A shooting that left two West Virginia National Guard members dead just blocks from the White House has set off a sweeping policy response from the Trump administration. The suspected gunman, an Afghan evacuee who arrived during the chaotic 2021 withdrawal, has become the catalyst for what officials are calling a comprehensive reexamination of immigration from high-risk nations.

Immediate Halt to Afghan Immigration Processing

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services moved quickly Thursday, announcing that all immigration requests related to Afghan nationals would be frozen indefinitely. The agency said security and vetting protocols need further review, describing homeland protection as "our singular focus and mission."

Director Joseph Edlow took to X to outline the broader directive, writing that he had ordered "a full-scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern" at the president's direction. He made the political stakes clear in a follow-up post, saying "the American people will not bear the cost of the prior administration's reckless resettlement policies."

The Suspect's Background Raises Questions

Authorities identified the shooter as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who came to the United States in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome. That program evacuated tens of thousands of Afghans after Kabul fell to the Taliban. Lakanwal had previously worked with a CIA-backed counterterrorism unit, adding complexity to an already fraught narrative about vetting procedures.

Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News that prosecutors intend to pursue the death penalty. FBI Director Kash Patel said investigators are looking into "any known associates that are either overseas or who are here in the United States of America," according to NPR. He noted that the suspect "had a relationship in Afghanistan with partner forces."

Broad Immigration Crackdown Already Underway

This review builds on policies already in motion. A June memo blocked nearly all immigration and travel from 19 nations, including Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Venezuela. By Tuesday, USCIS had been directed to re-interview approximately 200,000 refugees whose protected status could potentially be revoked, according to internal documents.

Data and Politics Collide

Operation Allies Welcome brought somewhere between 76,000 and 90,000 Afghans to the United States following the Kabul airlift, according to Department of Homeland Security figures. Federal watchdogs later criticized gaps in data collection and vetting during the rushed evacuation, though they acknowledged that agencies did manage to flag some security risks.

The statistical picture is complicated. Long-term research from the nonpartisan Cato Institute calculates that an American's annual chance of being killed by a refugee terrorist on U.S. soil is roughly 1 in 3.3 billion, underscoring how exceptionally rare such incidents are.

President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance argue that statistical rarity misses the point. "I remember back in 2021 criticizing the Biden policy of opening the floodgate to unvetted Afghan refugees," Vance wrote on X Thursday. "They shouldn't have been in our country." The administration is framing the review as a necessary correction to what it characterizes as dangerously lax security standards.