Immediately following the deadly, heartbreaking Washington shooting that left one National Guard member dead and another hospitalized in serious condition, a recognizable pattern was emerging. Without evidence or thoughtful analysis, an insidious, partisan narrative was spreading on news channels and social media throughout the U.S.: the danger of the unforgiving, ungrateful immigrant.
In that demonizing tale of betrayal, people were being told that the attacker, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan man, was a wily immigrant who managed to outwit several U.S. officials and eventually obtain residency status in the U.S. This single tragedy, we are now told, justifies a sweeping purge of refugees, asylum-seekers and even long-settled immigrants from non-white countries.
But this tale is not only dishonest, but it is also dangerous, incriminating and grossly irresponsible.
The framing of this tragedy, as promoted by unruly right-wing commentators and anti-immigration pundits, is simple: American "kindness" and "generosity" are being taken advantage of by immigrants. Making matters worse, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on X that the suspect was “one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome on Sept. 8, 2021, under the Biden Administration.” This is the fault of the Biden administration, which allowed hundreds of thousands of people to enter the U.S. without proper vetting, and now America is paying the price.
After this bad script, Republican leaders are signaling that they will use the shooting as the pretext to revisit applications, revoke immigration benefits and impose new layers of opaque “security screening” on nearly 200,000 people admitted since 2021. These are individuals who have already endured war, loss and displacement, now forced to relive trauma because fear has become a political currency. Yet, the accusation that the horrendous attack is the predictable consequence of Biden’s "ill-thought-out" immigration policy is manifestly untrue.
CNN, BBC, The Washington Post and many more reputable news sources revealed that Lakanwal was not a distressed civilian begging for asylum. He was part of an elite counterterrorism unit known as the Scorpion Forces, trained, armed and funded with direct CIA intelligence involvement. These shadowy units, created during the long U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, have long been accused by human rights groups of serious human rights violations: extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances and flawed intelligence, leaving thousands of civilians dead. In short, he was a product of America’s military industrial complex and, possibly, a CIA asset.
Still murkier, Lakanwal had worked with U.S. forces since 2011 and entered the U.S. as part of a program called Operation Allies Welcome, a special pathway specifically for those who supported the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and worked directly with the U.S. military or intelligence services.
To put it plainly, Lakanwal’s entry into the U.S. involved a heavily regulated, multilayered security process. Each step required biometric checks, intelligence reviews and in-person interviews. If anything, he was among the most intensely vetted entrants in the modern U.S. immigration system.
This is the inconvenient truth that political leaders want to ignore: The murderous attack is not a result of a rotten immigration policy, but a failed security paradigm. This attack is symptomatic of the catastrophic failure of the U.S. security policy controlled by its military-industrial complex – one that arms, trains and empowers individuals in Afghanistan only to abandon them to years of trauma, battlefield stress and psychological injury.
As of now, investigators have not identified a motive, but the early facts suggest a mentally deranged individual, shaped by war and violence, who broke down and went "cuckoo." The more relevant question is: Why was this not spotted by countless U.S. officials and professionals? Now, this tragedy is being repurposed to justify the targeting of entirely different groups: refugees, legal immigrants and communities with no connection whatsoever to the man or his history.
Unforgiving crackdowns on immigrants have always been justified by majoritarian politicians to distract from accountability. The U.S. has done it repeatedly: the Chinese Exclusion Act, the targeting of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Muslim ban and countless other times. The logic is always the same: the grotesque actions of one become the justification for punishing millions of innocents.
Today, that vicious logic is being revived. But no matter how loudly the fearmongering echoes through American political corridors, the truth remains: The attacker was not a product of a failed immigration system but a byproduct of a failed U.S. war policy that created him. Punishing innocent, law-abiding families from Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan or anywhere else will not change that reality. It will only deepen injustice. The Washington shooting is heartbreaking, but weaponizing it against vulnerable people is an even greater affront.
