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The shooting on Nov. 26, 2025 in downtown Washington, which took the life of a young member of the National Guard and left another seriously injured, left people across the country shaken. As the suspect was an Afghan who came to the United States as a parolee after the horrific victory of the Taliban, it also created deep concern within Afghan communities throughout America and other Western countries. Many feared that the actions of a single individual might shape how the broader public views tens of thousands of families who fled Afghanistan under very different circumstances.

Moments of violence understandably prompt fear, political pressure, and renewed scrutiny of security systems. They also force policymakers to decide whether their responses will be narrowly calibrated to risk or broadly imposed in ways that may carry unintended consequences.

As the suspect arrived during the 2021 evacuation of Afghanistan, the tragedy has resurfaced difficult emotions for a community still trying to rebuild after the fall of Kabul.

For many Afghan-Americans, this moment carried the weight of lived experience shaped by earlier episodes in which individual acts of violence triggered collective blame, public suspicion, and sweeping policy responses. They recalled with bitter lucidity those previous historical junctures where violence precipitated a cascade of collective blame, public suspicion, and sweeping, punitive policy shifts.

Within days of the shooting, the federal government announced several immigration and security-related measures: immigration processing was throttled or halted altogether, and the intricate apparatus of vetting was paused for “review.”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services paused immigration benefit processing for Afghan nationals, the State Department halted visa issuance for Afghan passport holders, and asylum adjudications were placed on hold pending revised screening standards.

Such moments of crisis place democratic governments under extraordinary, almost primal, pressure to be decisive. Yet these episodes serve as a crucible, testing whether the state’s security apparatus remains precise and analytical or becomes broader and more generalized in its application. While a heightening of scrutiny following such violence may appear politically inevitable, responses risk flattening meaningful distinctions among Afghan arrivals.

By treating Afghan arrivals as a single, homogenous risk category, rather than distinguishing among legal pathways, vetting regimes, and levels of integration, policymakers risk inflicting profound legal and social costs without any clear evidence of improved security. This article argues not against accountability, but for the analytical necessity of differentiation as a condition of effective long-term public safety.

The Illusion of the Single Story

The public debate in the aftermath of the attack has tended to treat Afghan migrants as though they constituted a single, static population defined by a single catastrophic moment.

Today, Afghan nationals constitute a population of roughly 300,000 to 350,000 individuals living in the United States, including post-2021 arrivals. The overwhelming majority have never been implicated in criminal activity and entered the country through distinct and heavily vetted legal pathways. This population includes long-settled citizens, lawful permanent residents, refugees, Special Immigrant Visa holders, asylum seekers, and humanitarian parolees, groups whose legal statuses, vetting histories, and level of integration differ markedly. Treating this population as a single security concern obscures these distinctions and risks distorting policy responses by conflating scale with threat.

In reality, Afghan migration to the United States is a saga spanning more than a century: multiple migration waves shaped by political upheaval, international partnerships, and repeated displacement.

The initial trickles of migration began as early as the 1920s, consisting primarily of students and professionals who moved with the ease of the global elite. Significant refugee migration began after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and continued through the 1980s. The civil wars of the 1990s and the initial, grim period of Taliban rule forced yet another wave to flee, many of them intellectuals, former government officials, and professionals who represented the country’s shattered middle class.

After 2001, the American intervention birthed a new category: Afghans who tethered their lives and loyalties to U.S. military, diplomatic, and development missions, many of whom later sought sanctuary through Special Immigrant Visas. This pathway was grounded not only in humanitarian need but in documented service and prolonged vetting.

The most visible and politically salient wave, however, followed the fall of Kabul in August 2021, when approximately 76,000 Afghans were ushered into the United States under emergency humanitarian parole through Operation Allies Refuge and Operation Allies Welcome. While this evacuation saved lives, it compressed years of migration, vetting, and integration into a few frantic weeks, leaving many families legally safe but structurally and psychologically unstable. These successive waves have produced an Afghan population in this country that is diverse in background, experience, legal status, and level of integration.

The Maze of Migration Pathways

Understanding the various legal conduits through which Afghans reached the United States is essential for evaluating both the nature of security risk and the consequences of blanket responses. One major pathway is refugee resettlement through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, a system that has processed Afghans following the Soviet invasion and, more recently, through Priority-1 and Priority-2 referrals for those facing targeted threats. Refugees undergo multi-year vetting involving biometric screening, intelligence checks, and interagency review, often across several jurisdictions before arrival.

Another pathway is the Special Immigrant Visa program, created specifically for those who worked alongside American forces and diplomats. The Special Immigrant Visa applicants were vetted both during their service and again during immigration processing, often while performing high-risk duties on behalf of the U.S. government, such as translating under fire during raids and engagements in enemy territory, guarding personnel in active war zones, or driving convoys through ambushes and improvised explosive device-laden routes, making them prime targets for Taliban execution squads. Their eligibility was based on demonstrated affiliation and a history of trust, not humanitarian vulnerability alone.

Humanitarian parole, by contrast, was an emergency mechanism undertaken when normal processing had become impossible. Parole provided immediate safety but no durable legal status, forcing many to apply for asylum or Special Immigrant Visas after arrival and entering a prolonged period of legal uncertainty. This pathway produced not a heightened risk of criminality, but a heightened state of instability. When those who arrived through family-based immigration, student visas, non-immigrant visas, or by requesting asylum at the southern border are included, the analytical flaw of treating all Afghan arrivals as interchangeable becomes clear. Administrative simplicity replaces risk differentiation. Such a response may appear decisive to a nervous public, but it risks missing actual risk signals while imposing heavy costs on populations that have already been vetted extensively.

Stability Versus Limbo

For the thousands of Afghans who arrived in the United States after the fall of Kabul in August 2021, physical safety did not bring certainty. Most did not plan to leave Afghanistan. Many fled under extreme time pressure, often without the chance to say goodbye to loved ones, and others were separated from family members in the chaos surrounding the Kabul airport. Many spent months or even years in transit centers in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, or Kosovo while undergoing additional screening and awaiting onward travel. By the time they reached American communities, many were exhausted — physically safe but emotionally and structurally unmoored, haunted by the specter of an uncertain future.

While the initial reception in the United States was marked by an extraordinary mobilization of veterans’ organizations, faith communities, local volunteers, and resettlement organizations, this early generosity could not substitute for legal clarity.

For many Afghan newcomers, prolonged uncertainty became a defining feature of resettlement. Asylum applications stalled. Special Immigrant Visa cases accumulated in backlogs measured in years. Work authorization required repeated renewal. Family reunification slowed or halted altogether, leaving spouses, children, and parents stranded in dangerous conditions abroad.

This extended limbo has had profound consequences for integration. Legal uncertainty limits the ability to plan, invest, or fully commit to life in a new country. It shapes employment decisions, housing stability, and mental well-being.

Economic integration has been similarly uneven and, for many, deeply disorienting. Physicians, engineers, lawyers, diplomats, teachers, and civil servants frequently discovered that their credentials were not recognized. They find themselves driving for rideshare companies, working in warehouses, or taking entry-level or hourly jobs far from their training and expertise. The loss was not merely economic, but existential: years of education, responsibility, and public service rendered suddenly invisible.

These pressures do not excuse violence. But they form the environment in which most Afghan families are attempting to rebuild their lives. Prolonged instability, when layered onto trauma and isolation, complicates integration and erodes trust, even among individuals deeply committed to following the law and contributing to American society.

The Individual Case

The investigation into the shooting will determine individual responsibility. Nothing excuses the violence. Yet this incident illustrates the danger of collapsing complexity into a single narrative. The perpetrator’s trajectory — recruited into the CIA-backed Afghan strike force as a teenager, evacuated after the fall of Kabul, and abruptly displaced from a structured combat role into precarious civilian life marked by unemployment, eviction risk, and prolonged legal uncertainty — offers context, not causation. It does not explain the crime, excuse it, or diminish individual responsibility. Accountability remains essential.

Most Afghans facing similar pressures do not commit acts of violence. Yet systems that leave tens of thousands of people in prolonged limbo will, on occasion, fail in destructive ways, not because of collective traits, but because of institutional inability to distinguish vulnerability from risk.

Understanding this distinction is not an act of sympathy at the expense of security. It is a prerequisite for effective policy. Responses that treat instability itself as a warning sign rather than a condition to be resolved risk perpetuating the very dynamics that undermine integration and long-term public safety.

Differentiation, Risk, and the Afghan Community

Afghan nationals often experience policy shifts differently depending on the specifics of their arrival. Understanding these distinctions is not merely an exercise in empathy — it is central to assessing risk, designing effective policy, and avoiding self-defeating security outcomes. Theses distinction shape how individuals experience prolonged uncertainty, legal review, and institutional trust. Each major group within the Afghan-American population experiences state action differently. Each reacts to prolonged uncertainty in ways that carry distinct implications for stability and integration.

Long-Settled Citizens

This group includes Afghans who arrived decades ago and are now U.S. citizens or long-term permanent residents. They have established careers, families, and community institutions, and in many cases have lived in the United States longer than in Afghanistan. From a security perspective, subjecting this population to renewed scrutiny produces little marginal benefit. Instead, it generates social cost: alienation, distrust of institutions, and the erosion of precisely the community anchors that help newer arrivals integrate. From a risk perspective, retroactive suspicion of deeply integrated populations is not merely inefficient; it is counterproductive, weakening informal networks that support social cohesion and early intervention when individuals struggle.

Former Security Personnel

This group consists of Afghans who worked directly with U.S. forces or intelligence services and arrived through Special Immigrant Visas or evacuation pathways. They were vetted repeatedly during their service and again through immigration processes. The central risk here is not infiltration, but abandonment. Prolonged legal uncertainty, stalled status adjustments, and economic marginalization undermine mental health, identity, and trust among individuals who once served as American partners under extreme conditions. From a security standpoint, policies that leave this group in limbo squander hard-earned loyalty and increase isolation among people who were once embedded in disciplined structures. Stability for this group is not charity, it is risk mitigation.

Displaced Professionals

Judges, diplomats, professors, senior administrators, and journalists fled Afghanistan not because they were violent, but because they were visible. Their persecution risk stemmed from who they were, not what they did. In the United States, their challenge is not screening failure but structural mismatch. Licensing barriers, professional downgrading, and long delays in legal status compound the psychological shock of displacement. Treating this group as a generalized security concern misidentifies both risk and opportunity. Their vulnerability lies in downward mobility and loss of purpose. Policies that prolong uncertainty for highly educated, civically minded individuals risk turning potential stabilizers into disengaged outsiders, not because of ideology, but because of institutional neglect.

Working-Class Families

This group includes mechanics, drivers, tailors, shopkeepers, and service workers whose resilience is high but whose margins are thin. They are often the least visible in policy debates and the most sensitive to disruption. Visa pauses, work authorization delays, and family separation hit this group hardest, not because they pose heightened risk, but because they lack buffers. Long hours, transportation constraints, and childcare responsibilities limit access to language classes, mental health services, and community support. From a security perspective, instability within this group does not typically produce radicalization, but it does produce isolation, exhaustion, and disengagement, conditions that erode integration over time.

Taken together, these distinctions reveal the analytical failure of treating Afghan arrivals as a single category of concern. The risks policymakers claim to be addressing differ sharply across these groups, yet blanket measures impose costs on all of them simultaneously. The result is a security posture that is broad where it should be narrow, blunt where it should be precise, and destabilizing where it claims to protect. Differentiation is not softness; it is the minimum analytical standard for any serious approach to security.

The Pathology of Trauma and the Theater of Policy

Trauma is a pervasive reality for those displaced by decades of war, yet it should be discussed without falling into mythmaking. Many former soldiers struggle with the loss of purpose, while families carry the heavy guilt of having escaped while others remained behind. However, extensive research shows that trauma is far more likely to manifest as anxiety, depression, or withdrawal than as aggression. Trauma alone is not a predictor of violence. Rather, violence is typically associated with a convergence of untreated mental illness, acute personal crisis, isolation, and prolonged instability. Conflating trauma with threat is not only analytically unsound but politically corrosive, as it discourages individuals from seeking the help they need for fear of being labeled a threat.

In the wake of the November 2025 shooting, the federal government announced measures that project a performance of vigilance: pausing immigration benefit processing, halting visa issuance for Afghan passport holders (including Special Immigrant Visas applicants), and subjecting existing Green Cards from 19 different countries, including Afghanistan, to review. Asylum adjudications have been paused, and refugees admitted between 2021 and 2025 may face re-interviews, delaying the status adjustment of tens of thousands.

In January 2026, the State Department announced an indefinite suspension of immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries, including Afghanistan. Under this policy, officers will halt interviews and refuse visa issuance pending reassessment of screening procedures, particularly for applicants deemed likely to rely on public assistance, a category defined broadly and subjectively. This is in addition to the travel ban affecting 19 countries, including Afghanistan, which was expanded to 39 countries in December 2025. The central question is whether these measures improve risk identification or merely slow bureaucratic processes for already vetted populations.

Applying broad, retroactive pauses collapses meaningful distinctions among migration pathways and risk profiles, imposing legal and psychological costs on families already living lawfully in the United States. In doing so, these measures substitute collective precaution for targeted assessment, prioritizing administrative reassurance over analytical precision without clear security benefit.

Better Policy Responses

If the U.S. government determines that its screening processes need to be enhanced, those improvements are best pursued through steady, institutional measures — strengthening professional judgment, improving interagency coordination, and refining the ability to distinguish meaningful indicators from background noise. Security requires differentiation, not suspension. A system that halts itself to demonstrate vigilance only performs anxiety while allowing real vulnerabilities to go unexamined.

Legal uncertainty has become a condition of life for many Afghans who already reside in the United States, a suspended animation in which time stretches but nothing resolves. This corrodes the capacity to plan, to work, to invest emotionally in their futures and in their new country. A person denied clarity about their legal status is denied the ordinary moral discipline of foresight. When the future is withheld, responsibility withers. Rather than framing faster adjudication and predictability as concessions, policymakers could view them as part of the basic institutional architecture of immigration governance, features that help ensure lawful compliance, foster economic and civic contribution, and promote stability within the system itself.

Family separation compounds this instability. The modern state has learned to speak fluently of deterrence and leverage, but it rarely acknowledges the slow violence of prolonged separation. Spouses left in danger, children growing up without parents, and families suspended across borders generate not resilience but quiet despair. Stress becomes ambient, trust in institutions erodes, and isolation deepens. If security is understood as the cultivation of social bonds strong enough to withstand crisis, then family unity is not a mere sentimental indulgence.

The same pathology shapes the discussion of trauma. The right reaction to this trauma is not suspicion but care — accessible, culturally intelligible mental health services that do not feel like surveillance.

Many Afghans arrived with professions, skills, and forms of knowledge shaped by years of responsibility in collapsing institutions. In the United States, these capacities are often rendered unusable by licensing regimes and indifference masquerading as neutrality. Downward mobility becomes the norm. Work that once carried meaning is replaced by labor that barely sustains. This is not merely an economic loss. It is an erosion of selfhood.

Against this backdrop, community institutions have taken on responsibilities that extend beyond their traditional roles, often complementing efforts at the federal, state, and local levels. Nonprofits, mosques, informal associations, and local networks provide the connective tissue that prevents isolation from becoming abandonment. Yet these institutions are tasked with ambitious objectives within a policy environment that is subject to ongoing adjustment.

Then there is the question of narrative. How violence is framed determines whether societies learn or harden. When public discourse collapses an entire population into the figure of a perpetrator, it licenses suspicion without analysis and fear without proportion. Democracies reassure their citizens not by amplifying dread but by explaining, calmly and clearly, how risk is assessed and why collective punishment is neither just nor effective.

Fundamentally, it is critical for all of us to remember that integration is often framed as a humanitarian concern, but in practice, it is a vital security asset. History offers us a precedent: Vietnamese and Bosnian refugees arrived with deep trauma but achieved long-term integration when policy emphasized stability rather than suspicion.

Conclusion

The murder of the young National Guard member in Washington was a devastating loss that deserves accountability and remembrance. Yet it also demands restraint.

Trauma and migration do not excuse violence, but neither do they define entire communities. Violence should be addressed through individual responsibility, not collective suspicion. The overwhelming majority of Afghan nationals live peacefully, seeking only the stability that has been denied to them for so long.

Policy responses shaped by tragedy should distinguish individual responsibility from collective experience. When governments respond to tragedy with broad suspicion and prolonged legal limbo, history suggests that trust erodes and insecurity deepens.

Precision after a crisis is not weakness. It is a sign of confidence in institutions capable of protecting the public while remaining faithful to the social foundations on which true security depends. The choice facing policymakers is not between security and empathy, but between analytical rigor and administrative fear.

Omid Kamal is a legal and policy analyst with extensive experience in international relations, diplomacy, and immigration and refugee services. He previously served as a diplomat at the Embassy and Permanent Mission of Afghanistan in Vienna. He currently works on asylum, Green Card, and family reunification cases in the United States. He holds an MA in International Relations and a law degree, and writes on migration, security, and integration.

Image: Staff Sgt. Ryan Brooks via DVIDS