Your mileage may vary, but I find these answers from Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on Meet the Press yesterday, discussing Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s deadly attack on two National Guardsman in Washington, D.C., significantly less than reassuring.
KRISTEN WELKER: And we are going to talk about some of the steps the president’s taking. But I just want to be very clear about this because his asylum was approved in April of this year, on the Trump administration’s watch. So just to be very clear, was there a vetting process in place to approve that asylum request?
SEC. KRISTI NOEM: Yeah, the vetting process all happened under Joe Biden’s administration.
KRISTEN WELKER: But was he vetted when he was granted asylum?
SEC. KRISTI NOEM: That is what is so broken —
KRISTEN WELKER: Are you saying he wasn’t vetted when he was granted asylum?
SEC. KRISTI NOEM: — is that they didn’t. Vetting is happening when they come into the country, and that was completely abandoned under Joe Biden’s administration. That’s the – that’s the irresponsibility that has completely devastated our country, Kristen. Put us in such a dangerous position. I don’t think people realize when Joe Biden was in the White House exactly how he was allowing our country to be infiltrated with people that we didn’t know who they were. Some of them we did know were dangerous, and we went after as soon as they came into this country. But under this program, we could have up to 100,000 people that came in from Afghanistan that may be here to do us harm. And President Trump is absolutely dedicated to getting them out of our country.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal was granted asylum on April 23. According to CBS News:
Lakanwal later applied for asylum with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2024 and his application was granted in 2025, the DHS official said. But his request for a green card, which is tied to the asylum grant, is pending.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Noem was sworn in as DHS Secretary on January 25, so Noem had been on the job and overseeing USCIS for about three months when Lakanwal was granted asylum.
The contention from Noem seems to be that the Biden administration did no vetting of individuals like Lakanwal — an assertion that is unproven — and yet that after three months on the job, the Trump administration was still granting asylum to individuals like Lakanwal, assuming that the vetting done by the previous administration was sufficient.
If the Trump team is going to just carry out the policies started under the Biden team . . . why do we need the Trump team?