Biden Policy Failure Plagues U.S.

In the wake of the shooting of two National Guard soldiers by an Afghan national in our nation’s capital, President Donald Trump ordered that all asylum decisions be paused. The attacker, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, had been granted asylum in the U.S. earlier this year after entering the country under the Biden Administration.

As reported by Fox News:

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced on Friday that it has halted all asylum decisions following the shooting in Washington, D.C., in which an Afghan national was accused of shooting two National Guard members, including one who died from her injuries.

USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow said the asylum decisions would be suspended “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”

“The safety of the American people always comes first,” he wrote on X.

The pause comes amid a broader immigration crackdown signaled by President Donald Trump, who on Thursday vowed to halt migration from “Third World countries” and reverse Biden-era admissions.

Edlow said on Thursday that officials would reexamine green cards issued to immigrants from every “country of concern,” including Afghanistan. USCIS also implemented new national security measures to be considered while vetting immigrants from “high risk” countries.

“I have directed a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern,” he wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security also said it had already halted all immigration requests from Afghanistan and was in the process of reviewing all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration.

Additionally, the Department of State has paused all visas for people traveling on Afghan passports in response to the attack against the National Guard members.

This is one of those moments where policy suddenly becomes painfully real, because this wasn’t an abstract debate. Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot on Wednesday by an Afghan national who came into the country as part of the chaotic 2021 withdrawal. And we now know that one of the Guardsmen has since tragically passed away. The other remains in critical condition.

For many of us, this felt like the nightmare scenario we warned about years ago when the Biden Administration launched Operation Allies Welcome. You’ll remember those images of entire planes loaded haphazardly with evacuees, desperate Afghans trying to cling to the landing gear. Many of them unvetted, with no documented connection to our military efforts in Afghanistan. It was heartbreaking, confusing, and ultimately dangerous. We talked about it extensively in our Revenge of the Taliban documentary. And sadly, what we feared then is now unfolding on our streets years later.

To be clear, I believe most Afghan evacuees were actually decent people fleeing from truly horrific circumstances. But the hard truth is that when you fly tens of thousands of people out of a war zone with almost no vetting, some bad actors slip through. Now we know many individuals from that program were flagged for potential terror ties once they were already inside the United States. And this week, one of those names became the face of a tragic attack on American service members standing post near the White House.

That’s the context for President Trump’s decision to halt all asylum approvals, not just for Afghans, but for every asylum seeker, until the system can be overhauled. And I’ll be honest: I don’t love being at a place where America isn’t able to offer refuge to people who genuinely need it. We are a nation built on that ideal. But when a broken process becomes a national security threat, fixing it can’t be optional. The President has basically said, Let’s stop the conveyor belt until we know who is coming in and why. Hard to argue with that after a week like this.

And honestly, our nation’s asylum system has become a loophole, a shortcut around the traditional immigration process. People would cross, claim asylum, get a court date, get released into the country, and, in many cases, never be heard from again. That’s not compassion. That’s dysfunction. And in the wrong circumstances, that dysfunction gets people killed.

And then you add to this confusion and chaos the continual and increasingly more bizarre campaign coming from several far-Left Members of Congress on Capitol Hill – including former naval officer  and astronaut Senator Mark Kelly (AZ) – encouraging troops to second-guess orders from the President,   based on what might be considered “illegal orders.” It’s been hard to define “illegal orders,” as they’ve still not given a single example of one issued by President Trump.

Over the weekend, Kelly appeared on Meet the Press, where he essentially reiterated his position that service members should be ready to refuse orders on the spot. This isn’t just irresponsible, it’s dangerous. The Uniform Code of Military Justice explicitly requires troops to presume orders are legal unless they are clearly unlawful. In actuality, Kelly is laying the rhetorical groundwork for an impeachment push down the road, and this entire messaging blitz is designed to keep kicking up more confusion and second-guessing.

But even in that swirl of political noise, the core story remains the same: A National Guardsman is dead because we failed to vet people coming into this country. That should never happen. Ever. And that’s why the asylum pause matters. Not because America is turning its back on immigrants, but because America has a higher responsibility to protect those who protect us.

Today’s Sekulow broadcast included more analysis of the President’s pause of the asylum process in the wake of this unconscionable attack on our National Guard. We were also joined by U.S. Special Presidential Envoy Ric Grenell, who weighed in on the attack, how the Biden Administration’s bad policies led to this point, and what he thinks President Trump will do going forward to fix this dangerous problem.

Watch the full broadcast below: