The Biden administration’s failure to protect our homeland is once again coming into full view after an election-day terror plot was seemingly foiled.
The Department of Justice indicted 27-year-old Afghan national Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi earlier this month, alleging that he was plotting an election-day terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS. Tawhedi had previously resettled in the United States after the Taliban retook Afghanistan in 2021 following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.
I previously raised concerns about the administration’s vetting of Afghan nationals to the forefront following the chaotic American withdrawal. While there was almost unanimous agreement that the United States should help Afghan nationals who aided the American war effort and faced reprisals from the rejuvenated Taliban as a result, there were also serious doubts about the White House’s willingness and ability to thoroughly vet those they were bringing into the United States.
Now, we know those concerns were well-founded. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it, it’s not surprising that “some people got through on visas who probably shouldn’t have,” given the tumultuous pullout from Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has been a hotbed of Islamic terrorism for decades, and was the plotting ground for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The federal government has a responsibility to heavily scrutinize the backgrounds and ideology of anyone who comes to the United States from this part of the world. This is not to denigrate the Afghan people, many of whom live under unimaginable tyranny and oppression, and some of whom would likely make fine U.S. residents. That said, our security services have an obligation to recognize the harsh realities of the dangerous world we inhabit.
Unfortunately, this is not the approach the Biden administration has taken on immigration. Ever since taking office in January 2021, this administration has completely disregarded the safety and security of the American people, waving through millions of unvetted foreign nationals into the country.
Beyond its lax approach to refugee resettlement, the Biden White House has allowed more than 10 million foreign nationals to illegally enter the country, many of whom we don’t know anything about. These illegal crossings include a record number of people on the terror watch list. It also includes Jose Antonio Ibarra, the Venezuelan national currently standing trial for the brutal murder of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student.
The Biden administration’s approach to immigration has been to rush as many foreign nationals as possible into the country and let the American people deal with the consequences later. In this most recent case, that approach nearly led to what could have been a devastating election-day terrorist attack. In theory, Tawhedi should have been one of the easiest Afghan nationals to vet given his background.
Before the suspect was arrested for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack against the United States, he was working as a security guard for the CIA in his home country. Anyone who knows how difficult it is to obtain a job with the federal government — much less a job with an agency such as the CIA — understands how intensive the background checks for those positions are. The fact that the government couldn’t adequately vet someone who worked for one of their own intelligence agencies demonstrates how difficult it is to properly vet people from that part of the world, and shows why extreme caution must be taken before admitting people from nations understood to be petri dishes for terrorism.
This is not the first time the Biden administration’s resettlement of Afghan migrants into the United States has caused problems, and it won’t be the last. The laws and culture of a country such as Afghanistan are diametrically opposed to the customs of Western civilization, which has made many Afghan migrants’ assimilation into the United States very rocky.
There have been stories of older Afghan men who were evacuated into the United States with their child brides. One survivor of a child marriage wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in 2022 arguing that the Biden administration’s resettlement of Afghan refugees could bring a culture of child marriage to the United States. Polling and research also suggest near-universal support among Muslims in Afghanistan for sharia law.
“Many of the girls arriving from Afghanistan in recent months may be free from the brutality of the Taliban, but they are not free from families who believe in a culture of forced marriage,” she wrote.
When importing foreign nationals from countries notorious for violence and draconian customs, the federal government has a responsibility to its citizenry to conduct intense vetting procedures for every single migrant. This apparent foiled terrorist plot is the latest indication the current administration is failing to do so.
Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.
