On Truth Social, Donald Trump is using the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard members stationed in Washington DC to add to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hysteria. He announced he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and denaturalize migrants “who undermine domestic tranquility.” Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, a major Trump ally, then called for a ban on Muslim immigrants to the United States and the deportation of anyone deemed an “Islamist.”
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the suspect in the of shooting of National Guard members, one of the soldiers has already died and the other is in critical condition, is an Afghani who fought for the United States against the Taliban. Donald Trump and Homeland Security head Kristi Noem were quick to blame Joseph Biden for admitting him into the United States.
Trump charged that Lakanwal “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. His status was extended under legislation signed by President Biden, a disastrous President, the worst in the history of our country.” In her post, Noem charged “The suspect who shot our brave National Guardsmen is an Afghan national who was one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States...under the Biden Administration.”
The reality is that while American allies in Afghanistan were admitted to the United States during the Biden Administration as part of Operation Allies Rescue, it was the February 29, 2020 Doha Agreement with the Taliban negotiated by the Trump Administration that established that the United States would withdraw all of its armed forces including its “allies.”
Lakanwal, did not apply for asylum in the United States until 2024 and it was granted in April 2025 when Donald Trump was President and his appointee Kristi Noem was head of Homeland Security. So Trump was right about one thing. The person to blame for Lakanwal remaining in the United States is the worst President in the history of our country.
Trump’s shared responsibility for the shooting of National Guard soldiers extends back to his first administration when Rahmanullah Lakanwal was a member of a C.I.A.-backed paramilitary group in Afghanistan, one of the secretive Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams or Zero Units. They were trained by the C.I.A. to conduct night raids and clandestine missions and with the certain Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the Zero Units secured U.S. and NATO bases in Kabul. Because of his participation in the Zero Units, Lakanwal entered the United States under Operation Allies Welcome.
The Zero Units were actually death squads and its members including Lakanwal were murders. In a 2019 report, Human Rights Watch documented fourteen cases of “extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances, indiscriminate airstrikes, attacks on medical facilities, and other violations of international humanitarian law” between late 2017 and mid-2019, all while Donald Trump was President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the American Armed Forces. In 2018, one of the Zero Units raided a home in eastern Afghanistan and killed five members of a family including an older woman and a child. In none of the cased documented by Human Rights Watch did the people who were murdered offer resistance.
Lakanwal was 5 years old when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 andhe joined Zero Unit 03 that was headed by a brother when he was a young man. In the United States, Lakanwal, his wife, and their five children lived legally in the State of Washington where he recently was a driver for Amazon Flex. A childhood friend of Lakanwal quoted in the New York Times said he suffered mental health issues as a result of his experience in the Zero Unit. “He would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure.” It is not clear how Lakanwal secured the .357 revolver he used in the attack but because of the Trump administration’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, gun regulations in the United States are lax. In the State of Washington open carry of a weapon is legal without a permit. A new law established that a permit will be required to purchase a gun does not go into effect until May 2027, too lack for the National Guard soldiers shot in Washington DC.
