Officials at the Department of Homeland Security received a congressional subpoena Tuesday after refusing to turn over documentation about the Biden administration's extreme lack of vetting during the catastrophic, August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“Over the course of the last several months, the Committee has made multiple attempts to obtain the requested documents and information cooperatively. Most recently, the Committee followed up on October 3, 2023, with both a telephone call and e-mail, and again on October 17, 2023, with an e-mail regarding the protracted delay in satisfying the Committee’s requests. On October 20, 2023, the Department provided a partial production containing limited data on Afghan evacuees," House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green released in a statement. "Although the production contained 1,601 pages, it is wholly inadequate. For example, 150 pages were either wholly redacted, devoid of content, or illegible. Further, many of the remaining pages appear to be nothing more than scanned printouts from spreadsheets of data that were provided in a format that rendered them indecipherable.”
"While the produced documents provide some basic information regarding Afghan evacuees, they fall well short of what was requested by the Committee," Green continued.
A Department of Defense Inspector General report showed in February 2022 thousands of Afghans who were brought to the United States without proper vetting.
"We found that Afghan evacuees were not vetted by the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) using all DoD data prior to arriving in CONUS. This occurred because Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) enrollments were compared against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) data, which did not initially include all biometric data located in the DoD Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) database and because the DoD’s National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) has agreements with foreign partners that prohibits the sharing of some ABIS data with U.S. agencies outside of the DoD," the report states. "Furthermore, during their analytic review, NGIC personnel identified Afghans with derogatory information in the DoD ABIS database who were believed to be in the United States."
The White House has maintained Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan was a "success" and that proper vetting of Afghans coming to the U.S. was deployed.
.@PressSec Jen Psaki on Afghan refugees: "I can absolutely assure you that no one is coming into the United States of America who has not been through a thorough screening and background check process." pic.twitter.com/tNGNbvEXRS
— The Hill (@thehill) September 1, 2021
Kirby touts security vetting…yikes.
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) April 6, 2023
“A new Department of Defense Inspector General report shows thousands of Afghans who were brought to the United States in the aftermath of President Biden's catastrophic exit from the country were not properly vetted.”… https://t.co/RnTlA1K7Bq