The shooting of two National Guard members by an Afghan national just blocks from the White House has set off an especially intense level of fury in President Trump and a new push to step up his anti-immigration policies.
In a series of statements in the two days since the shooting on a Washington street corner, Mr. Trump has cast the incident as exactly what he has warned about and made clear that he intends to use it to pursue an even more maximalist version of his agenda.
In a fiery social media post near midnight on Thanksgiving, he vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and threatened to strip U.S. citizenship from naturalized migrants “who undermine domestic tranquillity.”
He also threatened to “end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country” and deport foreigners deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
Those statements came after he had ordered the administration to review the status of green card holders from 19 nations that he has subjected to a travel ban.
It is not clear what authority Mr. Trump has to follow through on his demands or how he will seek to have them carried out. Under federal law, for example, U.S. citizens can generally only be denaturalized if they are found to have concealed material facts about their background in gaining citizenship or to have misrepresented themselves in the process.
But the ferocity of his response was in keeping with his longstanding views on immigration, race and national identity and what he sees as a direct link from those factors to crime, national security threats and economic distress — even though those links, where they exist, are often tenuous and more complex than he makes out.
The killing of one of the National Guard members and the critical wounding of another is also sure to fuel further debate over the costs and benefits of using the military on the streets of American cities. Mr. Trump has already ordered another 500 National Guardsmen to Washington on top of the roughly 2,000 there already, although a federal judge ruled last week that the initial deployment was illegal.
The shooting and Mr. Trump’s response assure that immigration will remain at the center of American politics heading into the 2026 midterm election cycle and at a time when the White House is on the defensive over issues like the cost of living and the Jeffrey Epstein files.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has been primarily focused on deporting migrants from the United States. But over the last several days he has re-emphasized policies and language that date back to his first term, when he disparaged African countries, and the 2024 campaign, when he singled out groups of migrants and blamed them for crime and other social ills.
Since the shooting, Mr. Trump has seemed to fixate on Somalian refugees in Minnesota in particular.
“We’re not taking their people anymore,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday. The president also inveighed against Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States as a refugee from Somalia. He described her as “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab.”
Asked Thursday at Mar-a-Lago what Somalis in Minnesota have to do with the accused Afghan shooter in Washington, Mr. Trump replied: “Ah, nothing. But Somalians have caused a lot of trouble.”
The shooting has taken on an outsize significance in the story that Mr. Trump tells about the country and the world. The details of the tragedy dovetail neatly with so many of the issues that animated his campaign for president.
The way Mr. Trump talks about immigration invokes tropes about out-of-control crime in big cities and about foreign invaders who take advantage of American hospitality with no intent to assimilate to an American way of life. He repeatedly brings up the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and its border and refugee policies, which Mr. Trump had said all along would result in catastrophe.
When he spoke in Palm Beach on Thursday, he held up a photograph showing Afghans rushing onto a plane leaving their country as its government collapsed in 2021. Such scenes, he said, were incontrovertible proof of what he had been warning about for years.
He downplayed the fact that the suspect in the Washington shooting, an Afghan who had worked with C.I.A.-backed forces to help the United States in Afghanistan, had received asylum from the U.S. government in April, when Mr. Trump was president, according to three people with knowledge of the case who were not authorized to speak publicly. Mr. Trump had an answer ready to go when he was asked about that on Thursday.
“When it comes to asylum, when they’re flown in, it’s very hard to get them out,” he said. “No matter how you want to do it, it’s very hard to get them out. But we’re going to be getting them all out now.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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