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A brazen ambush just blocks from the White House left a West Virginia National Guard specialist dead and a second soldier fighting for life, and authorities have now charged 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal with first-degree murder and related counts. This was not a random act of street violence — it was an attack on the people sworn to protect the capital and the American people, and it must be treated as such.
In the immediate aftermath, the State Department moved to pause visa issuance for anyone traveling on Afghan passports and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services halted processing of Afghan immigration requests and asylum decisions while security protocols are reviewed. Those are the kind of no-nonsense steps any administration focused on protecting citizens would take after such a deadly breach of public safety.
The suspect’s history only deepens the alarm: officials say Lakanwal worked with U.S. partner forces in Afghanistan and was brought into the country under the post-2021 evacuation effort, later applying for and receiving asylum. That sequence exposes the predictable blind spots of rushed resettlement programs that prioritized speed over thorough vetting.
President Trump and his Homeland Security team have rightly called for an immediate reexamination of vetting and green-card approvals tied to countries of concern, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the Afghan passport visa pause as part of that effort. Hard choices follow hard facts, and when American lives are on the line, secure borders and strict screening aren’t political talking points — they’re national defense.
Patriots who put on the uniform to protect our streets deserve a government that will defend them without apology, and this administration’s rapid response is the sort of decisive action long overdue. For years activists and open-borders ideologues pushed policies that treated national security as secondary to political virtue signaling; now the consequences are plain for all to see. No decent public servant should accept anything less than maximum scrutiny for those coming here from conflict zones.
Of course the left will try to weaponize compassion and yell “xenophobia,” and civil-society groups are already threatening legal fights over the pause. Those complaints ring hollow to any American who believes a federal government’s first duty is to its citizens — and not to risky immigration experiments pushed by previous administrations.
Congress must step up and close the loopholes that let dangerous individuals slip through after mass evacuations and rushed parole programs. Let this be a turning point: strengthen vetting, secure our ports of entry, and put the safety of hardworking Americans and the brave men and women in uniform ahead of ideological agendas.
