After National Guard Killing, Trump Doubles Down on Afghan Betrayal

Without any of the careful deliberation we should expect from a president, Donald Trump instantly reacted to the National Guard shootings that killed a young woman and left another soldier in critical condition with a tweet:

“I will permanently pause immigration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen.”

He continued elsewhere that he would “end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country and denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility.”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced,

“Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”

At the direction of the president, the agency is to re-examine all people from 19 countries including Afghanistan who hold green card work permits.

Crowd below offering clearance papers to American troops above in hopes of boarding planes to U.S. at Kabul Airport August 28, 2021.

Trump on his Truth Social pledged to…

"remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States or is incapable of loving our Country”.

rushing to extremes

Trump and his administration are precipitously taking these ill-considered actions, affecting tens of thousands of lives of Afghans we rescued from the Taliban, because a single, mentally troubled man turned killer decided to drive across the country to shoot two National Guard troops for reasons as yet unknown.

In any population, there will be those of a criminal bent, those who are mentally ill, true of the Afghans in our country, true among the millions of American citizens. But isolated incidents prove for Mr. Trump that other than white ethnic groups must be bad in their entirety and must be banned from entry or purged if already here. That is the America Donald Trump is deciding for us.

The Associated Press reports that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, married and a father of five, “had been unraveling for years, unable to hold a job and flipping between long, lightless stretches of isolation and taking sudden weekslong cross-country drives” from his home in Bellingham, Washington.

How does this not describe mental illness? How is Trump’s projecting him onto his entire people not the product of an equally ill mind?

CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed that Lakanwal had served as part of an elite CIA-trained counter-terrorism unit alongside American troops in Kandahar, the most dangerous Afghanistan province for being the Taliban’s heartland. He arrived in this country in 2021 and was granted asylum by none other than Donald J. Trump just this April, a fact we won’t hear from him.

Lakanwal is one of about 76,000 Afghans brought to the United States after President Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of August 2021 under a program named “Operation Allies Welcome” (OAW). As this publication reported almost three months before the evacuation:

”President Biden seems only at this last minute to have discovered that we are entirely unprepared to rescue the interpreters, drivers, cultural advisers, security guards — many of whom have been embedded with our troops, living with them at remote firebases, risking their lives on combat patrols, and now face inhuman retribution by the Taliban for their having rendered essential service to the U.S.“

Mr. Trump has no sense of honor or obligation for what is owed to those who assisted our troops. In April he had the Homeland Security Department terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some 9,000 Afghans in the U.S. for whom returning to their country was deemed too dangerous. Now they are to be sent back. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s explanation is imbecilic:

“Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevents them from returning to their home country.”

Their families will be uprooted, gainful employment left behind, and they face an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban where they face imprisonment and very possibly death. The Taliban hunts for those who helped Americans. At organizations such as No One Left Behind and #AfghanEvac, veterans of that war work to get those who helped them out of the country and settled in the U.S. It’s personal, and you can read a segment of our prior article here that tells a few of their stories.

Trump’s edicts subvert their efforts, disallowing entry. As a sociopath, he doesn’t care. In the last few days he has been ending TPS for a number of countries, effectively throwing everyone non-white out of the U.S. with no concern for their lives or what they may be contributing to this country.

It is heartbreaking to think of Sarah Beckstrom, her life ended at age 20 for no reason, as if there could be any, and Andrew Wolfe, 24, still critical, fighting for life. Making it worse, neither of them should have been there,
National Guard troops, brought from regional states to Washington D.C.
to fight crime, were instead used by the president for landscaping
to "beautify" the city.

their National Guard unit called to D.C. because Donald Trump must satisfy his lust for power by commanding the military to bring cities to heel in a nonsensical farce to supposedly fight crime.

The Afghan émigrés were not properly vetted in a resettlement program that was as shambolic as Biden’s Afghanistan departure, Trump and Republican allies say.

In an X post, Noem said the suspect “was one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States.” In response to reporters asking if Biden had erred by letting the suspect into the U.S., FBI Director Kash Patel claimed that there had been “zero vetting”. Vice President JD Vance, also in an X post, said Lakanwal and other Afghan refugees like him came into the U.S. “unvetted” and that “they shouldn’t have been in our country.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said,

”This individual — and so many others — should have never been allowed to come here. Our citizens and service members deserve far better than to endure the ongoing fallout from the Biden Administration’s catastrophic failures.”

And there you have it: the total betrayal of the Afghans who aided our troops and were promised entry into the U.S. in return for risking their lives. Our service members wanted them to come here, their Afghan mates on whom they had so heavily relied. Ratcliffe and the others speak from the ignorance of the lazy who took no trouble to find out about vetting, or, more likely, just lie so as not to deviate from Trump’s pronouncements.

In fact, we dug into this in 2021 and our analysis reported the polar opposite, that tens of thousands of those seeking resettlement were stuck…

“in the bureaucratic hairball of an absurdly copious vetting process that seems not to recognize that these workers had already been screened before their employment and went on to prove their loyalty performing valuable service alongside the military, the diplomatic corps, and contractors.”

They were seeking a Special Immigrant Visa, which Congress authorized in dribs and drabs, while 70,000 were caught in a bureaucratic vetting process that was taking an average of three and a half years for each single applicant.

As for Trump, what better speaks for the stupidity and ill-bred crudity than the exchange with CBS News' Nancy Cordes, who, referring to the Justice Department Inspector General and the Department of Homeland Security, asked:

”Your DOJ IG just reported this year that there was thorough vetting by DHS and by the FBI and by these Afghans who were brought into the U.S. So, why do you blame the Biden administration?”

Trump: Because they let him in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came in on a plane along with thousands of other people that shouldn't be here and you're just asking questions 'cause you're a stupid person."

the real agenda

The sudden closure of all avenues of ingress – sealing all immigration from unspecified third world countries, denaturalization, purges of green card holders, etc. – intimates that Trump is using the travesty that befell two Americans to shut out or expel people from countries other than white, other than Christian, in keeping with the new right-wing criterion that only those with generational roots are the true Americans.