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On the day before Thanksgiving, just blocks from the White House, two young West Virginia National Guard members on a “high‑visibility patrol” were ambushed in downtown Washington, D.C. A gunman walked around a corner near 17th and I Streets NW and opened fire, striking both soldiers multiple times in what officials repeatedly describe as a “targeted” attack. Both are in critical condition.
The suspect, 29‑year‑old Rahmanullah Lakanwal (reported with slight spelling variants in some outlets), is an Afghan national who came to the U.S. in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden‑era program that evacuated and resettled Afghans who had worked with U.S. forces after the fall of Kabul.
He drove across the country from his home in Bellingham, Washington, with the apparent intent to attack National Guard troops in the nation’s capital.
Within hours, the tragedy on a D.C. sidewalk had been weaponized into something else: a political cudgel aimed squarely at immigrants and at the very idea that America owes anything to those who served alongside it.
What We Know About The Attack
A Calculated, Close‑Range Assault
According to charging authorities and multiple briefings:
- The attack occurred around 2:15 p.m. near Farragut Square, two blocks from the White House.
- The victims have been identified as Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, both with the West Virginia National Guard.
- U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro described a graphic sequence: one guardsman is shot, falls, and the gunman leans over and shoots again; the second is then shot several times.
- The weapon was a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver.
- Other National Guard troops nearby returned fire and subdued the suspect, who was also shot and is hospitalized under heavy guard.
FBI Director Kash Patel says the Bureau is investigating the attack as possible terrorism, with a “coast‑to‑coast investigation” that includes search warrants at the suspect’s home in Washington state and in San Diego, as well as inquiries into possible associates overseas.
The Suspect’s Background
Here the story gets politically volatile fast.
- Lakanwal entered the U.S. in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, the program providing temporary parole and later immigration pathways to Afghans who worked alongside U.S. forces.
- He later applied for asylum in December 2024 and was granted asylum in April 2025, after Trump took office, according to law‑enforcement sources.
- The CIA has confirmed that he previously worked with a CIA‑backed partner force in Kandahar during the war in Afghanistan, part of the shadowy, lethal infrastructure the U.S. built in that conflict.
That last detail matters: the man now accused of ambushing U.S. troops in Washington is exactly the kind of local partner the U.S. begged to trust it in Afghanistan—and then frantically tried to rescue when the country fell.
From Crime Scene To Immigration Crackdown
The policy response from the Trump administration has been immediate and sweeping.
- President Trump called the shooting “an act of terror,” “an act of evil,” and “a crime against our entire nation,” and announced he would “re‑examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden.”
- Vice President J.D. Vance used the attack to argue that the administration must “redouble our efforts to deport people with no right to be in our country.”
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services abruptly halted processing of all immigration requests from Afghan nationals indefinitely, pending a review of security and vetting protocols.
That last move doesn’t target one gunman; it hits tens of thousands of Afghans, including interpreters, drivers, and fixers whose only “crime” was trusting American promises.
AfghanEvac, one of the major coalitions helping resettle former U.S. partners, has already warned that this “isolated and violent act” must not be used to define an entire community.
But that is precisely what the White House and its allies seem intent on doing.
The National Guard As Stage Prop
There’s another layer here: why these soldiers were in D.C. in the first place.
Roughly 2,100–2,200 National Guard troops have been stationed in Washington since August, deployed by Trump as part of a claimed crackdown on violent crime in Democratic‑led cities. In D.C., the Guard has effectively taken over key policing functions, even as a federal judge recently ruled the military takeover unlawful—putting that ruling on hold to allow for appeal.
After the shooting, Trump ordered 500 additional Guard troops to D.C.
This is classic Trump: use soldiers as visible symbols—of control, of toughness, of “whose city this is”—and then frame any attack on them as proof that the militarization was justified all along. The fact that the shooter appears to be a former U.S. ally from Afghanistan supercharges that narrative. It lets the administration collapse three things into one:
- An act of individual violence.
- A 20‑year war that ended in chaos.
- A broader anti‑immigrant project that long predates this attack.
The Guard members ambushed near the White House were there because the president has turned American streets into a long‑running security theatre production. Now, their suffering is being folded back into the show.
The Dangerous Logic Of Collective Blame
There are at least three overlapping truths here:
- This was a heinous, targeted attack on uniformed service members.
The details—close‑range shooting, ambush style, on a holiday week—are chilling. It is entirely reasonable for law enforcement to pursue terrorism charges and to dig hard into the suspect’s motives, contacts, and radicalization pathways. - The vetting system for high‑risk admissions should be rigorous and revisited when it fails.
Operation Allies Welcome processed around 76,000 Afghans in a chaotic, tragic moment. That kind of scale, under that pressure, will always have vulnerabilities. Reviewing those processes is legitimate. - Punishing a whole class of people for one man’s crime is both morally wrong and strategically stupid.
Freezing all Afghan immigration processing and threatening mass “re‑examination” of people already here doesn’t make the country safer; it signals to every future local partner around the world that America is a transactional, fickle ally.
Authoritarian politics thrive on this kind of collective blame. You identify a vulnerable group—refugees, asylum seekers, “foreigners”—and then treat every crime by a member of that group as evidence of inherent danger. You blur the line between individual responsibility and group guilt.
That logic is toxic to democratic norms. It erodes the rule of law, which is supposed to be about what a person did, not who they are or where they were born.
A Test Of What ‘Law And Order’ Really Means
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called the shooting “a targeted attack” and reminded the country that these Guard members “should be at home in West Virginia with their families.” That’s not just sentiment; it’s a critique of the larger project that put them there.
We’re now watching two competing ideas of “law and order” collide:
- One version means impartial justice: fully investigate, charge appropriately, strengthen security where it failed, and protect both the public and the rights of the accused. It keeps courts—and facts—at the center.
- The other version treats tragedy as fuel for a broader crusade: more troops on streets, more categories of people cast as threats, more executive power justified by fear.
The first is compatible with liberal democracy. The second is not.
The risk now is that the political response to this one gunman will do more long‑term damage to the institutions that protect Americans—courts, asylum systems, non‑politicized law enforcement—than he ever could have accomplished with a revolver on a D.C. corner.
The Global Signal We’re Sending
The U.S. told Afghan partners: if you stand with us, we will stand with you.
Now, after a single horrific crime by one former partner, the government is halting Afghan immigration processing entirely and openly entertaining the idea of re‑screening or removing Afghans already here.
Think about what that looks like from Kyiv, from Taipei, from any place where people are deciding whether to risk their lives alongside U.S. forces or diplomats. If America’s promise is conditional on perfect behavior by every last evacuee forever, it’s not really a promise. It’s a trap door.
The Washington ambush is a tragedy. But it will become something even worse if we let it justify a permanent architecture of suspicion and collective punishment.
The question now isn’t just who fired those shots near the White House. It’s whether a democracy can absorb that violence without turning it into an excuse to abandon its own commitments—to allies, to immigrants, and to the idea that the law is supposed to be a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.