Friday, November 28, 2025 - Donald Trump has said he will “permanently pause migration from all third world countries,” a day after two national guard members were shot in Washington DC. The attack has rapidly become a political flashpoint in the president’s ongoing crackdown on immigration.
In a social media post, sent after 11pm on Thursday, the US
president said his administration would also “end all federal benefits and
subsidies to noncitizens” and remove “anyone who is not a net asset to the
United States.” The post, which began with “a very happy Thanksgiving,” marks a
major escalation in the anti-migrant policies of his second term, which has
been dominated by a campaign of mass deportations.
Earlier in the night, President Trump announced the death of
Sarah Beckstrom, one of the two guard members shot in the attack close to the
White House on Wednesday. The second guard member, Andrew Wolfe, 24, is still
fighting for his life.
Authorities suspect the shooting was carried out by
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national.
Lakanwal entered the US in September 2021 under a Biden-era
program that evacuated and resettled tens of thousands from Afghanistan
following the chaotic US withdrawal. Reuters reported that he was granted
asylum in April of this year, under the Trump administration, and the CIA
confirmed on Thursday that he had worked with agency-backed military units
during the US war in Afghanistan.
Lakanwal was injured in the attack and remains in custody.
The president’s late-night social media post did not
identify the countries he intended to target or explain what he meant by the
term “third-world.”
Instead, it used blistering anti-immigrant rhetoric to blame
issues like high crime and America’s rising deficit on the presence of migrants
and refugees, without providing evidence.
In his post, the president singled out Somali communities in
Minnesota, following last week’s promise to end temporary protected status for
people from Somalia in the state.
The post comes as the president and members of his
administration have announced sweeping immigration reforms in the wake of the
shooting.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has
indefinitely suspended processing of immigration requests relating to Afghan
nationals pending further review.
The Department of Homeland Security later announced the
administration was expanding this to include a review of all asylum cases
approved under the Biden administration. The department did not clarify if this
review would be limited to Afghan cases or extended to other countries.
The USCIS director, Joseph Edlow, further stated he was
directing a “full-scale, rigorous re-examination of every green card for every
alien from every country of concern,” at President Trump’s request.
Edlow's statement did not specify which countries were
considered "of concern," but USCIS pointed to a travel ban Trump
previously imposed in June on citizens of 19 countries, including Afghanistan,
Burundi, Laos, Togo, Venezuela, Sierra Leone, and Turkmenistan.
It is not clear how the president would enact such a “pause”
in migration, given that previous bans issued by his administration have faced
challenges in the courts and in Congress.
A 2017 travel ban during Trump’s first term was widely
criticized and faced significant legal and popular resistance.
The shooting, Trump claimed earlier in the day, “reminds us
that we have no greater national security priority than ensuring that we have
full control over the people that enter and remain in our country.”
National guard troops have been positioned across Washington
DC since August, when the Trump administration declared a “crime emergency” and
ordered them in to support federal and local law enforcement. Soon after
Wednesday's shooting, Trump said he would send 500 more national guard troops
to the capital.
A federal judge last week had ordered an end to the national
guard deployment but put her order on hold for 21 days to allow the
administration time to either remove the troops or appeal the decision.
0 Comments