A report released Sunday morning slipped largely under the radar, drowned out by the horrific shooting at Brown University and the antisemitic terrorist attack targeting Jews celebrating Chanukah in Australia. That’s understandable — but it doesn’t make the information any less damning.
Senior U.S. intelligence officials have now confirmed that President Joe Biden was explicitly warned that hundreds of Afghan nationals with known or suspected terrorist ties were being admitted into the United States without proper vetting. Those warnings weren’t vague. They weren’t hypothetical. And they weren’t buried in bureaucratic noise.
Biden knew — and he chose to ignore them.
According to the report, U.S. officials flagged more than 1,000 Afghan nationals with ties to the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations who were allowed into the country under Operation Allies Welcome — the Biden administration’s rushed resettlement program following its disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. These weren’t vague concerns or after-the-fact suspicions. They were explicit warnings about identified terrorist threats.
Those warnings, however, were ignored. Instead, the Biden White House made a conscious choice to prioritize mass migration over national security, brushing aside intelligence briefings that spelled out the risks in plain English. The result was a deliberate abandonment of the vetting standards that had long been used to protect the American people.
Simon Hankinson, a former diplomat who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained: “The deliberate decision was taken to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghan nationals and their immediate relatives on the premise that the principal applicants had rendered significant service to the US government effort in Afghanistan.” Hankison remarked that, due to the administration’s haste in evacuating families, the U.S. lacked the “time or resources” to guarantee that individuals with links to terrorism were being filtered out and prevented from entering the country.
Despite repeated assurances from Biden administration officials that every Afghan evacuee was subjected to rigorous background checks, the truth turned out to be far more alarming. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general, border agents were left flying blind — lacking “critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees.” In many cases, agents weren’t even given basic information such as names, dates of birth, or travel documents. That’s not vetting. That’s negligence.
This failure takes on renewed urgency in the wake of Sunday’s horrific massacre at Bondi Beach. It is becoming painfully obvious that too many Western governments have thrown open their doors to Islamist migrants without due diligence, all in the name of diversity signaling. When governments refuse to do their most basic job — protecting their citizens — it is ordinary people who pay the price in blood.
Here in the United States, the consequences of Biden’s recklessness are no longer theoretical. Too many of these so-called “Afghan nationals” have turned out to be people who never should have been admitted in the first place. One of them shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he gunned down two West Virginia National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., killing Sarah Beckstrom and critically wounding Andrew Wolfe. Days earlier, another Afghan national was arrested in Texas after making terroristic threats on TikTok.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable result of a policy that prioritized optics over security, ideology over common sense, and political virtue-signaling over the safety of the American people. Biden’s administration didn’t just botch the withdrawal from Afghanistan — it imported the consequences.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been making the media rounds in recent days, reassuring Americans that the Trump administration is now doing what the Biden administration refused to do: revetting nearly 1,000 Afghan nationals currently living in the United States who have been identified as having ties to terrorist groups.
Gabbard didn’t sugarcoat the reality. “We know that Al Qaeda and ISIS continue to actively plot attacks against our homeland,” she said — a blunt admission of a threat that should never have been allowed inside the country in the first place.
The Trump administration’s clean-up of the mess Biden made in four years is ongoing.
