WASHINGTON D.C. (THE THURSDAY TIMES) — Specialist Sarah Beckstrom’s killing near the White House has become the catalyst for one of the most aggressive immigration moves of Donald Trump’s presidency, with the United States now preparing to reexamine every green card issued to people from 19 countries that the administration labels “of concern”.
At the president’s direction, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services will conduct what its director, Joe Edlow, called a “full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern”, a process that could unsettle thousands of long settled residents who believed their status to be secure.
At the direction of @POTUS, I have directed a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern.
— USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow (@USCISJoe) November 27, 2025
Pressed to define which nations fall into that category, officials pointed to a June presidential proclamation that lists 19 states across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, including Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. For immigrants from those countries, USCIS said it will now weigh “negative, country specific factors”, such as whether their governments are capable of issuing secure identity documents.
The decision comes in the immediate aftermath of the Washington shooting that left two National Guard members critically injured and prompted a furious political backlash. Officials have identified the suspect as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who once worked alongside the United States government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, and who arrived in 2021 under President Joe Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome after assisting American forces in Afghanistan. He applied for asylum in 2024 and was granted it in April 2025 under the current administration.
Since his name became public, the White House has moved rapidly to extend its immigration clampdown beyond the criminal case. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees USCIS, announced that all immigration requests involving Afghan nationals are now frozen indefinitely while security and vetting procedures are reviewed. Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS assistant secretary, said the administration is also reviewing “all asylum cases approved under the Biden Administration”, signalling a far broader reappraisal of recent migration decisions.
More than 190,000 Afghans have resettled in the United States since the military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, according to State Department figures, many of them interpreters, fixers and contractors who tied their fate to American forces during two decades of war. For those communities, the combination of a processing freeze and the threat of retrospective scrutiny has generated deep anxiety.
Trump has cast the shooting as proof of what he describes as a systemic failure at the border and in the refugee programme. In a video address from his Mar a Lago club, he blamed the Biden administration for bringing the alleged gunman to the United States and said the attack “underscores the single greatest national security threat facing our nation”. He argued that “every single alien” who entered from Afghanistan under his predecessor must now be reexamined and pledged to remove “any alien from any country who does not belong here or add benefit to our country”.
The attacker who critically wounded National Guard members in Washington D.C. is an Afghan national from Afghanistan, a hellhole on Earth, who entered in 2021 on Biden’s refugee airlifts. We will re-examine every such case and deport anyone who endangers our country. If they… pic.twitter.com/hLEP7SbYTv
— The Thursday Times (@thursday_times) November 27, 2025
The new measures dovetail with a pair of Thanksgiving messages in which Trump railed against what he called “politically correct” immigration policies and promised to “permanently pause migration from all Third World countries”, cancel what he labelled “Biden illegal admissions”, cut off federal benefits to non citizens and pursue what he termed “reverse migration”, a large scale effort to expel foreign born residents he views as disruptive.
In those posts he claimed that a foreign population of 53 million people, most allegedly on welfare or linked to failed states and criminal networks, was the “leading cause of social dysfunction in America”, and he promised that anyone who, in his words, hates or undermines the United States “will not be here for long”. The language offered an ideological frame for the concrete steps that followed within hours of the D.C. attack.
Immigration lawyers and civil rights advocates warn that the green card review and asylum rechecks could create a two tier system of permanent residence, where immigrants from certain countries live under constant threat of renewed scrutiny while others do not. They note that green cards are issued after extensive background checks and say reopening settled cases on the basis of nationality risks violating principles of due process and equal protection.
Supporters of the administration argue that the review is a necessary response to a changed security environment and that the government has a duty to reassess risk if new information emerges about particular countries or programmes. They say that if even one attacker slipped through under existing rules, the system should be tightened, not defended.
For now, hundreds of thousands of people from the 19 named countries face an uncertain future. A document that once signified lawful permanent residence has become, for many, a conditional status that can be pulled back into question with a presidential order, and one man’s alleged crime near the White House has become the trigger for a nationwide test of how far the United States is willing to go in the name of security.
