Immigration hard-liners throughout Washington are capitalizing on last week’s shooting of two National Guard members to try to get the Trump administration to restrict more tightly who can enter the United States — far beyond the steps that the White House has immediately taken since the attack.
Several lawmakers and Trump administration officials see the National guard shooting — which was carried out by an Afghan man who had been given asylum — as a chance for a get-tough approach to attaching new layers of screening on would-be migrants and refugees around the world.
They range from requiring in-person interviews for asylum seekers to deporting millions of people the administration claims entered without sufficient vetting from the Biden team. Other Intelligence tips include several additional checks to identify any such links to terror groups.
“Expect a full overhaul of all adjudications,” said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, adding, “We are in a critical moment of vetting foreigners from countries that have presented real threats, and we’ve got to start using common sense.”
The official, who was granted anonymity while speaking about developing plans within the United States government following the shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard that claimed one soldier’s life and seriously injured another, was one in a series of military officials to discuss efforts against ISIS.
“We have to test, and we have to test, and truly it’s a tragedy beyond belief,” said Republican West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice. “If I were President Trump, I’d say, ‘If you think there’s a better way, then fix it because we do not want to see this hot potato again,’” he said.”
Since that shooting, the Trump administration has moved to freeze visa and asylum applications from Afghan nationals. Also, it said it would conduct an audit of green cards issued to people in 19 countries. Trump has also claimed the U.S. needs to “revisit” all Afghans who arrived here under Biden and pledged to “permanently freeze” immigration from “third world countries.”
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem seems eager to go a step further. On the site X, on Monday, she said that she has advised the president to expand travel bans “on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies.”
“There were some discussions already underway about how we revisit some of these cases, how we circulate them to U.S. Attorneys so they can bring better attention to the attacks completed.” It was tinkering around the edges,” said one person close to the administration. “That said, now it’s going to be much more systematic, and I think they’re going to have to put more resources toward it.”
“I would say it’s an inflection point,” the person said.
Some of the proposals insert procedural obstacles. Immigration restrictionists on Capitol Hill are calling for U.S. officials to enforce standards that a government commission established following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to eliminate potential threats to national security.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has called for legislation to restore those challenging screening requirements, said chief among those steps would be a return to in-person interviews with the asylum applicant and broader vetting to ascertain whether an applicant is linked to any terrorist groups.
“Does that take time? But of course it does, and that is precisely the point. I mean, the point is to zero in and make a judgment about each person you’re letting in because who knows how long they’ll be here,” Hawley said in an interview.
The suspected gunman, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was an Afghan national who arrived in the country in 2021 on humanitarian parole. His asylum application was granted in 2025 under the Trump administration.
Although Trump’s administration and several other Cabinet officials claimed in the days after the shooting that the Biden team did “zero vetting” of the official, administration officials later said it was not enough.
It was unclear what led the man, Lakanwal, who had served alongside a CIA-backed paramilitary force in Afghanistan, to conduct the shooting. However, there have been documented reports of mental health problems. Soon after Lakanwal’s arrest, Noem had said that he was “radicalized” within the United States.
Some of the plans being eyed have no precedent. People who work in the National Counterterrorism Center are actively lobbying within the White House on an extreme plan to deport some 2 million people from predominantly Muslim countries who entered the U.S. under Biden — and make them reapply overseas if they want to come back, according to two senior intelligence officials.
The first intelligence official refused to say how the NCTC arrived at the 2 million figure.
The head of NCTC, Joe Kent, has already been floating the notion in public: using that retroactive vetting to deport those who have been “illegally admitted” here under Biden, because it is being discussed on his social media.
“We fully support the mission to clean up the mess made by these horrible decisions of the prior administration, and restore our nation’s proud legacy of being a haven for those fleeing oppression,” said Olivia Coleman, an NCTC spokeswoman.
Coleman also assured that NCTC will remain focused on “identifying those with terrorist connections, thoroughly vetting them, and providing the Department of Homeland Security with the information it needs to remove terrorists from our country.”
The demands for more action are being echoed by veteran implementers of limits on the legal pathways migrants use to enter the United States. They claim that the Biden administration did little to screen visa applicants.
“A lot of them were just, at best, very, very superficially vetted. Most were not properly vetted, I suspect, and we’ve been paying the piper for it. Not only as an attack against the National Guard, but in gang criminally moving into,” said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform think tank in Washington that promotes limits on legal channels to emigrate to America.
Under several administrations, including Biden’s, migrants and asylum seekers have received a general vetting for affiliations with terrorist groups and possible threats they might pose to U.S. national security that can be determined based on information contained in federal databases.
Afghans working with the United States in Afghanistan would have generally initially been screened by military personnel at bases overseas and, therefore, eligible to apply for a special visa. And humanitarian parole was not extended to all Afghan refugees. Many still languish at American bases and refugee camps abroad, hoping for a tiny number of Special Immigrant Visas that would enable them to come to the United States.
The Biden administration’s process, however, drew scorn in a 2022 report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, which found that federal officials “did not always have critical data” to vet Afghan refugees appropriately.
All eight Republicans on the Senate Intelligence panel wrote in a letter Friday that they want acting National Security Adviser Marco Rubio to fully act on the OIG and strip Afghanistan “evacuees” listed as national security threats.
Not all of the White House’s allies are advocating for bold, immediate action. Some Republicans are expressing caution, eager to learn more about the shooter before calling for sweeping changes.
“Secretary Noem says that he was radicalized after he came to the United States, and that may be, but we just don’t have the facts yet,” said Sen.
John Kennedy (R-La.), who has previously advocated for visa programs for Afghans who served the U.S. during its two-decade war there. “We don’t know the facts as to what extent, if any, the President Biden administration vetted the folks. We were assured that all of them would be checked, but we don’t know if they actually were.”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is “working to put in place the most stringent screening and vetting protocols in agency history” to remedy the damage caused by the Biden administration’s “reckless approach” to refugee resettlement, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said. “The Trump Administration is reviewing all immigration benefits granted to aliens from countries of concern under the Biden administration,” McLaughlin continued.
“These are priorities that President Trump promised the American people and is carrying out every day, and the necessary changes to policy will more effectively execute this policy to put America first,” White House spokesman Abigail Jackson said.
A lot of what the administration has done in recent days builds on a series of incremental moves that have increased scrutiny of applications and shrunk pathways to enter the United States legally, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an immigration lawyer and analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
“It’s ratcheting up, but it’s really based on these already extraordinary measures that they’d been putting into place or attempting to put into place,” Bush-Joseph said.
Bush-Joseph said the changes could include a return to rules on asylum put in place during the previous Trump administration. Several of those restrictions were held up in court during Trump’s first term. Still, the administration has already indicated a willingness to overhaul other immigration rules that were stymied by lawsuits back then, such as altering the diversity visa lottery.
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy DHS secretary during the first Trump term, who authored the section of a 2024 Heritage Foundation report that previewed many of Trump’s policy changes since made on immigration, said the administration should adopt three key policies: blocking new applicants from countries where vetting is impossible; re-vetting everyone applying in the U.S. from those nations; and deporting any one who cannot be adequately screened.
It is not yet clear how far the efforts will go to re-screen foreign nationals. At least seven Fairness for All Advisory Council members, three of whom at different times, also led the Office of the President.
This idea was one of them, though the second senior intelligence official cautioned that “a lot of things are floating around right now” in response to the National Guard shooting.
In the meantime, political pressure is building, with even lawmakers who have in the past supported programs that offered Afghans and others who supported the U.S. military entry into this country now saying that greater vetting will be necessary.
“I’m all for letting in those that helped our military into the U.S. I’m pretty darn clear on that,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). “But they have to be properly vetted — and we know that this wasn’t done.”
