Warnings about Afghan evacuee vetting ignored before Guardsmen shooting

Wednesday’s tragic shootings of two West Virginia National Guardsmen in Washington, and President Donald Trump’s call to re-screen green card holders from “countries of concern” including Afghanistan, were preceded by a warning from Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham about the Biden administration’s announcement amid the withdrawal that they were screening evacuees on the “back end.”

The identification of the suspect has once again raised concerns about the chaotic 2021 evacuation in Kabul and previous reports of misconduct by evacuees at US military bases.

Rahmanullah Lakkanwal, 29, who is originally from Afghanistan and was a member of a CIA-linked team fighting the Taliban, has been identified as the prime suspect in the shooting, which has since claimed the life of a West Virginia National Guard officer. Sarah Beckstrom is from Nicholas County, West Virginia.

On Friday, “Ingraham Angle” host Laura Ingraham told Fox News Digital that she and other conservatives have been sounding the alarm about vetting failures under Biden after the walkout since the Fox News host exclusively broke the story in September 2021 that members of congress took concerns about chaos at military bases detaining refugees directly to the State Department.

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“Shortly after the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal, it was clear that their intent was to bring as many Afghans to the United States as possible,” Ingraham wrote in an email on Friday.

She added: “Conservatives, myself included, have raised serious concerns about the cost, difficulty of uptake and potential pointless threats.” “Team Biden didn’t care.

“We kept hearing: ‘But we promised’ — Americans promised nothing — and they should not be forced to continue paying the price for the terrible mistakes made by previous presidents.”

In September 2021, Ingraham exclusively reported that a top Republican demanded answers from then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken regarding reports from Fort Pickett in Blackstone, Virginia, that depicted chaos and people evacuated without being examined or unaccounted for.

As Ingraham noted, Blinken said the State Department tried “to get as many people out as quickly as possible, while the airport was operating. We’ve been focused on doing that, and we account for when people arrive in the United States.”

“This is your Secretary of State admitting that he did not care to vet these people before we brought them to American soil,” Ingraham said at the time.

“And if you think they will be held securely on US military bases, think again.”

Then the MP. Tennessee’s Mark Green exclusively provided Ingraham with a letter he wrote demanding answers from Blinken.

“I recently learned from someone at Fort Pickett, Virginia, that the Afghan evacuees had free rein to run the complex, and were allowed to leave, although the vetting process had not been completed,” Green wrote.

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“My sources have made horrific allegations, including multiple incidents of sexual assault, and several people have been evacuated by Uber drivers without any permission from authorities or permission to leave.”

Greene called on his combat service in Afghanistan as an Army Special Operations Flight Surgeon to seek confirmation or denial of the allegations made by the source, telling Blinken that the reports pose a clear national security risk.

At the time, Ingraham compared Greene’s message to Blinken’s public statements. During a press conference at the time, Blinken said that as part of the administration’s effort to get “as many people out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, while the Hamid Karzai airport was operating, we were focused on doing that.”

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“We do an accounting when people arrive in the United States,” Blinken told reporters at the time.

“If you think they will be held securely on US military bases, think again,” Ingraham said of Greene’s revelations.

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Ingraham added Friday in statements to Fox News Digital that the Afghan evacuees from Biden’s withdrawal not only come from a culture hostile to Western values, but they often “rely heavily on American taxpayers to support them and their families.”

“This has to end — (it’s) another Biden blunder that President Trump has had to address,” she said.

In his discussion with Ingraham after the withdrawal, Green, a member and later chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee who left public life earlier in 2025, said he was hearing similar reports from bases outside Fort Pickett, Virginia.

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“The Department of Defense gets its guidance on how to handle these situations from the State Department,” Green claimed. “And the State Department is failing to give them adequate information. They’re letting them leave. They can catch an Uber and actually leave the base. They don’t know exactly how many people are there.”

“So, they can’t count someone if they don’t come back.”

Officials warned evacuees that if they left the base their visa processing would stop, but such a warning appeared to have little effect on those who may have left, Green said.

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“Then you receive horrific allegations of sexual harassment and assault, which is horrific,” he added.

At the time, Ingraham reported that many evacuees on planes out of Kabul came with no personal documents at all, and she wondered how any “vetting” could be done of people who couldn’t begin to prove their identity.

When contacted by Fox News at the time, Biden’s State Department said that, as a general rule, it does not comment on communications with Congress.

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Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary at the time, told CBS News that the administration was dealing with “a very small number” of evacuees who showed “no cause for concern.”

CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell followed up by pressing the minister on whether he could guarantee that none of the “thousands” of prisoners released by the Taliban would reach America.

“I can assure you that we are doing everything we can to make sure they don’t do that,” Mayorkas said.

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One year after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, lawmakers were still focused on the apparent chaos.

Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., said on Fox News in September 2022 that he had heard similar reports from Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, in his home state as Greene had heard from Virginia.

“Should it be a surprise to the American people that they were misled? This is no different than the southern border when Secretary Mayorkas went before the (House) Judiciary Committee and lied to us and said the border was secure. A year ago, President Biden said inflation was fleeting. And now, a year later, we find out they didn’t check them,” Tiffany said.

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Fox News Digital has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

Tiffany said he was at Fort McCoy in Tomah, Wisconsin, when the first 2,000 refugees arrived there.

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“None of them went through the special immigrant visa process,” he said. “I asked about that.

“People can walk right off base without any authorization from the commanding officer. We’ve sounded the warning bell about that. And now, finally, the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security is speaking out about this and saying this is a threat to national security and our local communities.”