In the aftermath of the Wednesday, Nov. 26, National Guard shooting in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump pushed the blame to his favorite scapegoat: the immigrant community. The shooter, who killed one National Guard member and critically injured another, was Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national and former CIA-backed Afghan soldier who entered the United States as part of Operation Allies Welcome, a program to help Afghans who had aided American forces escape the Taliban’s retribution as the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Trump pointed to insufficient vetting of foreign nationals under former President Joe Biden. Ironically enough, a couple of days later, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revealed that Lakanwal was already living in Washington state when he became radicalized, meaning that inadequate vetting had nothing to do with Lakanwal’s entry into the country.
In fact, the vetting process at the time involved countless steps before, during, and after his evacuation and arrival that ensured Lakanwal had no ties to terrorist organizations and did not pose a threat to the U.S. when he entered the country. Trump also failed to acknowledge the fact that his own administration approved Lakanwal’s asylum application in April 2025.
On Friday, Nov. 28, Trump froze all asylum applications and paused visas for Afghan nationals specifically, only a day after he vowed to “permanently pause” migration from what he described as “Third World Countries.” Then, on Tuesday, Dec. 2, he halted all immigration applications from 19 countries in one of his largest restrictions on legal immigration since the beginning of his second presidency.
The baseless fictions that Trump continues to use to justify his harsh immigration policies have contributed to an overly critical — and often warped — public view of immigration. While there are undeniably flaws with the immigration system that have led to decades of largely unchecked illegal immigration, that does not automatically make all immigrants in the country criminals. In a nation built on the concept of a melting pot of immigrant cultures and identities, it’s completely antithetical for Trump to push this notion that any foreign national that he considers “non-compatible with Western Civilization” should immediately be denaturalized and deported.
Trump’s reaction to the National Guard shooting in Washington, D.C., was just one instance of Trump observing one rotten egg in the mix, and swiftly concluding that all of the other eggs must be rotten too. In 2024, the killings of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray by illegal Venezuelan immigrants prompted Trump’s criticisms of Venezuelan immigration into the U.S. under the Biden administration, which he saw as just a mass migration of Tren de Aragua gang members and criminals. And now, his decision to pause specifically Afghan nationals’ visas perfectly illustrates his mindset that because one Afghan national committed a terrorist act, all Afghan nationals must be risks to national security.
Ultimately, the changes that Trump is making to American immigration policies are seeming more and more like a pretext for the implementation of a sweeping anti-immigrant agenda, utilizing specific, high-profile criminal cases that involve immigrants — illegal or not — to call for more stringent enforcement. Without efforts to clarify the reality of the immigration situation and dispel Trump’s manipulated anti-immigration rhetoric, the U.S. risks abandoning the immigrant “melting pot” that the nation’s culture and values were formed by.
