Trump's Crackdown on Afghan Refugees Won't Make America Any Safer
But it will risk the lives of a lot of Afghans who aren't criminals.
The Trump administration's response to last week's shooting in D.C. of two West Virginia National Guard members has been to double down on its anti-immigration agenda. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national, so President Donald Trump has halted all asylum decisions and paused visas for Afghan passport holders. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has announced that the government is "actively re-examining" all Afghan nationals who entered the country under President Joseph Biden. CBS reports that the administration is thinking of expanding its travel ban from 19 to 30 countries.
"This attack underscores the single greatest national security threat facing our nation," Trump declared after the shootings. The president blamed the Biden administration for allowing "unknown" and "unvetted" migrants to come to the U.S. from Afghanistan—which Trump called "a hellhole on Earth"—and other countries. "No country," he said, "can tolerate such a risk to our very survival," insinuating that immigrants bring crime and violence with them.
Such rhetoric has been used to justify the harshest parts of Trump's mass deportations. Since he took office, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has detained a record-breaking 66,000 individuals—including 600 children—and has skirted many constitutional rights in the process. Yet the data don't support the administration's claim that immigration officials are simply going after the "worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens."
New data leaked to and analyzed by David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, show that of the people taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since October 1, 73 percent had no criminal conviction. Nearly half had no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges; about a quarter had no conviction but did have pending charges. Of those with a criminal conviction, the majority had vice, immigration, or traffic violations. Only 5 percent had a violent criminal conviction.
Since January, the number of individuals arrested by ICE without a criminal record or criminal charge has grown by 1,500 percent.
After learning that the suspect in Wednesday's shooting is from Afghanistan, Trump vowed to "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." This is even less likely to reveal a large number of violent immigrants living among us.
Since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021, nearly 200,000 Afghan nationals have migrated to the U.S. as part of Operation Allies Welcome and its successor, Operation Enduring Welcome—programs designed to resettle Afghans who aided the U.S. during the two-decade Afghanistan War. Another 260,000 Afghans are still waiting to come to the U.S., according to Shawn VanDiver, the president of #AfghanEvac and a proponent of the Afghan refugee programs.
Although the suspect in Wednesday's attack came to the U.S. under Operation Allies Welcome in 2021 after working with the CIA in Afghanistan, refugees who have already come to the U.S. under these refugee programs have been subject to security screenings. Indeed, it was only after Lakanwal arrived in the U.S. that he was radicalized, according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told the Associated Press that refugees are "already the most highly vetted immigrants in the United States." Revetting and reinterviewing the hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees peacefully living in the U.S. is not only cruel, Aly argues, but a "tremendous waste of government resources."
Unfortunately, legal limbo is nothing new for Afghan refugees. Many of them legitimately fear for their lives if they return to Afghanistan after aiding the U.S. Now they face an even more uncertain future.
