Biden’s Reckless Afghan Resettlement Strategy
By Nate Hochman
October 8, 2021
The White House has done little to vet the 40,000 Afghan refugees, most of whom did not work with the U.S. military, it has so far brought to American soil.
At first glance, last week’s bipartisan passage of H.R. 5305 was not particularly unusual. The bill’s stated purpose was bureaucratic in nature: to extend the funding of the federal government after the end of the fiscal year on September 30. It’s the kind of stopgap funding measure that Congress has long preferred over traditional appropriations bills. But H.R. 5305, with the support of 49 Republicans — 34 in the House, 15 in the Senate — enacted more than just the usual funding-extension resolutions for existing government programs. The legislation also included provisions pertaining to the resettlement of more than 95,000 Afghan refugees.
This is a recklessly dangerous initiative, made worse by a persistent lack of transparency — and at times, outright dishonesty — from the Biden administration. Despite the Department of Homeland Security’s assurances that Afghan refugees are “vetted to the same rigorous standards we use during normal refugee and [Special Immigrant Visa] processing,” few of the recently arrived evacuees have even been adequately vetted for security threats, and none have completed the normal refugee-processing requirements. Furthermore, conventional criminal background tests are practically useless given that the vast majority of Afghanistan’s criminal-record database is not digitized and is inaccessible to American security agencies. In essence, the president has extended an invitation to tens of thousands of unknown individuals from a notoriously terror-prone nation to come to the United States — albeit with many of them waiting in another country first — with almost no adequate screening.
“Afghanistan is a particularly bad country to just simply bring people from, because the documentation standards are not very robust,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, tells National Review. “It’s a big country, it’s a rural country, and they don’t have the same documentation standards that we do. Even when we ran the country, we didn’t really have a lot of intelligence on who the good guys or the bad guys were, which is why there were so many ‘green on blue’ attacks.” Green-on-blue violence, shorthand for “insider attacks” perpetrated against U.S.-allied forces by Afghan soldiers or Taliban infiltrators who had previously passed security screening, took 172 lives and wounded 85 more in 2019. The deadly pervasiveness of these attacks is not an argument against accepting refugees, of course, but it does point to profound and systemic issues with our access to background information on Afghan citizens.
“Today, we don’t have access to any in-country information that we didn’t take with us out of Afghanistan, so our ability to actually screen these people is very, very limited,” says Arthur.
This is not an abstract issue: The Biden administration’s porous vetting practices have already had real consequences for Americans. While just over 40,000 of the expected 95,000 Afghans have arrived in the U.S. in the past month and a half, there have already been multiple allegations of sexual assault and abuse perpetrated by refugees on the U.S. Army bases where they are being housed. In the first weeks of September, two recently arrived Afghan men were indicted for federal crimes at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, where 12,500 refugees now reside: Bahrullah Noori, 20, on multiple counts of allegedly sexually abusing victims under the age of 16, and Mohammad Haroon Imaad, 32, for allegedly trying to strangle and suffocate his wife. Later that month, the FBI opened an investigation into reports of an attack on a U.S. servicewoman perpetrated by a group of male refugees at Fort Bliss, N.M.
The White House, for its part, has continued to insist that everything is going according to plan. “We screen and vet individuals before they board planes to travel to the United States, and that screening and vetting process is an ongoing one and multi-layered,” DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said at a National Press Club event in September. If that is true, it does not inspire confidence in the screening and vetting process, given that an Afghan national who had previously been deported after pleading guilty to a rape charge in Idaho was allowed to board a U.S.-bound evacuation flight at the end of August, followed just three weeks later by another evacuee who had been deported after an aggravated-felony conviction. Both convicted felons made it onto flights out of Kabul while American citizens remained stuck in the city, and both were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection only after touching down at Washington Dulles International Airport. Now that they have arrived on American soil, they are afforded a number of rights and protections that make it far more difficult to deport them. And because of legal precedents surrounding the detention of illegal immigrants, they could potentially be released onto American streets if the government fails to prove that they are a security risk or that “there is a significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future” after a six-month grace period.
These issues are the direct result of the Biden administration’s decision to break with long-standing precedent by bringing the refugees to America before fully vetting them, accommodating them in eight U.S.-military-bases-turned-refugee-camps that they are free to move off and onto as they wish; as of a week ago, more than 700 refugees had simply up and left the bases altogether. “This is completely outside of our normal refugee system,” Arthur tells NR, referring to the Biden administration’s vetting process. “This is sui generis, as it relates only to Afghans. The way that it’s supposed to work is: You’re in a refugee camp abroad, and we pick you and bring you to the United States. This is: We bring you to the United States, and then give you government benefits.” The entire project has been facilitated by a generous $6.3 billion in resettlement aid included in H.R. 5305.
Despite the very evident flaws in its refugee-resettlement strategy, the Biden administration has taken measures to weaken our vetting processes with regard to the newly arrived Afghans: The resettlement plan outlined in H.R. 5305, which had the strong backing of the administration, waives an important set of national-security measures concerning the issuance of state driver’s licenses and identification that have been on the books for more than a decade and a half. Those measures were part of the Real ID Act of 2005, which required that applicants for driver’s licenses provide documentation proving their lawful status in the United States, acting on the 9/11 Commission’s finding that “all but one of the 9/11 hijackers acquired some form of U.S. identification document, some by fraud.” But now, even as driver’s licenses are being provided to the newly arrived refugees at taxpayer expense, those same refugees are exempt from certain identification requirements ostensibly mandatory in every state.
At the Biden administration’s request, H.R. 5305 also allows Afghan refugees after a year in the U.S. to apply for green cards, which would allow them permanent residency and put them on a pathway to citizenship. That mass citizenship for the evacuees is a reasonable policy seems to have become the conventional wisdom in many circles without any serious debate. But while the largest part of those arriving at our shores from Afghanistan are undoubtedly decent people who would make good U.S. citizens, a closer look at the integration of Afghan refugees in Europe should make us pause before rushing to welcome them into the American polity en masse.
We should not overly extrapolate from incidents of apparent criminal behavior by Afghan refugees already seen in the U.S. But neither should we ignore them entirely. Indeed, there is other evidence that some Afghan refugees may have trouble adjusting to American cultural norms. Opinion polling shows that large majorities of native Afghans look favorably on forcibly applying sharia law to Muslims and non-Muslims alike and punishing apostates with the death penalty, and hold other views that are incompatible with the American system. In this regard, we shouldn’t overlook the European experience following the influx of Afghan refugees as part of the 2015 migrant crisis. In Austria, where the Syrian and Afghan refugee populations are similar in size, Afghans committed around half of all reported sexual assaults according to statistics a few years ago; Syrians committed fewer than 10 percent.
It might be a plausible argument that the European experience has little bearing on America if these refugees largely had preexisting ties to the U.S. But by all accounts, most of the refugees now residing within our borders did not work directly on behalf of America, despite the White House’s attempts to frame resettlement efforts as an initiative “to support those who have supported this nation.” The State Department itself acknowledged that the majority of interpreters and other holders of Special Immigrant Visas — the visas given to those who aided U.S. military and diplomacy efforts in Afghanistan — were left behind. These are the Afghans who deserve our help and resettlement the most, and we have let them down. As the Washington Post reported, many of the Afghan evacuees have “minimal identification and did not appear to have worked closely with the United States.” Instead, the majority of Afghans are arriving in America on “humanitarian parole,” a classification reserved for those who do not qualify for SIVs or even refugee status. And by all accounts, they are not all the Westernized interpreters and journalists they have been made out to be: Beyond the high-profile reports of assault, there have been credible reports of child brides and other trafficking victims being brought onto U.S. military bases by evacuees.
None of this is to say that Afghan refugees should be rejected outright, but rather to stress the very real reasons to proceed with utmost caution. That the Biden administration has utterly fallen down on the job may not surprise us — we have come to expect this kind of incompetence from progressives — but the 49 Republicans who lent their support for this flawed project should know better. And in light of all the available evidence pertaining to resettlement, the Biden administration’s negligent screening is all the more outrageous.
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