Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the Afghan national suspected of shooting two National Guard members in a Washington, DC terror attack Wednesday, was allowed into the US under a Biden-era resettlement program that Republican lawmakers long warned could pose a threat to Americans.
The alleged shooter was among roughly 90,000 Afghans allowed entry into the US under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome (OAW) and Operation Allies Refuge (OAR) programs, which provided the foreign nationals immigration processing and resettlement support.
Lakanwal, 29, entered under Operation Allies Welcome in September 2021 – amid the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan – and resettled in Bellingham, Washington, law enforcement sources told The Post.
The majority of those Afghan refugees, about 73,500, were granted a two-year parole by the Biden administration – and some later received a two-year extension of their initial temporary immigration status – allowing them to legally live and work in the US.
Roughly 16,500 evacuees were admitted under Special Immigrant Visas or another immigration status.
But almost from the start of the programs, lawmakers had expressed concerns about the screening process for refugees.
“The Biden Administration’s security vetting procedures to clear Afghans entering the country remain unclear and incomplete, and, unless changed, are insufficient to preserve the safety of the American homeland,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) wrote in an October 2021 letter to former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and ex-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Describing the vetting process as “hastily developed,” Ernst warned: “We cannot release a potential terrorist into the United States.”
President Trump described Lakanwal’s attack on the National Guard as an “act of terror” Wednesday night – and the suspected gunman is not the first Afghan national admitted to the US during Biden’s botched withdrawal to be accused of being a terrorist.
In October 2024, the Justice Department charged Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi with plotting an ISIS-inspired Election Day terror attack.
Tawhedi, who entered the US on Sept. 9, 2021, and was living in Oklahoma City on a Special Immigrant Visa, allegedly took steps to stockpile AK-47 rifles and ammunition to carry out an attack on US soil “in the name of ISIS,” according to the DOJ.
If Tawhedi’s case did not confirm the longstanding suspicions from Republican lawmakers, a damning DOJ Inspector General report released in June did.
The report found that US officials discovered at least 55 of Biden’s Afghan evacuees were on a terror watch list.
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“I’ve sounded the alarm about the need to thoroughly vet Afghan evacuee applicants since August 2021,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement at the time.
Grassley went on to slam the Biden administration for “allowing suspected terrorists to enter the United States and roam free for years.”
In July, he claimed that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard informed him that around 1,600 Afghan evacuees “had links to terrorism or other derogatory information” as of August 2022.
The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) identified 55 Afghans who were either already on the terrorist watchlist and made it to a US port of entry or were added to the database during the evacuation and resettlement process, the DOJ IG report found.
Of those, 46 evacuees were eventually removed from the watch list after the FBI determined that they posed no threat to the homeland.
However, nine remained in the terror database as of July 2024 and eight were still in the US.
It’s not yet known if the alleged DC gunman was on any such list or known to law enforcement.
“[A]ccording to the FBI, during OAR and OAW, the normal processes required to determine whether individuals posed a threat to national security and public safety were overtaken by the need to immediately evacuate and protect the lives of Afghans, increasing the potential that bad actors could try to exploit the expedited evacuation,” read the DOJ IG report.
The report noted that the Department of Homeland Security described its screening and vetting process of Afghan nationals as “a multi-layered review, conducted by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals, of evacuee biometric and biographic data along with the U.S. government’s data holdings to identify derogatory information indicating potential threats to national security.”
Under Trump, DHS appears to have been taking requests from Afghan nationals to extend parole on a “case-by-case basis.”
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Afghan migrants, another DHS deportation protection program, was terminated by the Trump administration, effective July.
Following the DC shooting, US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced late Wednesday night that, effective immediately, it was stopping “all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals” indefinitely pending review of vetting protocols.
“The protection and safety of our homeland and of the American people remains our singular focus and mission,” the agency said on X.
The president pledged to “re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden” and take “all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here.
“This attack underscores the single greatest national security threat facing our nation,” Trump said in an address to the nation after the National Guard attack. “The last administration let in 20 million unknown and unvetted foreigners from all over the world.”
“If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them.”
