“Public News” founder Michael Shellenberger reports on U.S. policy regarding Afghan evacuees resettled in the United States following the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan in 2021.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER, PUBLIC NEWS: Hey everyone, it’s Mike Shellenberger for Public. The 29-year-old Afghan man suspected of shooting two National Guardsmen yesterday in Washington, D.C. was clean on all checks, a senior U.S. official told CNN. The official said that the U.S. government had been doing continuous annual vetting of individuals since the Afghans’ arrival in the U.S., especially in the wake of the failed terror plot disrupted before the election last year in Oklahoma, which involved an Afghan evacuee. But a senior intelligence official told Public there wasn’t adequate screening done of Afghan evacuees. We don’t have good fidelity on who any of them are. We say they’re vetted and he, the suspected shooter, Rahmanullah Lakhanawal, was vetted. That meant we thought he wouldn’t turn his guns on us when we were paying him every month. And that worked for a decade with him. But the second we’re not doing that anymore, the deal on their end changes. Lakhanawal came to the U.S. as part of the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome. Nation-building failed, said the official. We ended up importing massive amounts of people. Some online have asked why the U.S. didn’t return the evacuees and why they were brought to the U.S. in the first place. The average Trump voter is asking, didn’t I vote to kick them out? I think that’s fair, the official said. The person said they were told earlier this year upon entering the intelligence community, you don’t know how bad it is now regarding the government’s inadequate screening of evacuees. The Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security in 2022 published a report warning of security risks among the Afghan evacuees in the U.S. DHS encountered obstacles to screen, vet, and inspect all Afghan evacuees it found. Information was inaccurate, incomplete, or missing. Border Patrol admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States. On November 21st, the Trump administration’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a memo saying it would revoke the refugee status of people who do not meet the criteria and would stop processing applications for permanent residence for all refugees who entered under President Joe Biden, about 233,000 people. The memo noted that the Biden administration had cut corners on properly vetting candidates. The reason the U.S. didn’t find many terrorist ties among evacuees was because they were fighting the Taliban, said the official. If they were fighting the Taliban, we said they’re not terrorists. This individual, Lock on Wall, and the Election Day attacker came up clean. There was no derogatory information on them, so we flew them to the states with no long-term plan. There is evidence that Lock on Wall was mentally disturbed by his participation in an elite CIA-run kill squad known as the Zero Unit, which conducted nighttime operations that included targeted assassinations of high-value targets. A childhood friend of Lock on Wall told the New York Times, when he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it and it put a lot of pressure on his mind. Both Human Rights Watch and the UN published separate reports accusing the Zero Unit of having committed war crimes, including extrajudicial killings, torture, and civilian deaths. You’re never supposed to bring your proxies home, they’re mercenaries. We hire for a very specific purpose. We can’t bring large populations with a drastically different culture here. There was never a moment like, will these guys be good neighbors? It was, can I pay him enough to shoot the enemy and not me? Why did the U.S. government bring so many Afghans to the U.S. in the first place? Was there a better option for them? And what should happen to them now? If you’re not already a subscriber, please subscribe now to support Public’s award-winning investigative journalism to read the rest of the article and to watch the full video.

More of Shellenberger’s reporting:

The 29-year-old Afghan man suspected of shooting two National Guardsmen yesterday in Washington, D.C., was clean on all checks, a senior U.S. official told CNN. The official told CNN that the US government had been doing continuous, annual vetting of individuals since the… pic.twitter.com/OhFOiOWUoN

– Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) November 27, 2025

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