My latest in PJ Media:
Back in September, Old Joe Biden’s teleprompter offered some reassurance to the American people: “Planes taking off from Kabul are not flying directly to the United States. They’re landing at U.S. military bases and transit centers around the world. At these sites where they are landing, we are conducting thorough scrutiny — security screenings for everyone who is not a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident.” Will it really surprise you, after ten months of this hard-Left, habitually dishonest administration, to discover that he was lying?
The reality is that almost none of the 82,000 Afghans who are now in the United States after being airlifted out of Kabul in August were vetted first. There could be any number of jihad terrorists and other criminals among them, but there is no way to know for sure until they actually commit crimes. Until then, celebrate diversity!
This revelation comes from a memo that Senate Republicans drafted in October, in which, according to a Wednesday report in the Washington Examiner, “senior officials across the departments of Homeland Security, Defense, State, and Justice described a disastrous screening and vetting process.” This process relied completely on databases of criminals and terrorists, which were incomplete in the best of times and even less useful in the chaotic situation of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden administration officials accepted at face value what these Afghan evacuees told them about themselves, without making any effort at all to check whether or not the evacuees’ claims were true.
What’s more, the Examiner reports that “the large majority of people, approximately 75%, evacuated were not American citizens, green card holders, Afghan Special Immigrant Visa holders, or applicants for the visa.” The Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) was given to Afghans who aided U.S. forces during our twenty-year misadventure in the country. As bad as the 75% figures was, it represented a slight improvement over the situation at the beginning of September, when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that “of the 60,000 Afghans who have entered the U.S., nearly 8,000 are either U.S. citizens or residents, while about 1,800 are SIV holders, having obtained visas after assisting the U.S. military.” That is, 52,000, or 86 percent, were not U.S. citizens or SIV holders. However, Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) noted in early November that as of the beginning of October, only 700 of the 82,000 Afghans who had already been brought to the United States had SIVs.
Biden himself wasn’t the only one who promised that the Afghans they were bringing into the United States by the thousands would be thoroughly vetted. State Department wonk Ned Price was just as firm: “Before anyone who is evacuated from Afghanistan comes to this country, they undergo a rigorous vet. Unless and until they complete that vet they will not be in a position to come to the U.S.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
