Even before Donald Trump vowed on Wednesday to shut down immigration processing for Afghan migrants in the wake of a horrific shooting near the White House, the State Department was reportedly taking steps to push governments around the world to restrict migration on the grounds that it supposedly caused violent crime to flourish.
A New York Times report on Wednesday revealed a diplomatic cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio a week earlier directing U.S. diplomats around the world to pressure the governments of countries in Europe as well as Canada, New Zealand and Australia to heavily restrict migration. The November 21 cable, obtained by the Times, directs those ambassadors and their staffs to highlight crimes, especially violent acts, committed by migrants in their respective countries to make the Trump administration’s case.
The text claimed that violent crimes committed by immigrants were “widespread disruptors of social cohesion”, an accusation that rings true in no small part due to the immediate impulse of the Trump administration and its far-right allies to highlight and supercharge political discourse around such instances of violence.
U.S. diplomats were directed in the cable to “regularly engage host governments and their respective authorities to raise U.S. concerns about violent crimes associated with people of a migration background”, according to the Times.
The cable’s existence was not previously reported until Wednesday, when a man identified as an Afghan national was named as the suspect in the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard members just blocks from the White House. The two Guard troops were reported to be in critical condition as of Thursday morning.
The suspect in Wednesday’s shooting, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is thought to have served with U.S. forces including the CIA in his native country of Afghanistan before he came to the U.S. with the fall of Afghanistan’s government to the Taliban in 2021. The suspect is hospitalized after being shot by a Guard member during the attack.
Donald Trump issued a furious response on Wednesday after the shooting, vowing that the suspect would pay the “steepest possible price.” He directed federal agencies to immediately suspend immigration requests from Afghanistan, which has been under the control of the Taliban for four years. The suspect was brought to the U.S. initially under the Biden administration, which began a program to evacuate Afghans who feared retaliation from the Taliban due to their cooperation with the U.S. in 2021.
Reports citing the Department of Homeland Security indicate that Lakanwal applied for asylum during Biden’s last year in office and had his request approved earlier in 2025. He was waiting on a green card application to be accepted at the time of the shooting.
Trump, in a video message Wednesday evening, demanded new vetting for all Afghan refugees brought to the U.S. after 2021.
“We must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden,” the president said.
He also added that attacks from such migrants represented the “single greatest national security threat facing our nation.”
Tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis have resettled in the United States on special immigrant visas over the last four years, many fleeing ongoing instability in the two nations invaded by the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Many fear retaliation for serving as translators, fixers or in other roles in services to U.S. forces active in the two countries in conflicts against the Taliban, Islamic State, and other groups in the region in support of the Afghan and Iraqi governments.
The fall of Afghanistan’s democratic government in 2021 accelerated the pace of those visas being issued after former President Joe Biden directed the Department of Homeland Security to extend protections for vulnerable Afghan citizens, a program known as Operation Allies Welcome. The agency also extended temporary protected status for other Afghan refugees at that time, protecting them from deportation with temporary protected status, but that was halted by the Trump administration earlier in 2025.
Migrants who commit violent crimes became a major focus of the president’s third campaign for office in 2024, and Trump used the murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley in February of that year to hammer then-President Biden over immigration policies. Since taking office, Trump has wrongly claimed that illegal border crossings dropped to zero under his watch; those numbers are actually publicly available on the DHS website, and indicate that while illegal migration has sharply fallen there are still thousands of encounters with migrants seeking to entry the country illegally every month at ports of entry and along the U.S. border.
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