave guardsmen. They're the best in the world, we're lucky to have them, and today is a brutal reminder of what we ask them to do every day.”

The Biden-era programme rehabilitated thousands of Afghans after the US pulled back from Afghanistan since many of them had worked for American troops and diplomats as interpreters and translators, and would have been targeted by the Taliban had they stayed back.

Over 76,000 Afghan people were evacuated to the US, fearing that they were fair game for the Taliban that cruised back to power in Kabul as American withdrew their troops. There were harrowing images back then of hundreds of people running alongside a US Air Force C-17 transport plane as it was about to take off from Kabul airport on August 16. The much-feared Taliban that returned to power after 20 years of American occupation of Afghanistan believes in a strict interpretation of Islam and places excessive restrictions on the movement of women.

In an interview to Open, former US Marine and best-selling author Elliot Ackerman who had served in Afghanistan had repeated what he had written in his book, “The end of our war in Afghanistan represents the end of twenty years of promises: to local leaders who allied themselves with us at great personal risk, to women who’d taken steps toward equality, to Afghan soldiers like Shah who’d fought to keep their country from falling apart, and to the government of Afghanistan itself.”

Trump, who replaced Biden as President early this year, has however been opposed to any such goodwill gesture that would hurt American national security. In fact, speaking after the attack in Washington DC, Trump also spoke about Minnesota where he said Somalians are wreaking havoc and “ripping apart” the fabric of the city. Minnesota is home to around 87,000 Somalians who had come in as refugees over the years.