A MAN identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal may have doomed the fate of all Afghan refugees in the US. This week, just as Americans were rushing to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday, a shooting took place at a metro station close to the White House.
It is alleged that Lakanwal, who had travelled thousands of kilometres from his home in Washington state, shot a female member of the National Guard, who died later, and a male guardsman. Other National Guard members shot and injured Lakanwal, ending the attack. National Guard members have been deployed in Washington, D.C. since the past several weeks on the orders of President Donald Trump to address what he has called a “crime emergency”.
Reports reveal that 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who entered the US in 2021 through the Operation Allies Welcome initiative, was granted asylum this year. He had worked with the CIA in Afghanistan before the Taliban returned to power. This fact is of no use to the Trump administration that has pounced on the attack as a means of questioning the entry of Afghan refugees fleeing Taliban rule into the US.
In the hours after the attack, officials of the Trump administration, such as FBI director Kash Patel, alleged that thousands of refugees had been admitted to the US under the Biden administration and questioned the vetting process. In fact, refugees and visa holders coming to the US undergo thorough vetting. Politically, this spin on the unfortunate and tragic attack has provided Trump an opportunity to reinforce his anti-immigrant rhetoric — a welcome break for a beleaguered administration under criticism for its poor economic numbers.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Trump stated: “We must now re-examine every single alien who has 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 benefits to our country.” He said, “If they can’t love our country we don’t want them.”
Trump has been given an opportunity to reinforce his myopic stance.
The crackdown then proceeded swiftly. In a post on X, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service announced that “processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely… .”
Media reports say the pause is likely to affect all Afghan nationals trying to stay in the US by seeking asylum or even through a green card. It will even affect Afghans who helped the US in its 20-year war in Afghanistan. Many of them remain stuck in third countries waiting for their visas to be processed through the Special Immigrant Visa programme, one of the few pathways left for Afghan refugees who were promised safety in the US for their role in the war.
On Thursday, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover.”
The crackdown on immigrants has been the centrepiece of this administration’s highly visible and intentionally horrific actions since day one. The attack — while tragic — was not unlike many other shootings that take place daily in the US. But it has given the administration another argument to stop all immigration to the US particularly where it involves black and brown immigrants.
Just a few days before this announcement, the USCIS ordered that Haitians in the US, who enjoyed TPS or temporary protected status owing to the upheavals in that country, would no longer be able to avail it after early next year. The crackdown on Afghans (and there are rumours that this will extend to Somali refugees) fits into the larger Trumpian vision of the United States as a white and Christian nation.
The losers, of course, are the Afghans who chose to side with the Americans and believed that their safety would be assured. This one act committed by one man — who may well be mentally ill rather than radicalised — is enough to doom them all.
Just as the colonists once did so too are the neo-colonists doing — abandoning their promises and rendering the sacrifices made for them worthless as they move on to new missions and forget old wars. This is particularly true given that the ascendance of the Taliban in Afghanistan is a constant reminder to the US that a two-decade war and trillions of dollars were largely a waste of resources and yielded no victory at all.
Thousands of Afghans and others will likely now never get to the US. In a seeming instant, their presence has been tainted, they have been labelled unwanted and they will once again have to find some way to fend for themselves in a hostile and xenophobic world.
Published in Dawn, November 29th, 2025
