For many Americans, the emotive response to this atrocity is: they shouldn’t have been here. But who “they” refers to differs depending on who you talk to.
Some people who hate Donald Trump think the Guard should never have been in Washington. They were put in harm’s way by the president. It comes dangerously close to saying they brought it upon themselves.
President Donald Trump said he would “permanently pause” migration from Third World countries to the US.Credit: AP
Others think the Afghans should never have been allowed into the US. Vice President JD Vance, who objected at the time, said bluntly: “They shouldn’t have been in our country.”
Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s alleged actions should not tar the 190,000 other Afghans who have resettled in the US since 2021. At such numbers, some people are going to commit crimes. You would hope none would become radicalised. But that’s an omnipresent risk in an open, welcoming society.
It’s a risk many Americans don’t think they should be taking. In this already febrile climate around immigration, the attack has set off a visceral response. And it is not limited to Afghan refugees.
Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff who leads immigration policy in the White House, said any immigrant who had come to the US under the Biden administration was now under the microscope. He raged that millions had been allowed in from “the most failed societies on earth”, naming Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and Iraq.
White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller says the administration will accelerate its deportation drive.Credit: Bloomberg
Miller is not persuaded by the idea that one man’s actions shouldn’t tarnish an entire cohort.
“This is the great lie of mass migration,” he wrote 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.”
Laura Loomer, an influential MAGA personality with the ear of the president, is calling for a permanent ban on Muslims travelling to the US and a rigorous deportation spree. “Raid the mosques and mass deport every single Islamic immigrant non-citizen,” she urged.
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Trump has commenced his response. He announced that he would “permanently pause” migration from what he described as Third World countries, and remove anyone who was not a “net asset to the United States”.
He also said he would end all federal benefits and subsidies for non-citizens, denaturalise migrants who “undermine domestic tranquillity”, and deport any foreign national who was a security risk or was “non-compatible with Western civilisation”.
And US Citizenship and Immigration Services declared all asylum decisions would be paused “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible”.
The finer details remain to be seen. But it’s pretty clear: anyone from a Muslim majority nation – and from anywhere Trump considers a “shithole country” – has a question mark over them.
“For the most part, we don’t want them,” Trump said. “They come in illegally, they have a lot of problems, their countries force them in because their countries are smart – they don’t want them. ‘Let’s give them to the Americans to take care of’.”
In another sign of the broad, emotive response this attack is prompting, Trump took the opportunity to lash out at a Somalia-born Democratic congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, who is “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab and who probably came into the USA illegally”, and rekindled a conspiracy theory that she married her brother.
The shooter in Washington killed an American soldier. He fired directly at the country’s heart, and he targeted one of Trump’s proudest achievements, the deployment of the National Guard.
Fairly or unfairly, many will now pay a price for his despicable actions. It’s likely to get ugly.
