Senate Holds Hearing on Biden Admin Failures to Vet Afghan Evacuees
On Wednesday, Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) chaired a joint hearing focused on failures in screening Afghan refugees across federal agencies, including the State Department and Department of Defense, during Operation Allies Welcome.
Operation Allies Welcome (OAW) was a resettlement program started under the Biden administration following the collapse of the Afghan central government in August 2021. Following the shoddy retreat from Kabul in August 2021, President Biden designated the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the lead agency in charge of resettling Afghan evacuees. (RELATED: Importing Chaos: The Paradox of Nation-building)
During the initial evacuation, about 97,000 Afghan evacuees were brought to the U.S. to “resettle in American communities,” according to a report from the DHS inspector general. The majority of evacuees, about 77,000, were granted two-year humanitarian parole.
The Biden administration chose speed over safety, at times disregarding the security concerns of its own officials to prioritize the swift absorption of Afghan refugees into American society.
One through line from the hearing: The Biden administration chose speed over safety, at times disregarding the security concerns of its own officials to prioritize the swift absorption of Afghan refugees into American society.
Humanitarian parole grants Afghans a temporary legal presence in the U.S., but it doesn’t provide immigration status or a path to permanent residency. However, OAW parolees are eligible for refugee-like benefits and assistance. To qualify for humanitarian parole, applicants must submit to extensive screenings and remain in contact with respective agencies.
As part of its responsibilities within the larger resettlement of evacuees, the State Department established the Afghan Placement and Assistance (APA) Program to resettle Afghan nationals granted parole, working with “nine resettlement agencies and their 385 local partners.” Resettlement agencies provided “initial relocation support, material needs, and services for 30 to 90 days after the Afghans arrived at their final resettlement location.”
However, once parole was issued, DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were “chiefly responsible for their final resettlement,” according to a report by the State Department’s inspector general.
Three witnesses representing the respective inspectors general of DHS, the Department of Defense (DoD), and the State Department spoke at length about the concurrent deficiencies within the vetting process that raised concerns with lawmakers.
Michael J. Roark, the deputy inspector general for evaluations at the Department of Defense, testified that there were “significant challenges in the interagency effort to enroll, screen, and vet displaced Afghans for possible security threats before they were granted access to the U.S.”
Roark also testified that DoD had failed to implement all of the IG’s recommendations, leaving open the possibility of recurring security issues in the case of another influx of refugees.
Failure to communicate across agencies was a recurring theme of the hearings, as detailed by Craig Adelman, the deputy inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, and Arne B. Baker, a senior official from the State Department currently performing the duties of an inspector general.
DHS was clueless about who was in the country, where they were, and what they were doing.
In one instance, Baker said that the State Department “was unable to confirm the reliability of the number of individuals reported by the State Department as having been evacuated from Afghanistan during the evacuation.” As for DHS, Adelman testified that “In several cases, DHS could not demonstrate that it accurately knew who individuals were, where they were located, whether parole conditions were being met, or whether individuals had unresolved risk indicators.”
These deficiencies are not simply bureaucratic shortcomings or about degrees of efficiency; they represent serious gaps that have direct bearing on public safety, national security, and the public trust in our immigration system,” he added.
In other words, DHS was clueless about who was in the country, where they were, and what they were doing.
Notably, the CIA was absent from the witness list, despite its role in creating the “Zero Units” — Afghan intelligence and paramilitary forces — that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the suspect in the November shooting of two National Guardsmen, belonged to.
There were also no witnesses from several federal agencies under DHS’s umbrella — such as Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — that are responsible for screening, vetting, and inspecting each evacuee before issuing humanitarian parole.
While most of the Afghan evacuees brought into the country received humanitarian parole, some entered through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program. To be eligible for the SIV program, evacuees had to have taken “significant risks to support our military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan,” be “employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government in Afghanistan, or our coalition forces,” or be a family member of someone who served.
Since 2009, the U.S. government has issued 156,000 SIVs to Afghans. State Department officials issued half of those SIVs in the 45 months after suspending Embassy Kabul’s operations. In 2024, the department issued 33,119 Afghan SIVs (7,208 to principal applicants and 25,911 to family), nearly double that of 2023’s total.
By June of 2025, the department had used over 80 percent of the available 50,500 SIV slots for principal Afghan applicants. In December 2025, following the November shooting by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, President Donald Trump issued an executive order suspending the SIV program.
Despite the number of agencies involved, the reports issued by the Inspectors General of DoD, the State Department, and DHS paint a sordid picture of a federal apparatus ill-equipped to handle the number of refugees accepted into the country. To wit, in 2023, the State Department’s OIG noted that the resettlement agencies working with the APA found the “large number of eligible Afghans and their simultaneous arrival raised substantial implementing challenges for the APA Program.”
Additionally, resettlement agency officials “told OIG that the APA Program involved some of the most significant challenges that they had ever faced.” The issues faced by resettlement agencies ran the gamut from “housing and documentation” to “cultural orientation, staffing, program guidance, tracking systems, and medical care.”
Baker confirmed this in his testimony, stating, “[R]esettlement agencies reported difficulty meeting the mental health care needs of Afghan evacuees and recommended that evacuees receive mental health screenings earlier in the process.”
Before his attack in the nation’s capital in November, Lakanwal had reportedly been “struggling with his mental health — often isolating himself in a dark room — in the years after he left Afghanistan and entered the U.S,” according to CBS News.
Organizations receiving resettlement funds were also a topic of conversation for the hearing. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was a specific target of Sen. Hawley’s. Julie Marzouk, founder of Marzouk Evolve Advocacy Consulting, testified that as one of the organizations contracted to resettle Afghan refugees, CAIR received tens of millions of federal dollars with little oversight on how it spent the money.
Marzouk claims that “CAIR, an organization with a thirty-year association with Hamas, was entrusted to vet Afghan applicants for terrorism.” In response, CAIR released a statement, a part of which reads, “Calling in an anti-Muslim bigot and acolyte of the Israeli government to serve as a witness is bad enough. Letting such an individual spew hate without any pushback is unacceptable.
“We stand in solidarity with the Afghan American community and the Afghan refugee committee, and we applaud CAIR California for the work it has done to serve the people of California, including new Californians establishing a better life for their families.”
Since 2021, “over 190,000 Afghans have settled in the United States through the EW program and its predecessor, Operation Allies Welcome,” according to the State Department.
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