The United States on Friday halted all decisions relating to asylum claims and paused visa issuances for Afghan nationals, a day after President Donald Trump posted an anti-immigration screed in which he vowed to “permanently pause” migration from nations he described as “Third World Countries.”
U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services “has halted all asylum decisions until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible,” USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow said in a social media post. In a separate post shortly afterward, the State Department said it has “IMMEDIATELY paused visa issuance for individuals traveling on Afghan passports.”
The decisions come in the wake of Trump’s lengthy social media posts Thursday night in which he railed at migrants, took aim at elected Democratic officials and threatened a wide variety of immigration policy changes, without providing specifics.
The president did not mention Wednesday’s attack on two National Guard members near the White House, but the posts followed days of heightened rhetoric around immigration and refugees from the Trump administration in the wake of the shootings.
The suspected shooter is an Afghan national who underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the U.S., according to people with direct knowledge of the case, The Washington Post reported.
Sarah Beckstrom, 20, an Army specialist, died of her injuries after the attack, which officials described as targeted. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, was critically wounded and remains in hospital.
In the wake of the shootings, the Trump administration had said it would halt processing immigration requests from Afghan nationals indefinitely and would review Afghan nationals who were admitted to the U.S. under the Biden administration. On Thursday, Trump ordered USCIS to reexamine the statuses of green-card holders from 19 countries.
Asylum cases are filed by immigrants in the U.S. who are claiming a fear of prosecution in their home country based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. USCIS handles affirmative asylum cases — those filed by migrants who are not in deportation proceedings — while Justice Department immigration courts deal with what are called defensive asylum applications, from people already facing removal.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said USCIS’s effort to pause affirmative asylum cases would not have a material effect for most people in the pipeline given a huge backlog of cases and long wait times for decisions.
USCIS was reviewing more than 1.4 million pending affirmative asylum claims at the end of 2024, according to federal data, pushing wait times for decisions for many of them to more than a year.
Bier noted that a pause on affirmative asylum cases would seem to be at cross purposes to Trump’s mass deportation campaign because the administration cannot remove people who are legally in the country and awaiting an asylum decision. He suggested the administration could be moving toward enacting stricter policies that would aim to issue blanket denials for most asylum claims.
“Other stuff that’s kind of teased out in the president’s [social media] post is setting that up as well, in terms of foreclosing any legal way to stay in the country, any legal way to come,” Bier said. The administration’s view, he said, is “we’re shutting everything down, all avenues are closed, no matter who you are and what you did.”
In his posts Thursday, Trump aid he would “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” end all federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens, and deport any foreign national “who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.” The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not provide clarification about his comments.
Trump wrote that his threatened changes to immigration policy “will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process.” He repeated accusations against his predecessor, President Joe Biden, though Trump has previously said he has no proof that Biden’s aides used the autopen without Biden’s knowledge or otherwise used it illegally.
The alleged shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, first entered the U.S. in 2021 as part of Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden-era program that helped resettle Afghan nationals following the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem.
Noem previously described Lakanwal as “one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States” after the Taliban resumed rule of Afghanistan.
But in addition to the vetting reported by The Post, Lakanwal was also granted asylum earlier this year, a process that would have brought its own scrutiny, according to #AfghanEvac, a coalition that supported the relocation effort — an assertion the White House did not dispute.
Lakanwal had been part of one of the CIA’s “Zero Units,” The Post has reported, according to several people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation.
The units, which have never been publicly acknowledged by the CIA, carried out missions to kill or capture members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other extremist groups, with intelligence and logistical support provided by the CIA and the U.S. military.
Mariana Alfaro, Karen DeYoung, Arelis R. Hernández, Jeremy Roebuck and Warren P. Strobel contributed to this report.
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