The Biden administration's failure to protect the homeland is once again on full display after an election-day terrorist plot appeared to be thwarted.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department indicted Nasir Ahmad Tauhedi, 27, an Afghan national, for allegedly planning an election-day terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS. Tauhedi had previously resettled in the United States after the Taliban retaken Afghanistan in 2021 following the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
I have previously raised concerns about the administration's front-line scrutiny of Afghans following the chaotic withdrawal of American troops. There was near unanimous agreement that the United States should support the Afghan people who had supported the American war effort and faced retaliation from the resurgent Taliban as a result, but it had also been agreed that the United States should thoroughly thwart the people they had brought with them. There were also serious questions about the White House's willingness and ability to scrutinize the situation. To the United States.
We now know that those concerns are well-founded. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it, given the chaos of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, it's not surprising that “people who probably shouldn't have gotten visas got visas.”
Afghanistan has been a hotbed of Islamic terrorism for decades and was the scene of the plot for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The federal government has a responsibility to scrutinize the background and ideology of people coming to the United States from this part of the world. This is not meant to denigrate the Afghan people. Many of them live under unimaginable oppression and oppression, and some of them are likely to become upstanding US residents. That said, our security services have a duty to recognize the harsh realities of the dangerous world we live in.
Unfortunately, this is not the approach the Biden administration has taken on immigration. Since taking office in January 2021, this administration has shown complete disregard for the safety and security of the American people, allowing millions of foreign nationals to enter the United States without screening.
Beyond his lax approach to refugee resettlement, President Biden has allowed the illegal entry of more than 10 million foreign nationals, many of whom we know nothing about. These illegal crossings include a record number of people on terrorist watch lists. Among them is José Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan national currently on trial for the brutal murder of 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.
The Biden administration's approach to immigration has been to rush as many foreign nationals into the country as possible and leave Americans to deal with the consequences later. In this most recent incident, that approach nearly led to a devastating terrorist attack on election day. In theory, Tauhedi would have been one of the easiest Afghan nationals to scrutinize given his background.
The suspect worked as a security guard for the CIA in his home country before being arrested on suspicion of planning terrorist attacks against the United States. Anyone who knows how difficult it is to get a job in the federal government, much less to get a job at an agency like the CIA, understands how intensive the background checks are to get that job. Dew. The fact that the government could not properly vet someone who worked for one of its intelligence agencies shows how difficult it is to properly vet people in that part of the world, and it is understood It shows why you need to be very careful before accepting people from the country. It becomes a petri dish for terrorism.
This is not the first time the Biden administration's resettlement of Afghan immigrants into the United States has caused problems, and it will not be the last. The laws and culture of countries like Afghanistan are diametrically opposed to the customs of Western civilization, making it extremely difficult for many Afghan immigrants to assimilate into the United States.
There is also the story of an elderly Afghan man who sought refuge in the United States with his child bride. In 2022, one child marriage survivor wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that the Biden administration's resettlement of Afghan refugees could introduce a culture of child marriage in the United States. Opinion polls and surveys also suggest near-universal support for Sharia law among Afghanistan's Muslims.
“Many of the girls who have arrived from Afghanistan in recent months may have been freed from Taliban brutality, but not from families who believe in a culture of forced marriage,” she wrote.
When importing foreign nationals from countries notorious for violence and harsh customs, the federal government has a responsibility to its citizens to conduct strict vetting procedures for each immigrant. This apparently thwarted terrorist plot is the latest sign of the current administration's failure to plan.
Dale L. Wilcox is Executive Director and General Counsel of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to protect the rights and interests of Americans from the negative effects of mass immigration.
