Thousands of legal immigrants are paying for the crimes of one
Imagine you’re a senior in Law School, about to graduate with honors. You spent years working toward your degree and paid thousands in tuition. You had your dream job lined up at a big law firm after graduation and were planning on buying a home.
Two weeks before your graduation ceremony, a student from the School of Business is discovered cheating on an exam. The university president then decides that, to ensure no one else cheats in the future, no degrees will be issued for an indefinite period to anyone in the School of Business, or the School of Medicine, or your school. Your degree is held hostage, along with your dream job and your life projects.
This scenario should strike anyone as grossly unjust. No one should be punished for the crimes of another person—let alone those who have done everything right and followed the rules. Yet that’s what’s happening to many legal immigrants after the Trump administration paused immigration benefits after the shooting of two members of the National Guard by an Afghan asylee. Thousands of immigrants are being punished for the crimes of a single person.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal is charged with shooting two members of the National Guard in November, killing one, Sarah Beckstrom. NBC News reports that, back in Afghanistan, Lakanwal collaborated with the CIA to hunt down Taliban commanders in “highly dangerous missions.” Lakanwal and his peers “were among the most extensively vetted of any Afghans who worked with American forces.” Lakanwal, along with other members of his unit, were evacuated from Afghanistan and granted work permits in the U.S. under the Biden administration. Lakanwal applied for asylum in 2024 and his application was approved this April, under the Trump administration.
The Trump administration claims Lakanwal wasn’t properly vetted by the Biden admin, contradicting statements that the shooter and others who worked with U.S. forces on the battlefield were thoroughly vetted. Lakanwal would’ve also had another round of vetting when he was granted asylum earlier this year, but the administration hasn’t addressed that fact thus far.
It’s extremely unlikely that Lakanwal wasn’t vetted at all. Legal immigration involves multiple layers of screening (biometrics, background and cross-agency checks, repeated reviews). Some speculate that the shooter recently developed mental health issues and became violent, which probably couldn’t have been caught beforehand.
Even then, the administration has decided, in an unprecedented move, to pause immigration applications for people from 19 countries, including Venezuela, Cuba, Somalia, Afghanistan, and others subject to Trump’s travel ban. (At the time of this writing, more countries were being added to the travel ban list and it was unclear whether their immigration benefits would be paused as well.) The administration cited national security concerns for this pause, but they haven’t said what measures they’ll take to improve it.
This move halts immigration applications for individuals seeking to come to America legally, and immigrants who are already legally in the U.S. It includes a pause on green card applications and even citizenship ceremonies. Many people affected have been living peacefully in the U.S. for years or even decades. Many of them are the spouses and parents of U.S. citizens. They are your neighbors, coworkers, and employees.
Pausing immigration benefits is not trivial. It puts lives on hold—immigrants’ and U.S. citizens’ alike. For example, pausing a green card application means that the applicant won’t know for an indefinite amount of time if they’ll be able to continue living in the U.S. Many green card applicants are married to U.S. citizens. Will they be able to live with their spouse in America? What if they have children? It may also mean they can no longer work in the U.S. if their work permits expire. How are they going to sustain themselves and their families? What are their employers going to do when they face the loss of their employees?
Many of these immigrants will be left in legal limbo. In the current climate, that can be terrifying, and some report being scared of what the future may hold.
Citizenship applications and ceremonies have also been paused. Immigrants at this stage have been vetted many times over, and the government knows they don’t pose a threat. These applicants now have no idea if or when they’ll be able to become U.S. citizens, and some may fear another crackdown might imperil their legal status as a whole.
The administration should seriously and objectively assess if their vetting mechanism failed in Lakanwal’s case, and improve those processes if so. But stopping adjudications for hundreds of thousands of people with no connection whatsoever with the killer, many of whom have already been vetted multiple times and who are living in America already, is not a vetting upgrade. It’s collectivization of immigrants and collective punishment. The highest-yield signals of national security threats are highly individual: derogatory information, travel patterns, etc., not collective as the administration is pretending.
This pause puts on hold America’s promise to these legal immigrants who followed every rule to be here, even within a Kafkaesque system that is extremely hard to navigate. The rule of law demands predictable rules, individualized judgments, and proportionate, objective measures, not sweeping changes that negatively impact the lives of thousands.
Agustina Vergara Cid is a SCNG columnist and the author of the Substack “From Her Beacon Hand.” You can follow her on X @agustinavcid