Trump Broadens Immigration Crackdown Following National Guard Shooting

Read our editorial on the growing reactionization of the U.S. here.

A former CIA collaborator opened fire near the White House on November 26, killing one National Guardsman and injuring another. Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who had received training from and worked under the Central Intelligence Agency during the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, allegedly drove cross-country from Washington state to Washington, D.C., to carry out the attack.

The National Guardsmen were both stationed in D.C. as part of the anti-immigrant crackdown known as the “Safe and Beautiful Mission,” which began in August 2025.

Lakanwal immigrated to the United States in September 2021 through former President Biden’s “Operation Allies Welcome,” part of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 following its defeat to the Taliban.

In Afghanistan, Lakanwal fought in the “Zero Unit”, a death squad trained and sponsored by the CIA responsible for carrying out attacks on civilians and national liberation fighters.

Lakanwal’s family, which includes his wife and five children, have stated to law enforcement that he suffers from PTSD from his CIA work in Afghanistan, demonstrating the pattern of U.S. imperialism betraying the lackeys who do its dirty work.

U.S. government officials are treating the shooting as an “act of terror,” with Attorney General Pam Bondi saying that authorities will do “everything in our power” to seek the death penalty, or minimum of “life in prison with terrorism charges.”

Trump is using the shooting to deepen the current mass deportation drive across the country, posting on social media on Thanksgiving that he “will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” He also said he would “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.”

Defending this policy, top Trump ally and speechwriter Stephen Miller stated on X, “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has already stopped processing cases from Afghanistan. The same day as Trump’s post, the director of that agency, Joseph Edlow, announced “a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern.”

While the full details of this latest hysterical mass deportation campaign remain to be seen, a June 4 presidential proclamation lists Afghanistan, Iran, and Venezuela, among others, as “of concern”—countries that U.S. imperialism has struggled and failed to fully subjugate in recent decades.

Photo: National Guard in Washington D.C. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. G.H. Cureton)

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