The horrific terrorist attack on National Guard members Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe by a 29-year-old Afghan national has rightly prompted the Trump administration to order a re-vetting of all Afghan nationals who were admitted into the United States since 2021 and a reinvestigation of all immigrants from 19 nations with a high terrorism nexus, including Afghanistan.

However, a small cadre of self-appointed “Afghan rescuers” has sought to paint this terrorist attack as an unfortunate outlier — a byproduct of post-traumatic stress disorder, mental illness, personal vendetta, or statistics — rather than the predictable result of a compromised U.S. vetting process and former President Joe Biden-era open-border immigration policies.

The Thanksgiving week terrorist attack occurred despite the Trump administration’s wise decision earlier in 2025 to pause nearly all refugee admissions under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. However, that decision was undermined by the State Department’s Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts office, which used the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa pipeline and exemptions to the USRAP pause to continue bringing Afghan nationals from the refugee camp in Doha to the U.S. — including this very month.

These actions in defiance of U.S. immigration policy show a naivete of the hostility many Afghans hold toward Western values, as well as their willingness to hide that hostility to improve their families’ economic prospects. In fact, long-standing U.S. refugee policy requires that an applicant must have a well-founded fear of persecution, in this case by the Taliban. Yet U.S. officials have documented cases of Afghan........

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