FBI to investigate motive in D.C. shooting as Trump administration deploys more National Guard members

Investigators led by the FBI’s joint terrorism task force sought clues on Thursday to what motivated an attack the previous day on two National Guard members mere blocks from the White House in what officials called an “ambush” attack on Thanksgiving eve.

The two soldiers, part of a militarized law enforcement mission ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump months ago and challenged in court by officials of the District of Columbia, were hospitalized in critical condition. The suspect was wounded in an exchange of gunfire before he was arrested.

Members of the West Virginia National Guard, the two were on a “high-visibility patrol” outside the entrance to a subway station when the suspect “came around the corner,” drew a weapon and immediately fired at the pair, Jeff Carroll, executive assistant chief of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, said. The alleged assailant appeared to have acted alone.

The suspect was identified by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national whose last known residence is in Washington state.

According to the DHS, the 29-year-old entered the U.S. in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden-era program to resettle thousands of Afghans who assisted the U.S. during the Afghanistan war and feared reprisals from Taliban forces who seized control of their homeland after the U.S. withdrawal.

The initiative brought roughly 76,000 people to the U.S., many of whom had worked alongside U.S. troops and diplomats as interpreters and translators.

A former landlord of Lakanwal’s told The Associated Press he had settled in Bellingham, Wash., about 125 kilometres north of Seattle, with his wife and five children.

Among the questions that will undoubtedly be examined is when and how Lakanwal travelled more than 4,200 kilometres to D.C., and the circumstances around how he obtained a firearm.

Crackdown on Afghan refugees

Trump, who is at his Florida estate for the Thanksgiving holiday, said: “This heinous assault was an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror.”

“We must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden,” he added in a recorded statement.

Late Wednesday, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said that it has stopped processing all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals indefinitely.

But it was not clear that any requests were seriously being considered for asylum, given a host of measures from the Trump administration this year to throttle immigration to the U.S.

Trump suspended refugee resettlement from the country on his first day in office, via executive order.

Just this week, it was learned that the Trump administration plans a review of all refugees admitted to the U.S. during the Biden administration, according to a memo obtained by both Reuters and the The Associated Press.

The memo — signed by the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, and dated Nov. 21 — said that during the Biden years, “expediency” and “quantity” were prioritized over “detailed screening and vetting.”

The memo said that warranted a comprehensive review and “re-interview of all refugees admitted from Jan. 20, 2021, to Feb. 20, 2025.”

Advocates say that refugees, who flee conflict or persecution in their home countries, are some of the most highly vetted individuals to be allowed entry into the United States. They must overcome a yearslong process that involves waiting, paperwork and vetting before they eventually qualify for the coveted slots in the refugee program.

That contention was also made in statement Thursday by the Afghan advocacy group #AfghanEvac, which expressed its condolences to the families of the two Guard members and urged political leaders and media figures not to demonize an entire community.

“AfghanEvac rejects any attempt to leverage this tragedy as a political ploy to isolate or harm Afghans who have resettled in the United States,” Shaun VanDiver, president of the San Diego-based group, said in a statement. “Those who would twist this moment to attack Afghan families aren’t seeking safety or justice — they’re exploiting division and endangering all of us.”

In addition to the refugee announcements, Afghanistan was among several countries whose citizens were to be banned from visiting the U.S., in an executive order signed in June.

Trump wrote at the time that Afghanistan “lacks a competent or co-operative central authority for issuing passports or civil documents and it does not have appropriate screening and vetting measures.” He also cited its visa overstay rates from the country.

Additional Guard troops to be deployed

Trump in August ordered the National Guard deployment to fight crime in a city he said had become unsafe, despite objections from District of Columbia officials who challenged the move in court as an infringement on local government control. Violent crime incidents had already started a decline last year after an increase in the first few years of the pandemic, city officials argued, and were far fewer than when a crack cocaine epidemic helped fuel a homicide total of between 360 to 480 killings per year between 1988 and 1996.

Trump, a Republican, has deployed troops in other cities led by Democratic mayors — Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Oregon and Memphis, Tenn. — to combat what he has described as lawlessness and violent unrest over his crackdown on illegal immigration. With the exception of Tennessee, the deployment of state guard troops came without the approval of state governors.

Democratic leaders of those cities have accused Trump of manufacturing pretexts for militarized shows of force, and have questioned the expense, as they can protect federal personnel and buildings but not perform most law enforcement duties.

Nevertheless, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth late Wednesday announced plans to deploy an additional 500 National Guard members to Washington in the wake of the shooting. It was not immediately clear if they would all be from D.C., which has about 2,400 Guard members in total.