It’s a tragedy that two National Guard soldiers were critically injured (one has died) by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan refugee who served with the CIA prior to the withdrawal of United States forces in 2021 following an agreement Trump made with the Taliban to have the withdrawal happen.
UPDATE: An AP story, “Subject in National Guard attack struggled with ‘dark isolation’ as community raised concerns,” makes clear that Lakanwal suffered from mental health problems. There’s no evidence so far that he was radicalized to become a terrorist as the Trump administration is claiming. Excerpt:
The Afghan man accused of shooting two National Guard members blocks from the White House 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. Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s behavior deteriorated so sharply that a community advocate reached out to a refugee organization for help, fearing he was becoming suicidal.
Emails obtained by The Associated Press reveal mounting warnings about the asylum-seeker whose erratic conduct raised alarms long before the attack that jolted the nation’s capital on Wednesday, the eve of Thanksgiving. The previously unreported concerns offer the clearest picture yet of how he was struggling in his new life in the United States.
…The emails described a man who was struggling to assimilate, unable to hold a steady job or commit to his English courses while he alternated between “periods of dark isolation and reckless travel.” Sometimes, he spent weeks in his “darkened room, not speaking to anyone, not even his wife or older kids.” At one point in 2023, the family faced eviction after months of not paying rent.
The community member, in an interview, spoke of becoming worried that Lakanwal was so depressed that he would end up harming himself. But the community member did not see any indication that Lakanwal would commit violence against another person.
But Trump is making the tragedy worse by politicizing the shooting of the two soldiers in Washington, D.C.
He and his administration cronies are blatantly lying in a thinly-veiled attempt to use the shooting as an impetus to further expand Trump’s already cruel deportation of hard-working migrants whose only “crime” is crossing the border illegally in their attempt to find a better life for themselves and their families.
One lie is that Lakanwal was granted asylum in this country with zero vetting. A PBS story says:
The man accused of shooting two National Guard members in Washington is one of about 76,000 Afghans brought to the United States after the chaotic withdrawal of the U.S. from their country as the Taliban took over, authorities said.
The program, called Operation Allies Welcome, was created after the 2021 decision to leave Afghanistan following 20 years of American intervention and billions of dollars of aid.
Democratic President Joe Biden, who oversaw the withdrawal started by his predecessor — Republican President Donald Trump — said the U.S. owed it to the interpreters and translators, the fighters and drivers and others who opposed the Taliban to give them a safe place outside of Afghanistan.
…Lakanwal was granted asylum in April under the Trump administration, according to #AfghanEvac, a group of veterans and others working to get Afghans who helped the U.S. out of the country in exchange for their help.
Like all asylum seekers, he would have had to undergo fingerprinting and iris scans, a full background check and interview and a risk assessment, the organization said.
So around seven months ago the Trump administration found that Lakanwal was entitled to asylum, not finding anything in his background that raised an alarm. Yet now Trump is demanding that all Afghan refugees go through extensive background checks because they supposedly are a threat to our country. My strong suspicion is that the only thing they’re guilty of is having a dark skin color, as that seems to be the main criterion Trump is using to decide which immigrants can remain here, and which must be deported or kept out.
Trump has vowed to permanently pause immigration from what he calls “third world” countries. These are Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. An administration official said:
“Effective immediately, I am issuing new policy guidance that authorizes USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] officers to consider country-specific factors as significant negative factors when reviewing immigration requests,” Edlow said in a post on X, adding: “American lives come first.”
Let’s make that one American life, not lives. Because I couldn’t find evidence that any Afghan refugee other than Lakanwal — there are about 200,000 Afghans in the United States — has ever murdered an American. This might have happened, but it sure didn’t make any national news, based on the Googling I did. Regarding crime rates in general among Afghan refugees, Google AI says:
- Incarceration Rates: Research published by the Cato Institute in 2021 found that native-born Americans were approximately 11.6 times more likely to be incarcerated than Afghan immigrants.
- General Immigrant Crime Data: Broad studies on immigrant populations (across all nationalities) consistently show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or be incarcerated than U.S.-born individuals.
This means that if we want to be safer here in the United States, we need more immigration, not less.
Trump also has been railing against the Somali community in Minnesota for committing fraud against government agencies. Here he’s on slightly better statistical ground, since a New York Times story says that 59 people have been convicted of fraud out of the 80,000 Somaili refugees in Minnesota. Still, that’s just .07%, less than a tenth of a percent of the entire Somali population in that state.
The fraud was substantial, totaling about a billion dollars. However, it makes no sense to vilify an entire immigrant population based on the bad actions of a few people.
After all, about 600 people were convicted or pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement officers in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the nation’s capitol. That’s ten times more than the number of Somalis convicted of fraud. Yet I don’t recall any reasonable person saying that after January 6 we need to look on all MAGA supporters of Trump suspiciously, because they might assault a police officer.
Further proof that Trump is racist comes from the only group he has said deserves asylum in the United States: white South Africans, who really don’t need asylum at all.
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