By Shane Croucher and Alia ShoaibShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberA 2021 video in which JD Vance warned about the risks of not properly vetting the Afghan refugees who would enter the U.S. under a Biden administration initiative is resurfacing on social media in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard troops in D.C. on Wednesday by an alleged suspect who used the scheme.
The "Operation Allies Welcome" program allowed Afghans who had helped American forces over the course of the war there to enter the U.S. as the Taliban swept back to power in Kabul and U.S. troops hastily left in a chaotic 2021 withdrawal. It was designed to preserve the lives and safety of Afghans who worked with the U.S. and now faced retribution by the Taliban.
But the Trump administration said the suspect in the D.C. shooting is Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who had worked with the U.S. and entered the country under the Biden initiative. As a result, President Donald Trump said the status of all Afghans who entered the U.S. in the Biden era would be "reexamined".
Vance Cited Suicide Bombing Poll
In the video from August 2021, Vice President Vance—then running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio—cited opinion polling by Pew that he said showed 40 percent of Afghans viewed suicide bombing as an acceptable solution to a problem.
Vance said that the U.S. should "help the Afghans who helped us, but let's ensure that we're properly vetting them so that we don't get a bunch of people who believe they should blow themselves up at a mall because somebody looked at their wife the wrong way."
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His opponents criticized the comments as bigoted and a distortion of the truth at the time, unfairly tainting views of Afghans and their beliefs. But Vance's supporters on social media are shedding fresh light on the video today, saying it was prescient in light of the D.C. shooting.
"Four years ago," said Sebastian Gorka, White House deputy assistant to the president and senior director for the Counter Terrorism National Security Council, in a post on X, resharing the video.
Clay Higgins Demanded Answers
Other Republicans were sounding the alarm about the vetting of Afghans under Operation Allies Welcome at the time. Representative Clay Higgins, the Louisiana Republican who was then ranking member of the Subcommittee on Border Security, raised concerns about the national security implications of the operation.
"Some of these individuals are being paroled into the interior of the United States, or they are even prematurely leaving military bases before undergoing proper and necessary vetting," Higgins told a joint committee hearing of the House on October 21, 2021.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the suspect in Wednesday's National Guard shooting was "one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome on September 8, 2021, under the Biden Administration."
...The DHS described Lakanwal as "a criminal alien from Afghanistan" and called the shooting a "terror attack."
In the 2021 joint committee hearing about Operation Allies Welcome, Higgins raised concerns about the rushed process and limited transparency regarding bringing Afghans into the U.S. He said that Republicans on the Committee on Homeland Security had received "very little information" from the Biden administration about the process.
"As part of our Congressional oversight authority, the committee must address the fallout, including any national security threats, due to the manner in which the United States withdrew from Afghanistan," Higgins said. "Additionally, the committee must also address the screening and vetting process for all Afghans leaving Kabul during the chaotic last days."
Trump Orders Status Review
Trump called for all Afghans who entered the country under the Operation Allies Welcome scheme to be re-examined in a video address on Wednesday.
"We must now reexamine every single alien who’s 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," he said.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services wrote on X that the department was halting the processing of all immigration requests for Afghan nationals indefinitely, pending a review of security and vetting protocols.
Federal agencies are reviewing security and vetting protocols for Afghan nationals, and USCIS has temporarily halted processing new requests. Trump suggested that some Afghans could be removed from the U.S. upon re-examination.
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