The tragic Wednesday shooting of two West Virginia National Guardsmen in Washington, and President Donald Trump’s call to reexamine green card holders from “countries of concern” including Afghanistan, was predated by a warning from Fox News host Laura Ingraham about the Biden administration’s announcement amid the withdrawal that they were vetting evacuees on the “back end.”
The identification of a suspect has raised concerns again about the chaotic 2021 Kabul evacuation and previous reports of misconduct by evacuees on U.S. military bases.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, originally of Afghanistan and once part of a CIA-linked team fighting the Taliban, was identified as the main suspect in the shooting, which has since claimed the life of West Virginia National Guard Spc. Sarah Beckstrom of Nicholas County, West Virginia.
On Friday, “Ingraham Angle” host Laura Ingraham told Fox News Digital she and other conservatives have been sounding the alarm on failures of Biden-era vetting following the withdrawal ever since the Fox News host exclusively broke the story in September 2021 that members of Congress brought concerns over chaos at Army bases holding refugees directly to the State Department.
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“Soon after the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal, it was obvious that their intent was to bring as many Afghans into the U.S. as possible,” Ingraham wrote in an email Friday.
“Conservatives, including myself, raised serious concerns about the cost, the difficulty of assimilation and potential threats posed to no avail,” she said. “The Biden team didn’t care.
“We kept hearing, ‘But we promised,’ — Americans didn’t promise anything — and they shouldn’t be forced to keep paying for previous presidents’ horrendous mistakes.”
In September 2021, Ingraham reported exclusively that a top Republican demanded answers from then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the reports out of Fort Pickett in Blackstone, Virginia, depicting chaos and unvetted, unaccounted for evacuees.
As Ingraham pointed out, Blinken had said the State Department tried to “get as many people out as fast as we can, while we had the airport functioning. We focused on doing just that, and we’re doing accountings on the back end as people arrive in the United States.”
“That’s your Secretary of State admitting that he didn’t care about vetting these folks before we brought them to U.S. Soil,” Ingraham said at the time.
“And if you thought they would be securely held on US military bases, well, think again.”
Then-Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee exclusively provided Ingraham with a letter he wrote demanding answers from Blinken.
“I’ve recently been made aware from someone at Fort Pickett, Virginia, that Afghan evacuees basically have free rein of the complex and have even been allowed to leave, despite not having completed the vetting process,” Green wrote.
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“My sources made shocking allegations, including multiple incidents of sexual assault and several evacuees have been picked up by Uber drivers without any permission from authorities or being cleared to leave.”
Green called upon his own combat service in Afghanistan as an Army special operations flight surgeon to request confirmation or denial of the allegations made by the source, telling Blinken the reports pose an obvious national security risk.
At the time, Ingraham contrasted Green’s letter with Blinken’s public statements. During a news conference at the time, Blinken said that in the administration’s effort to get “as many people out (of Afghanistan) as fast as we can, while we had the (Hamid Karzai) Airport functioning, we focused on doing just that.
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“We’re doing accountings on the back end as people arrive in the United States,” Blinken told reporters at the time.
“If you thought they would be securely held on U.S. military bases, think again,” Ingraham said of Green’s revelation.
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Ingraham added Friday in comments to Fox News Digital that Afghan evacuees from Biden’s withdrawal not only come from a culture hostile to Western values, but they are often “all too dependent on the U.S. taxpayers to support them and their families.”
“This must end — (it’s) yet another calamitous Biden mistake President Trump is forced to address,” she said.
In his discussion with Ingraham after the withdrawal, Green, a member of and later chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee who left public life earlier in 2025, said he was hearing similar reports from bases beyond Fort Pickett, Virginia.
“DOD is getting its directions on how to handle these situations by the State Department,” Green claimed. “And the State Department is failing to give them adequate information. They’re letting them leave. They can catch an Uber and actually leave the base. They don’t know exactly how many are even there.
“So, they can’t account for someone if they don’t return.”
Green said officials warned evacuees that if they leave the base their visa processing would stop but that such a warning appeared to have little effect on those who may have left.
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“Then you get the shocking allegations of harassment and sexual assault, and it’s just horrific,” he said.
At the time, Ingraham reported many of the evacuees on the planes out of Kabul came with no personal documentation at all, and she questioned how any “vetting” could be done of people who couldn’t begin to prove their own identity.
When contacted by Fox News at the time, the Biden State Department said, as a general rule, it did not comment on communications with Congress.
Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security Secretary at the time, told CBS News that the administration was dealing with “very few” evacuees who had given “any cause for concern.”
CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell followed up by pressing the secretary whether he could guarantee none of “thousands” of prisoners released by the Taliban would be coming to America.
“I can guarantee you that we are doing everything possible to make sure that they don’t,” Mayorkas said.
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By one year after the Afghanistan withdrawal, lawmakers were still focusing on fallout from the apparent chaos.
Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., said on Fox News in September 2022 he had heard similar reports out of Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, in his home state as Green had out of Virginia.
“Should it be any surprise to the American people that they were misled? This is no different than the Southern border when Secretary Mayorkas came before the (House) Judiciary Committee and lied to us and said the border is secure. A year ago, President Biden said ‘inflation is transitory’. And now, a year later, we find out that they did not vet them,” Tiffany said.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
Tiffany said he was at Fort McCoy in Tomah, Wisconsin, when the first 2,000 refugees arrived there.
“None of them had gone through the SIV (Special Immigrant Visa) process,” he said. “I asked about it.
“People could walk right off from the base without any authorization from the commanding officer. We sounded the warning bell on that. And now, finally, the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security is talking about this and saying this is a threat to national security and to our local communities.”
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