Trump uses National Guard shooting to cast suspicion on refugees
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President Donald Trump holds a video call to thank members of the military for their service on Nov 27.
PHOTO: AFP
Shawn McCreesh
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PALM BEACH, Florida – The shooting of two National Guard members the day before in Washington hung over President Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving events at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, where he held a call with members of the military to thank them for their service on the holiday.
At the beginning of the call, he revealed that one of the guard members, Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, had died.
“It’s just happened,” Mr Trump said. “She was savagely attacked. She’s dead. Not with us.” The other victim, he said, was “fighting for his life”.
After the authorities identified the suspect as an Afghan refugee, members of the Trump administration and other Republicans reacted furiously.
They cited it as evidence of what they had been warning about immigration, condemned the Biden administration’s refugee policies and said it justified a further crackdown on immigration that the president said was coming.
Mr Joseph Edlow, director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, announced on Nov 27 that following the attack, he was implementing new policy guidance on vetting prospective immigrants from 19 high-risk countries using “country-specific factors as significant negative factors”.
The change in guidance had been under consideration before the shooting.
In his statement, Mr Edlow blamed the Biden administration for “dismantling basic vetting and screening standards, prioritising the rapid resettlement of aliens from high-risk countries over the safety of American citizens”.
The fierce rhetoric was echoed across the administration.
“I remember back in 2021 criticising the Biden policy of opening the floodgate to unvetted Afghan refugees,” Vice-President J.D. Vance wrote on social media on Nov 26. “Friends sent me messages calling me a racist. It was a clarifying moment. They shouldn’t have been in our country.”
And Repubican Senator Tommy Tuberville wrote in a post late on Nov 26: “We must IMMEDIATELY BAN all ISLAM immigrants and DEPORT every single Islamist who is living among us just waiting to attack.”
At Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump produced a photograph showing Afghans rushing onto a plane leaving their country as its government collapsed in 2021.
“This is what we had under the Biden administration,” he said, holding up the photograph of the frenzied evacuation scene for the news cameras in the room. “That whole thing should have never, ever happened.”
When a reporter pointed out that, according to officials, the suspect had worked with the CIA and, therefore, had been vetted, Mr Trump said: “He went cuckoo. I mean, he went nuts.”
Mr Trump said his administration was “looking at” the possibility of deporting the family of the 29-year-old suspect, who lived in Bellingham, Washington, with a wife and several children.
Asked whether he was blaming all Afghans for the crime of one man, he said, “No, but there’s a lot of problems with Afghans.”
Echoing largely unfounded claims that he has made about immigrants from other countries, he said “many of these people are criminals, many of these people are people that shouldn’t be here”.
Jumping to the subject of Somali refugees in Minnesota, he said that population was “taking over” that state, bringing gang violence.
Asked what Somalis had to do with the Afghan suspect, Mr Trump replied: “Ah, nothing, but Somalians have caused a lot of trouble, they’re ripping us off a lot of money.”
This led him to criticise Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, who came to the United States as a refugee from Somalia.
“We’re not taking their people any more,” he said.
In the case of the shooting suspect, he received asylum from the US government in April, according to three people with knowledge of the case who were not authorised to speak publicly. A reporter asked Mr Trump about this as well.
“When it comes to asylum, when they’re flown in, it’s very hard to get them out,” he replied. “No matter how you want to do it, it’s very hard to get them out, but we’re going to be getting them all out now.”
A short while later, a White House official said, the president spoke with the family of the slain National Guard member. NYTIMES
