President Donald Trump denounced the shooting of two National Guard members as an “act of terror” in remarks Wednesday night and said the suspect was originally from Afghanistan.
Referring to the “monstrous ambush-style attack just steps away from the White House,” Trump said, “This heinous assault was an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror. It was a crime against our entire nation.”
He did not name the suspect, but said the suspect in the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. Wednesday had come from Afghanistan to the United States in 2021.
“I can report tonight that based on the best available information, the Department of Homeland Security is confident that the suspect in custody is a foreigner who entered our country from Afghanistan, a hellhole on Earth,” the president said, speaking from Palm Beach, Florida.
“He was flown in by the Biden administration in September 2021 on those infamous flights that everybody was talking about, nobody knew who was coming in, nobody knew anything about it,” Trump added.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on social media platform X that “[e]ffective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”
In a post on social media platform X, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote that the suspect “is an Afghan national who was one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome on September 8, 2021, under the Biden Administration.”
According to a 2024 report from the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, about 77,000 Afghans “were granted humanitarian parole into the United States for 2 years” under Operation Allies Welcome.
In 2022, a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report raised concerns about the program, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis authored by Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow; Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center; and Steven Bradbury, who was then a distinguished fellow at Heritage.
They wrote:
The DHS Inspector General reported that the Afghans were not adequately screened, despite Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas’s contrary statements to Congress and the American public, and that DHS failed to track Afghans who independently left the U.S. military bases where they were initially housed. The Inspector General further reported that DHS did not attempt to locate all Afghans who left the bases to verify their compliance with parole conditions.
In 2023, Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, expressed concerns about the program, saying in a statement, “It is inconceivable that proper vetting procedures were followed during the chaos and disarray of the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan and questions remain to the nature of persons enrolled in domestic resettlement programs.”
CIA director John Ratcliffe said that the suspect had worked with the CIA.
“In the wake of the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration justified bringing the alleged shooter to the United States in September 2021 due to his prior work with the U.S. government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar, which ended shortly following the chaotic evacuation,” Ratcliffe told Fox News Digital.
Trump said in his Wednesday night remarks that the “attack underscores the single greatest national security threat facing our nation.”
“The last administration let in 20 million unknown and unvetted foreigners from all over the world … no country can tolerate such a risk to our very survival,” the president added.
Trump added that the suspect’s “status was extended under legislation signed by President [Joe] Biden, a disastrous president, the worst in the history of our country.”
“We’re not going to put up with these kind of assaults on law and order by people who shouldn’t even be in our country,” Trump continued.
“We must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here or add benefit to our country.”
“If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them,” the president said.
Vice President JD Vance wrote on X that he recalled “back in 2021 criticizing the Biden policy of opening the floodgate to unvetted Afghan refugees.”
“Friends sent me messages calling me a racist. It was a clarifying moment,” he added. “They shouldn’t have been in our country.”
“We will first bring the shooter to justice, and then we must redouble our efforts to deport people with no right to be in our country,” the vice president continued.
In his remarks Wednesday night, Trump also called on Americans to remember the two National Guard members and their family and friends in prayer on Thanksgiving.
“This Thanksgiving I ask every family to say a prayer for the great heroes who were so horribly shot—for their loved ones, please, say a prayer.”
