AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We look now at President Trump’s call to pause all asylum decisions after an Afghan man who once worked for the CIA opened fire near the White House last Wednesday, shooting two National Guard members, killing one. Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly killed West Virginia National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom — she was 20 years old — and critically wounded Andrew Wolfe, who is 24.

On Thursday, Trump posted on social media, quote, “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions … Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for — You won’t be here for long!” Trump wrote.

Lakanwal is charged with first-degree murder, will likely face terrorism charges. He previously worked in a CIA-backed Afghan Army unit known as Zero Unit, often called a “death squad” by human rights groups. He entered the United States in 2021 through Operation Allies Welcome, a program that saw the U.S. evacuate thousands of Afghans who faced reprisals from the Taliban over their support of the U.S. occupation. He applied for asylum in 2024 and was granted refugee status last April under the second Trump administration.

Still with us, Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. We’re also joined in Washington, D.C., by Laila Ayub, the executive director of Project ANAR. And in San Diego, California, we’re going to start with Shawn VanDiver, president and board chair of #AfghanEvac.

Shawn VanDiver, this horror that took place in Washington, the shooting of the two National Guardsmen, one of them now dead, an you talk about Trump’s response?

SHAWN VANDIVER: Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me on this morning.

Look, there’s just no question: This is an absolute tragedy. No family should have to deal with the epidemic of gun violence in our country. And it’s awful that we’ve lost one of these National Guardsmen, Miss [Beckstrom], and that Mr. — and that another one is fighting for his life in D.C.

President Trump’s reaction, though, and Kash Patel’s reaction and Kristi Noem’s and Marco Rubio’s is — and JD Vance’s, is all over the place. It’s off base. They shouldn’t be ascribing — they shouldn’t be leveraging this absolute tragedy as a political cudgel to do whatever they were going to do anyways with our immigration regarding our wartime allies and other refugees and asylum seekers from around the world. It’s an unconscionable tragedy that they would leverage the awful experience, the awful incident that occurred there.

And these folks served with us for 20 years. I can’t — I was on BBC last night, and I called them liars, all of them. They’re lying about that he was — whether or not he was vetted. They’re lying about the fact that they approved his entry. This is a case of a tragic breakdown in our mental health system, not a case of messed-up vetting or anything other than that.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who the people are, who you’ve been working on to get into this country, you yourself from the military.

SHAWN VANDIVER: Sure. So, I didn’t serve in Afghanistan. I served all over the world, but not in Afghanistan.

As we go around the world and we fight our wars, the U.S. military and our diplomats and other frontline civilians need support from local people who believe in our mission. And in Afghanistan, over our longest war, over the course of 20 years, hundreds of thousands of people stood up for the idea of democracy, believed in our mission and believed us when we told them, “If you stand with us, we’ll stand with you. If you work with us, you can come become an American. You can have your shot at the American dream.” The Trump administration, the Biden administration, the Obama administration, the Bush administration, everybody has let these folks down.

For the very first time in our country’s history, back in 2021, we, the civil society, stood up with the Biden administration. We dragged them to the right place. We got them to build something called Enduring Welcome, which is the safest, most secure immigration policy in our country’s history. And it represents the very first time that our country was actually answering the call for our wartime allies. It was too slow, but it was working. We were getting 5,000 wartime allies and their families out every month from Afghanistan to a third country. They undergo even more security vetting and then come to the United States of America and start their American dream in a durable pathway.

Before we built Enduring Welcome, Operation Allies Welcome brought about 77,000 Afghans here, but they most — many came on a nondurable status. They came as parolees, or they came as they were awaiting an immigration status, like SIV. Many had to apply for asylum once they got here. And it’s that population that’s been really — everybody’s been stuck in limbo, but this population has been stuck in limbo in the United States. And now they’re being targeted by President Trump’s political stunts at immigration court, and, you know, they’re snatching teachers out of the classrooms. These folks have done nothing but believe us and believe in the idea of America, and we’ve really let them down.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Laila Ayub into this conversation, executive director of Project ANAR. If you can talk specifically about women who have come to this country, who have left Afghanistan, and your concerns about President Trump halting all evaluations of people applying for political asylum in the United States, after the 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and now the Taliban in charge?

LAILA AYUB: Yes. So, this decision to halt or pause all asylum adjudications with USCIS, it is really clearly an extension of this existing agenda that the administration has had towards abandoning the U.S.’s obligations under international and domestic law to offer protection to people. We have been seeing advancements in other countries, particularly for women, for gender-based asylum claims, and earlier this summer, we saw the administration target those kinds of claims.

Now we’re seeing — earlier last week, we saw a directive to reevaluate all of the refugee admissions from under the Biden administration. Now we’re seeing this administration weaponize last week’s tragedy to scapegoat and collectively punish an entire community. First, they made announcements about policies targeting Afghans, including restricting and pausing indefinitely the processing of all immigration applications with USCIS. And then we saw a number of statements that really went beyond that and targeted the 19 countries on the travel ban list, as well as these undefined terms, like “Third World countries,” and broader categories, such as people who are not a net asset to the U.S.

It’s really dehumanizing. It is also illogical and irrational for many reasons, including because refugees and immigrants contribute to this country in so many ways. So, this is an extremely concerning effort to punish all Afghans, all immigrants and people who came here oftentimes as a direct result of U.S. foreign policy and didn’t have really much of a choice left other than to flee their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Lakanwal has a wife and five children. They’re based in Bellingham, Washington. The suggestion is that they would be deported. Where to, do you think, Laila?

LAILA AYUB: Well, we’re seeing that this administration has been — there’s been a pattern of removing people to Third World — to third countries, not to that undefined term of “Third World,” but to third countries. And there’s also deportations to Afghanistan. So, we don’t know what their plan is with this particular family, but what we do know is that in order to accomplish these efforts of large-scale targeting of not just that family, which is not something that, you know, I am particularly aware of, but the Afghan community in general, the immigrant community in general, it requires surveillance and increased militarism, increased policing. And none of these things really keep us safer in our communities here. They just harm more of our neighbors and more of our loved ones.