Tipsheet

A Reminder of Biden's Disastrous 'Vetting' of Afghans

Katie Pavlich
Katie Pavlich  |  October 09, 2024 12:15 PM

During the disastrous August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration evacuated thousands of unvetted Afghans and allowed many of them into the United States. At the time, Americans and Afghan interpreters who served the U.S. military in their fight against the Taliban, were left behind. 

The White House reassured Americans Afghans coming to the United States would be vetted, especially given the country is home to ISIS, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. In September 2021, just days after the last U.S. soldier left the country, Press Secretary Jen Psaki said "no one" coming to the U.S. after being evacuated from Afghanistan was unvetted. 

And yet, Tuesday night the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a 27-year-old Afghan national Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi in Oklahoma City. Tawhedi, who is in the U.S. on a Special Immigrant Visa, stockpiled weapons and planned to slaughter Americans on Election Day. 

The Biden administration paroled 77,000 Afghans into the U.S. after the catastrophic exit from the country. According to the Defense Department Inspector General, they were not properly vetted.

"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," a DOD IG report released in February 2022 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."  

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Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lindsey Graham and Senator Chuck Grassley have been warning about this problem for years. 

"The National Counterterrorism Center did not use all the data it should have, leaving dangerous gaps in the screening process. And worse, the administration cannot locate some evacuees with problematic records who were released into the United States before their background checks were completed," the lawmakers have stated. “These processing problems pose serious national security and public safety concerns."

The Biden White House has yet to respond to the arrest of Tawhedi.