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Trump administration officials say they are undertaking a broad re-examination of asylum cases and green cards issued to citizens of certain countries, after the shooting of two national guard members near the White House in Washington DC on Wednesday.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) named the suspect in the shooting as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who entered the US under a policy set up under Joe Biden after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and continued under Donald Trump.
Hours after the shooting US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced processing of immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals was indefinitely suspended pending further review.
The DHS said the administration was expanding that to include a review of all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration. DHS did not clarify whether it is reviewing all asylum cases from only Afghanistan or from other countries, as well.
The USCIS director, Joseph Edlow, said in a statement he was also directing a “full-scale, rigorous re-examination of every green card for every alien from every country of concern,” at Trump’s request.
Edlow’s statement did not specify which countries were considered countries of concern. USCIS pointed at a travel ban Trump imposed in June on citizens of 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Burundi, Laos, Togo, Venezuela, Sierra Leone, and Turkmenistan.
Late on Thursday, USCIS also announced it would start considering “country-specific factors” for applicants from countries included in the travel ban as “significant negative factors” in certain immigration applications.
Trump’s second term in office has been marked by a harsh immigration crackdown, and the president signaled shortly after the shooting that he considered the attack justification to reconsider refugee and asylum status granted under previous administrations.
“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,” the president said on Wednesday. “If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them.”
Speaking from Palm Beach on Wednesday evening, Trump cast the shooting as the result of lax vetting of migrants from Afghanistan, a country that he described as “a hellhole on earth”, a claim echoed by other senior officials, including the FBI director, Kash Patel, and Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia.
The suspect came to the US in September 2021 under an Operation Allies Welcome program that gave some Afghans who had worked for the US government entry visas to the US. The CIA said he worked with CIA military units during the US war in Afghanistan.
Lakanwal was granted asylum this year under Trump, according to a US government file seen by Reuters. He had no known criminal history and the government file said he was vetted because he worked with US government partners in Afghanistan during the war, and no potentially disqualifying information was discovered.
The shooting took place near the Farragut West metro station in the capital city.
The guard members were named as Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Andrew Wolfe, 24. On Thursday, Trump announced the death of Beckstrom. He said thatWolfe was still fighting for his life.
The suspect was also shot and had injuries not believed to be life-threatening, according to a law enforcement official not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.
guard troops have been positioned across Washington since August, when the Trump administration declared a “crime emergency” and ordered them in to support federal and local law enforcement.
There are an estimated 2,375 national guard troops activated in Washington. Trump said in his speech that he directed the rebranded “war department” to send an additional 500 guard members to Washington after the shooting.
The US district judge Jia Cobb recently ruled that Trump’s national guard deployment was likely unlawful and must be halted, but the order does not go into effect until next month. The Trump administration is appealing against the ruling.
Reuters contributed to this report.
