President Donald Trump has sharply escalated his efforts to restrict legal pathways to immigration following the killing of a National Guard member near the White House last week.
Law enforcement’s identification of 29-year-old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal as the suspected gunman in last week’s deadly shooting prompted Trump to ramp up his anti-immigrant rhetoric and enact sweeping new restrictions on legal immigration.
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The Trump Administration’s review of immigration processes includes a pause on all asylum decisions, changes to Green Card vetting, and a pause on all visas for Afghans.
Lakanwal, who reportedly worked with the CIA in the U.S. military’s nearly 20-year fight against the Taliban, arrived in America through a Biden-era program, Operation Allies Welcome. The program helped Afghans who worked with the U.S. military or government evacuate the country after the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Lakanwal obtained asylum under the Trump Administration earlier this year. One of the Guardsmen that Lakanwal attacked, Sarah Beckstrom, 20, has died, while the other, Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains in critical condition.
Read more: Trump Calls Shooting of National Guard Members an ‘Act of Terror’ and Launches Immigration Crackdown
Shawn VanDiver, president of nonprofit AfghanEvac, which works with Afghan allies to help resettle, said in a statement on Friday that the Trump Administration is using collective punishment for the actions of one man.
“They are using a single violent individual as cover for a policy they have long planned, turning their own intelligence failures into an excuse to punish an entire community and the veterans who served alongside them,” he said. “This is not a policy dispute. It is a deliberate abandonment of our wartime allies and a breach of America’s word.”
The Afghan Community Coalition of the United States issued condolences to the families of the victims of the shooting, but asked that the country not forget the “twenty years of Afghan-US partnership.”
Here is what we know about the changes the Trump Administration has made so far.
Green Card restrictions
Immediately following the shooting, President Trump said in a post on Truth Social post that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions,” without providing further details on which countries he was referring to.
The same day, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director Joe Edlow said he had directed a “full-scale, rigorous reexamination of every green card for every alien from every country of concern.”
Edlow did not elaborate which countries “of concern” would be reevaluated, but in an email to TIME, the USCIS confirmed that the list stemmed from a June White House proclamation that imposed new travel and visa restrictions on citizens of 19 countries. These countries include Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, all of whom would be “fully” restricted from entry. It also included a second tier of “partially” restricted countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
New guidance from the USCIS, published on Nov. 27, explained that the department will “consider country-specific factors” from these nations. It does not provide examples of what those factors will be.
“My primary responsibility is to ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible,” Edlow said in a statement the day after the attack. “This includes an assessment of where they are coming from and why. Yesterday’s horrific events make it abundantly clear the Biden administration spent the last four years dismantling basic vetting and screening standards, prioritizing the rapid resettlement of aliens from high-risk countries over the safety of American citizens.”
Despite the Trump Administration’s claims that immigrants, including those welcomed under Operation Allies Welcome, were not “vetted,” the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) archived page for the program says that all those admitted went through a “rigorous screening and vetting process,” which was “multi-layered and ongoing,” and included several different agencies.
Pause in asylum decisions
USCIS and Edlow also announced Friday that the United States paused all asylum adjudications until Edlow says the department “can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”
Asylum officers at the USCIS, which is under the DHS, were instructed not to approve, deny or close any asylum applications received, according to CBS News reporting.
Immigrants applying for asylum are those requesting protection out of fear of return to their home country due to persecution, well-founded fear of being persecuted in the future, “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Trump said Sunday that he intends to maintain a pause on asylum decisions for “a long time,” consistent with his Administration’s crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration, and included his attempt to build and carry out the country’s largest mass deportation operation in history.
“We don’t want those people,” Trump said. “You know why we don’t want them? Because many have been no good, and they shouldn’t be in our country.”
Pause on Afghan Visas
Another change has specifically targeted Afghan immigrants as a result of the D.C. shooting: the pause on all visa issuances to Afghan nationals.
“The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on X when the policy was announced on Friday.
Afghan refugees were already facing uncertainty earlier this year after Trump suspended the Refugee Admissions Program when he entered office and implemented travel-ban-related pauses affecting Afghan nationals.
Rubio’s new policy effectively halts, for now, the Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghans, utilized by people who had helped out the U.S. military and government in the war, and had bipartisan support. After the country fell back into the hands of the Taliban, Afghans who fought with the U.S. military had expedited processes for safety, though they still went through vetting processes. The U.S. admitted close to 200,000 Afghans under various humanitarian pathways after 2021.
“It appears Secretary Rubio is attempting to shut down the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program in direct violation of federal law and standing court orders,” VanDiver said in a statement. “Our hearts are absolutely broken for our Afghan allies, who have already endured more trauma, loss, and sacrifice than most Americans can imagine.”
At the end of 2024, over 36 million people in the world were refugees, and close to one in six of them were from Afghanistan, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
The asylum move follows similar moves already underway by the Trump Administration, including a recently reported Reuters memo that ordered a broad review of all refugees who entered under former President Joe Biden, which could reopen cases for thousands who sought U.S. protection.
The post Trump Has Made Sweeping Changes to Immigration Since the D.C. Shooting. Here’s What We Know appeared first on TIME.
