Immigration hawks push for new restrictions in wake of National Guard shooting

Immigration hardliners across Washington are using last week’s shooting of two National Guard members to push the Trump administration to further limit who can enter the U.S., well beyond restrictions the White House has taken in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

A number of lawmakers and Trump administration officials view the shooting — by an Afghan man who’d been granted asylum — as an opportunity for an aggressive effort to load on new layers of screening of would-be migrants and asylum seekers across the world.

Proposals range from mandatory in-person interviews for asylum applicants to deporting millions of people the administration says entered the U.S. without adequate vetting from the Biden administration. Other suggestions include a variety of additional checks to reveal any connections to terror groups.

An administration official said to “expect a full overhaul of all adjudications,” adding: “We are at a critical moment of vetting foreign nationals, not just those from typical countries of concern.”

The official, like others, was granted anonymity to speak freely about the evolving plans within the U.S. government to respond to the shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard that killed one soldier and left another in critical condition.

“We need to screen and screen and screen some more because really and truly this is a tragedy beyond belief,” said West Virginia Republican Sen. Jim Justice. “If I were President Trump, I would say, ‘If you think there’s a better way, then fix it.’”

Since the shooting, the Trump administration has moved to freeze visa and asylum applications from Afghan nationals, and said it will audit green cards issued to individuals from 19 countries. Trump has also said the U.S. must “reexamine” all Afghans who came to the U.S. under Biden, and vowed to “permanently pause” immigration from all “third world countries.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appears eager to go further. She posted on X on Monday that she has recommended the president expand travel bans “on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

“There were some plans already afoot to find ways to revisit some of these cases. It was kind of tinkering around the edges,” said one person close to the administration. “But now, it’s going to be much more systematic, and I suspect they’re going to have to devote more resources to it.”

“I would call it an inflection point,” the person added.

Some of the proposals add procedural barriers. Immigration hawks on Capitol Hill are arguing for U.S. officials to restore standards a government commission convened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to root out potential security threats.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has pushed for legislation restoring those strict screening requirements, argued that chief among those steps would be the resumption in-person interviews for asylum applicants and more rigorous reviews to determine if an applicant has any ties to terrorist organizations.

“Does that take time? Of course it does, which is the point. I mean, the point is to zero in and make a judgment about each person you’re letting in because who knows how long they’ll be here,” Hawley said in an interview.

The alleged shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was an Afghan national who entered the country in 2021 on humanitarian parole. His application for asylum was approved in 2025 under the Trump administration. While Trump and other Cabinet officials alleged shortly after the shooting that the Biden administration did “zero vetting” of him, administration officials later said the vetting was insufficient.

It’s unclear what inspired Lakanwal, who worked with a CIA-backed paramilitary force in Afghanistan, to carry out the shooting but reports have documented mental health concerns. Noem had said shortly after his arrest that Lakanwal was “radicalized” in the United States.

Some of the plans under consideration would be unprecedented in scope. Two senior intelligence officials said that people who work in the National Counterterrorism Center are actively pushing the White House on a hardline plan to deport some 2 million people from mostly Muslim countries who entered the U.S. under Biden — and force them to reapply from abroad if they want to return.

The first intelligence official declined to explain how the NCTC arrived at the figure of 2 million.

Joe Kent, the head of the NCTC, has already floated the idea in public, advocating for retroactively vetting recent arrivals to the U.S. and deporting those “illegally admitted” under Biden on his social media account.

Olivia Coleman, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said NCTC “fully supports the mission to undo the damage caused by the previous administration’s lax vetting standards and get these monsters out of our country.”

Coleman also pledged that NCTC will “continue our efforts to identify individuals with terrorist ties, rigorously vet them, and equip DHS with the intelligence needed to remove these criminals from our country.”

The calls for more action are being amplified by long-time advocates for restricting legal pathways for migrants to enter the United States. They argue that the Biden administration conducted meager screening of visa applicants.

“Many of them were, at best, very, very superficially vetted. Many probably weren’t vetted at all, and we’ve been paying the price for it. Not just with this attack on the National Guard, but in terms of criminal gangs moving in,” said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform think tank in Washington, which favors restrictions on legal pathways to emigrate to the United States.

Under multiple administrations, including under Biden, migrants and asylum seekers have been generally screened for ties to terrorist groups and potential threats they may pose to U.S. national security based on information available in federal databases. Afghan nationals who worked with the U.S. in Afghanistan — and therefore qualified to apply for a special visa — were typically initially vetted by military personnel at bases overseas. And not all Afghan refugees were offered humanitarian parole. Many still wait at U.S. military bases and refugee camps around the world for a small number of Special Immigrant Visas that would allow them to enter the United States.

Still, the Biden administration’s process was criticized in a 2022 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report, which found that federal officials “did not always have critical data” to properly vet Afghan refugees.

In a letter Friday, all eight Republicans on the Senate Intelligence panel urged acting national security adviser Marco Rubio to fully implement the recommendations of the OIG report and to remove Afghan “evacuees” deemed a security risk.

Not all of the White House’s allies are pushing for immediate and dramatic action. Some Republicans are voicing caution, wanting to learn more about the shooter before pushing for major changes.

“Secretary Noem says that he was radicalized after he came to the United States, and that may be, but we just don’t have the facts yet,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who in the past has supported visa programs for Afghans who helped the U.S. in its two-decade war. “We don’t have the facts about the extent to which, if any, President Biden’s administration vetted the folks. We were told they would all be vetted, but we don’t know if that was the case or not.”

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is “working to implement the most rigorous screening and vetting protocols in agency history” as a way to correct damage from the Biden administration’s “reckless approach” to refugee settlement. McLaughlin added that the Trump administration is “reviewing all immigration benefits granted by the Biden administration to aliens from countries of concern.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is “fulfilling his promise every day and any policy changes needed to more effectively achieve” his goal to “put America first and carry out the largest mass deportation operation in history.”

Much of what the administration has carried out in recent days has built on its gradual steps to increase scrutiny of applications and reduce pathways to legally enter the United States, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an immigration lawyer who works as an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

“It’s an escalation, but it’s building on these already extraordinary measures that they had been taking or trying to take,” Bush-Joseph said.  

Among the changes, Bush-Joseph said, could be the reintroduction of rules around asylum introduced during the first Trump presidency. Many of those rules were blocked in the courts during Trump’s first term, but the administration has already shown a willingness to revamp other immigration policies that were hampered by litigation back then, such as changes to the diversity visa lottery.

Ken Cuccinelli, who served as acting deputy DHS secretary during the first Trump administration and wrote the chapter of a 2024 Heritage Foundation report that previewed many of the immigration policy changes Trump has since made, said that the administration should pursue a three-pronged policy of blocking new applicants from countries where vetting is impossible, re-vetting all applicants in the U.S. from those nations and deporting anyone who cannot be properly screened.

How far the efforts will go to re-screen foreign nationals is unclear. The first senior intelligence official said that senior White House officials have been briefed on the plan to deport the 2 million migrants from counterterrorism officials.

The second senior intelligence official cautioned that “a lot of things are floating around right now” in response to the shooting, but confirmed this idea was one of them.

In the interim, the political pressure is bubbling to the surface, as even lawmakers who have historically backed programs that grant Afghans and others who supported the U.S. military entry to the United States are acknowledging a need for more vetting.

“I am all about allowing those that assisted our military passage into the United States. I am very firm on that,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). “But they must be properly vetted and we know that this was not done.”