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The Fatal Flaw Of Trump's "Reverse Migration" Policy

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by blueapples
Monday, Dec 01, 2025 - 12:30

blueapples on X | ashesofacacia.substack.com

Perhaps no single issue accelerated the paradigm shift that led to the re-election of President Donald Trump more than the onslaught of immigration under the Biden administration's open borders policy that continues to haunt the nation to this very day. Despite immigration reform serving as the strongest pillar of the domestic policy platform Trump ran on in 2024, there has been no end in sight to the chaos unleashed by unchecked immigration into the country over the course of the previous presidential administration, even after nearly a full year since Trump's return to the Oval Office. The latest chapter in the tale of this continued turmoil was written by the tragic shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, DC, by Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal.

US Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe and US Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom were the latest victims of America's unrelenting immigration crisis.

In response to the shooting, the Trump administration amplified its messaging surrounding the urgent need for widespread and radical immigration reform. Following his announcement of the death of 20-year-old US Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, who was shot by Lakanwal while serving alongside 24-year-old US Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe as part of Trump's D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, the president unveiled his intention to "permanently pause migration from all Third World countries to allow the US system to fully recover," concluding that "Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation." Trump's remarks following Beckstrom's tragic passing highlight a fundamental problem that has led to the immigration crisis continuing to grip America. While radical immigration reform is certainly necessary, viewing it as the only solution to what has led to this watershed moment in American history is a myopic perspective that fails to examine the continued policy failures that have exacerbated this crisis.

The example of Rahmanullah Lakanwal demonstrates how America's immigration crisis is not the result of an isolated domestic policy failure. Instead, that is one component of a multifaceted failure of policymaking that has defined America in the 21st century and continues to write the pages of its history in an ominous tone that foreshadows a bleak future ahead for the country. While Lakanwal's arrival in the US was facilitated by a broken immigration system, the catalyst for his immigration was tied to a decades-long neoconservative interventionist foreign policy that continues to displace millions of people the world over. So long as its fundamental causation behind the rampant immigration into the US remains undiagnosed, treating immigration reform as the lone resolution to this ongoing crisis is another example of the doomed outlook of treating the symptom of a disease instead of its underlying cause.

Following the apprehension of Lakanwal as the perpetrator of the shooting of Beckstrom and Wolfe, the revelation of his status as an Afghan national was enough political capital for the Trump administration to weave a narrative placing the blame for the shooting on the US' failures during the War on Terror that the president has been consistently critical of during his years on the campaign trail and in the Oval Office. Trump quickly highlighted the botched withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan conducted by his predecessor, President Joe Biden, to explain how Lakanwal was able to immigrate to the US to begin with. In doing so, the president tacitly acknowledged the impact that the country's misguided foreign policy has had in exacerbating the immigration crisis.

Lakanwal initially entered into the US in September 2021 through a program launched by the Biden administration in the chaotic aftermath of the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan called Operation Allies Welcome ("OAW"). The program established by the Department of Homeland Security aimed to resettle vulnerable Afghans seeking refuge from the despotism under the return of Taliban rule. OAW took the specific initiative of offering safe passage for Afghans who worked with US forces during the war as they found themselves in the immediate crosshairs of the Taliban. Alongside a companion program named Operation Enduring Welcome, nearly 200,000 Afghans were resettled by the US following its 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.

By virtue of working with US armed forces in Afghanistan, Lakanwal made himself into a prime candidate to be resettled under OAW. He was one of only 3,300 refugees to be brought to the US from Afghanistan under a special immigration visa, which expedited his entry into the country due to his background working with the US military. Although it was the key factor in facilitating his entry into the country, his history of working with US forces has become overshadowed by the discourse transfixed on the failures of US immigration policy alone.

A deeper examination of Lakanwal's history of aiding the US military is necessary to correct the course of that dialogue in order to shed light on how a broken immigration system is just one dimension of a series of policies that have come to undermine the national security of the US, ironically launched in the name of defending it. That history conveys how the interventionist foreign policy enhanced another component of the multifaceted policy failures that have reared their ugly heads throughout the immigration crisis; namely, the absence of government oversight rendering it incapable, if not just unwilling, of reining in the US intelligence sphere. While Lakanwal's arrival in the US in 2021 may not have occurred if determined by systemic flaws in the country's immigration system alone, the confluence of those alongside other failed policymaking enacted by the Department of Defense and intelligence sector made it an inevitability. This complex reality is made excruciatingly evident from examining the role that US covert operations in Afghanistan throughout the War on Terror played in starting the chain of events that led to the shooting he committed.

Lakanwal aided US forces as a member of a special group of strike forces comprised of regional Afghan militias under the direction of the CIA in Afghanistan known as "Zero Units." His background was confirmed by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who stated, "In the wake of the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration justified bringing the alleged shooter to the United States in September 2021 due to his prior work with the US government, including the CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar, which ended shortly following the chaotic evacuation."

The CIA-linked "partner" that Lakanwal worked for alluded to by Ratcliffe was Zero Unit NDS 03—also known as the Kandahar Strike Force. The CIA-linked strike force was one of five Zero Units organized under the National Directorate of Security (NDS) of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, formed following the US invasion into the country. Each Zero Unit was comprised of Afghan militia members from various regions across the country in opposition of Taliban rule. Separate Zero Units operated in distinct regions of the country. NDS 01 operated in central Afghanistan, including the capital of Kabul; NDS 02 operated in the eastern region, including Nangarhar and Kunar; Lakanwal's unit, NDS 03, operated in the south, including Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan, out of Firebase Gecko, a base used by the CIA and US special forces in Kandahar; NDS 04 operated in the northeast; and the Khost Protection Force, comprised of former officers of the Marxist-Leninist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, operated in the southeast of the country, out of a CIA base in Khost named Camp Chapman. Though organized under the NDS, Afghanistan's control of the Zero Units was only nominal. According to the Human Rights Watch, control of each strike force did not “fall under the ordinary chain of command within the NDS, nor under normal Afghan or US military chains of command”; instead, their operations were strictly overseen by the CIA.

Lakanwal became a member of NDS 03 around 2011, when he was just 15 years old. Senior US officials elucidated on his background with the CIA-linked militia, stating that Lakanwal likely altered his birth certificate to conceal his real age in order to meet the requirement of needing to be 18 years old to join the Zero Unit alongside his brother, who served as its platoon leader. Despite gaining entry into the Zero Unit by virtue of forging his birth certificate, that same US official attested that Lakanwal would have been subjected to an exhaustive vetting process. That process involved a review of his candidacy against a variety of databases, including the one operated by the National Counterterrorism Center ("NCTC"), to rule out any possible connections to terrorist cells.

The same NCTC database was responsible for reviewing Lakanwal's application to immigrate to the US via OAW in 2021. "In terms of vetting, nothing came up," the senior US official stated. DHS officials explained that the vetting process enlisted 400 personnel across separate federal agencies that conducted background checks by reviewing "biometric and biographic screenings conducted by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals." The vetting process included an initial screening before candidates under OAW were transported to the US, followed up by further review upon their arrival processed at US military bases before the resettled Afghans were released into the general population. The senior US official commenting on the review of Lakanwal's candidacy under OAW defended the integrity of the vetting process, stating, "He was clean on all checks."

Yet, even before the shooting perpetrated by Lakanwal, holes in that vetting process became impossible to ignore. A 40-page report released by the DHS Office of Inspector General during the Biden administration on May 6th, 2024, acknowledged the rampant failures of the vetting process for OAW. The report criticized DHS for having a "fragmented" process for identifying and resolving derogatory information of applicants. The flaws of the program highlighted by the report concluded that the DHS "did not have a process for monitoring parole expiration, and the guidelines for determining re-parole for OAW parolees were undefined." The report also noted errors in data of the population resettled under the program kept by US Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A subsequent report released in June 2025 by the Trump Department of Justice was equally critical of the role that the Federal Bureau of Investigation played in conducting OAW. "According to the FBI, the need to immediately evacuate Afghans overtook the normal processes required to determine whether individuals attempting to enter the United States pose a threat to national security, which increased the risk that bad actors could try to exploit the expedited evacuation," the report said. The DOJ report reached the shocking conclusion that at least 55 individuals evacuated from Afghanistan through OAW were later identified as being on terrorism watch lists.

The magnitude of the deficiencies highlighted in those two reports was demonstrated by a terror plot in Oklahoma foiled before the 2024 Presidential Election, which involved ISIS-linked Afghan nationals Abdullah Haji Zada and his brother-in-law Nasir Ahmed Tawhedi. Both men behind the plot were also brought to the country under OAW in 2021. Astonishingly, that isn't the only parallel they shared with Lakanwal. Tawhedi was also revealed to have been working for the CIA as part of its security forces embedded in Afghanistan. Biden administration officials stated Tawhedi was also subjected to the screening process it put in place for applicants under OAW before being admitted into the US.

The failed Oklahoma terrorist attack led to US officials instituting an annual review of Afghans brought to the US under the program. Despite that enhanced scrutiny, the vast resources at the US' disposal remained inept at mitigating the massive risks presented by the blowback from nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan. Effectively navigating those risks was further complicated by the covert nature of operations conducted by US intelligence agencies in Afghanistan, such as the CIA program that armed and trained Lakanwal.

As the Afghanistan theater of the War on Terror unfolded over the course of almost 20 years, it quickly became regarded as the "CIA's war" due to the extensive covert operations the agency conducted in the country. By 2013, already over a decade into the war, more than $2.5 billion of the US intelligence budget was earmarked for covert operations. That spending comprised nearly 5% of the entire US intelligence budget for that fiscal year. The Afghan Zero Unit program was organized under those covert operations.

That spending did not just enable the CIA to organize the regional Afghan militias into Zero Units under its control. The organization of these forces under its covert operations allowed the CIA to select targets, direct missions, and supplement them with the assistance of US special operations forces. The nefarious influence of the CIA's covert control of these strike force units enabled them to operate with impunity throughout Afghanistan over the course of the war. That absence of accountability and transparency quickly became evident as the Zero Units' operations were a central component of the violence enabled by the US intelligence sphere that plagued the country during the US occupation.

While Afghan government officials recognized the Zero Units' role in subduing the Taliban, those accolades were drowned out by complaints about their misconduct. NDS 03, the Zero Unit that Lakanwal was a member of, had a sordid history of violence that was well-established years before he joined its ranks. In 2009, militia members suspected of belonging to NDS 03 were of being involved in a shooting that resulted in the death of 10 Afghan police officers outside of the attorney general's office in Kandahar. Among the casualties was police chief Matiullah Qati. Then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai assigned the blame for the deaths of those policemen to private Afghan guards working on behalf of coalition forces. Karzai explained that the guards, accompanied by US Special Forces, entered into a heavily fortified government complex in Kandahar to free prisoners held by the Afghan government.

US military spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker disavowed President Karzai's claim that the raid conducted by NDS 03 was aided by US Special Forces. Sidenstricker retorted that "there were no US forces involved in the attack, and the Afghan side is being investigated by Afghan authorities." 41 private security guards were eventually arrested in connection with the shooting. In 2011, the Afghan Supreme Court sentenced 4 of the guards to death. The remaining 37 guards received sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years in jail.

While the CIA's covert direction of the Zero Units superseding the authority of the NDS made their role in the 2009 shooting difficult to ascertain, subsequent operations by the Zero Units removed any doubt about the unbridled violence they unleashed under the auspices of working for the US intelligence sphere. Zero Unit NDS 01 was exposed for routinely targeting civilians in the Wardak region of Afghanistan bordering Kabul by raiding homes, mosques, and madrassas. 33 religious students were killed across 4 separate raids committed by NDS 01 in 2018 alone. The Zero Unit's violent raids continued until the end of the US occupation, leaving no safe haven for locals.

The virtual blanket immunity that working under the CIA gave NDS 01 emboldened them to go as far as to target medical facilities in the central Afghan region they conducted operations within. In 2019, NDS 01 raided a Swedish-run health clinic in the Wardak Province. During the raid, NDS 01 soldiers detained workers in the clinic, binding them and covering their faces with hoods before interrogating them, alleging unsubstantiated ties to the Taliban. Although victims of the raid heard the soldiers speaking English, they were unable to verify whether or not the Zero Unit was accompanied by US special forces at the time.

However, shortly after the raid, several houses and a mosque in the area around the clinic were destroyed by US airstrikes, conveying that US forces were working in concert with NDS 01 as they executed the assault on the health clinic in some capacity. That airstrike killed at least five civilians, including a 12-year-old girl. US military officials ostensibly confirmed the role that NDS 01 played in providing reconnaissance for the airstrike, stating it “conducted a thorough investigation into these incidents, including a thorough review of all available intelligence collected from air and ground forces shortly after the strike."

Despite the fatality of a child, US military officials determined that no civilians were killed in the airstrikes, demonstrating the same blatant disregard for human life as the Zero Unit operating under their direction that conducted the raid on the Swedish-run health clinic. That wanton abandonment of any regard for civilian life demonstrated by NDS 01 in the latter years of the US occupation of Afghanistan was not the culmination of the unrestrained conduct of the CIA-backed forces. Instead, it was a continuation of a standard of conduct that had become normalized from the Zero Units' inception.

In response to the outrage that followed revelations about the long-standing violent operations routinely targeting civilians conducted by the Afghan Zero Units, former CIA Press Secretary Timothy Barrett stated that the agency “conducts its global operations in accordance with law and under a robust system of oversight."

Although the government was barred from funding, training, or equipping foreign military units when credible evidence of human rights abuses existed during the war in Afghanistan, this prohibition under US law only applied to the State and Defense departments. The US intelligence sphere remained immune from any such restrictions during the course of the conflict. That lack of oversight allowed the Zero Units to remain a key force in CIA covert operations up to and including the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. During the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces, Zero Units were deployed as part of the forces securing the Kabul airport during the US withdrawal. Due to OAW, the chaos that followed the CIA Zero Units during the course of the occupation of Afghanistan did not end with the US withdrawal from the country.

Afghan nationals Rahmanullah Lakanwal, Abdullah Haji Zada, and Nasir Ahmed Tawhedi being part of the CIA sphere of influence operating within Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021 proves that the risks their admission to the US presented were not the byproduct of a broken immigration system in-and-of-itself. While OAW allowed those risks to materialize following their arrival to the US, the acts they committed were fomented by the bloodlust of a neocon foreign policy and its adjacent CIA-led covert operations, if not executed under their continued directives.

While President Trump has announced a series of initiatives intended to radically reform the abysmal immigration policy that brought Lakanwal, Zada, and Tawhedi to the US, the hyperfocus on immigration alone displays the myopic perspective his administration has taken. That outlook fails to diagnose the widespread problems that culminated in the acts they committed, which continue to be unaddressed. The systemic flaws of the US immigration policy continue to be exacerbated by the decades-long neoconservative interventionist foreign policy that launched the War on Terror. For over 20 years, US interventionism has displaced populations from countries like Afghanistan, not only feeding them into a broken immigration system but also sowing resentment that is imported into the country through programs like OAW.

Since the US has divorced itself from Afghanistan, its continued military interventionism in other countries to this day perpetuates that dynamic. The Trump administration's continued airstrikes in Somalia demonstrate that while the Afghanistan theater of the War on Terror has concluded, the malevolent neocon influence behind it still drives the foreign policymaking of the US. Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has doubled the amount of airstrikes in Somalia compared to 2024. That continued bombardment of Somalia has led to an influx of immigrants from the country. 

Attention to the impact of their presence in the country in perpetuating the immigration crisis has been magnified following the revelation of a massive fraud scandal in Minnesota, which federal prosecutors say siphoned $1 billion from the state's social safety net programs. Investigators into the scandal highlighted how many of the companies that billed Minnesota state agencies for services that were never performed were involved members of the Somali diaspora of roughly 80,000 in the state. "Hundreds of thousands of Somalians [sic] are ripping off our country and ripping apart that once great state," Trump said in response to the controversy.

Although Somalia is one of the countries the Trump administration has vowed to reassess the immigration status of foreign nationals who hail from there, its continued bombardment of the nation as part of the forever wars that have stained the history of the US complicated the hopes of any widespread deportations of that demographic. In September 2024, the Temporary Protected Status ("TPS") of Somalis in the US was extended until March 2026. That TPS provides Somalis in the US with deportation protections, complicating the Trump "reserve migration" strategy. While Trump stated he would terminate the TPS of Somalis in the country, his efforts to bring an end to those protections have proven futile when taken against other foreign nationals.

On November 19th, 2025, a federal court ordered the Trump administration to delay its termination of TPS for over 6,100 Syrian nationals. Syria, like Somalia, has been a nation devastated by the interventionist foreign policy of the US in the name of "fighting terrorism." Syria perhaps best demonstrates the fallacy of that mission of US foreign policy, as the Trump administration welcomed the former ISIS leader who now serves as its president to the White House with open arms.

While the Trump administration was successful in bringing an end to the TPS for nearly 250,000 Venezuelan nationals living in the US in the weeks before that court ruling, many subject to the ruling upheld by the US Supreme Court remain eligible to stay in the US until as far as April 2026. Given the Trump administration's enhanced bellicosity toward the regime of Nicolás Maduro ruling Venezuela, the prospect of an inevitable conflict with the country complicates the premise of widespread deportations of those foreign nationals. The example of Venezuela not only highlights the symbiotic relationship between failed US foreign policy and the impact it has had on immigration to the country. It also shows how the Trump administration refuses to sever itself from one of the fundamental causes perpetuating the immigration crisis.

As in the case of Syria, the foreign policy posture Trump has taken against Venezuela is brought into serious doubt when juxtaposed against his diplomatic measures. While Trump has declared Venezuela an enemy of the US on the basis of its alleged ties to "narco-terrorism," the weight of the concerns he has for that was contradicted by his decision to pardon former Honduan President Juan Orlando Hernández.

“I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernández who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump announced on his Truth Social platform. Hernández had been serving a 45-year federal prison sentence after being sentenced following his conviction on trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the US.

The decision to pardon Hernández demonstrates how Trump's posture against narco-terrorism is less of one made out of a true national security concern and one more deeply rooted in the political expediency that furthers the foreign policy initiative of regime change in Venezuela. That blatant contradiction of pardoning Hernandez drastically damages the position he has taken against Maduro. In doing so, it raises equally significant questions about the motives behind the narrative he has cultivated regarding immigration from Venezuela, which like in the case of Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, et al. could increase as a consequence of any military action taken against the South American country.

Although supporters of the Trump administration have celebrated its calls to launch a mission of "reverse migration," their overzealousness overlooks how the success of that forthcoming domestic policy initiative is undercut by the overtures of foreign policymaking that refuse to severe itself from the militant interventionism inextricably tied to the immigration crisis. The shooting perpetrated by Rahmanullah Lakanwal was made possible by the confluence of that disastrous foreign policy and concurrent domestic policy failures. Isolating immigration reform as the panacea for the ills decades of warmongering have created is far from the comprehensive solution needed to restore national security. Instead, that narrative serves as nothing more than another example of the jingoistic demagoguery that the War on Terror was built upon. If the people of the United States are still swayed by that rhetoric, then it only proves that they remain under the spell of the very forces that have put their lives in such peril.

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.
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