Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Andrew Wolfe, 24, were sworn in as National Guard members on Tuesday. The following day they were ambushed by an Afghan refugee while on patrol near the White House. As their families spend Thanksgiving at the hospital, it’s worth considering what the tragedy says about the state of the country.
The National Guard’s presence in the capital has been controversial since it began this summer. But blaming the servicemembers’ presence for provoking this monstrous act is inappropriate. The Guard has helped reduce and deter violent crime and is far from menacing. At worst, deploying soldiers to pick up trash is a poor use of resources. President Donald Trump’s decision to call up 500 additional guardsmen to patrol D.C. is a symbolic gesture, not a prelude to fascism.
At the same time, America’s political class has shown little interest in lowering the temperature.
Trump used a televised address to the nation to blame his predecessor Joe Biden for the shooting. The alleged shooter came to the United States in 2021 amid America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. He had cooperated with the CIA in his home country and had been vetted by the American intelligence community. He was granted asylum earlier this year and had a pending application for a Special Immigrant Visa but had not yet been granted lawful permanent residence.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has immediately and indefinitely paused all immigration from Afghanistan. The president announced he will “reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden.” As more details emerge, investigating what signs were missed will be essential. It’s been obvious for years that vetting was insufficiently thorough. The Biden team’s failure to prepare for the fall of Kabul inevitably brought some dangerous people into the country. They should be identified and repatriated.
Yet threatening the status of all 77,000 Afghans refugees who have made America their home is morally bankrupt. Many are people who put their lives and their family’s lives at risk to help the United States, working as interpreters and fighting alongside U.S. troops during the two-decade war.
Helping them secure permanent status in America, which would include further vetting and checks, has been a bipartisan issue in the House and Senate. To punish law-abiding refugees who risked everything to help America is not going to inspire foreign friends in the future. Many deserving Afghans have been waiting for years to get the right paperwork to enter the U.S., and some of their strongest supporters are U.S. veterans.
It was also disingenuous for the president to use a moment of national trauma to draw parallels between new Afghan arrivals and the fraud scheme being perpetrated by Somali immigrants in Minnesota. The nearly 80 people charged with pocketing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars intended to feed needy children took advantage of this country’s most vulnerable cohort.
“If they can’t love our country” Trump said of immigrants, “we don’t want em.” It’s not unreasonable to expect new arrivals to be enthusiastic about their adopted country, and the reality is that most are. Using this incident to suggest otherwise does a disservice to the country.
A week after Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush visited a D.C. mosque to explain that Islam was not America’s enemy, and the religion wasn’t represented by the terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those attacks prompted the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. That became the country’s longest war, and it continues to have a long tail. Neither of Wednesday’s victims was alive on 9/11.
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