Trump has wreaked collective punishment on immigrants following the shooting of two National Guard members in DC.
By Sonali Kolhatkar ,
December 8, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a roundtable discussion with farmers in the Cabinet Room of the White House on December 8, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Alex Wong / Getty Images
The aftermath of the November 26, 2025, shooting in Washington, D.C. has underscored yet again that we live in a white supremacist world where people of color are target practice for racist leaders, and where the actions of one are enough to incur collective punishment against all.
As Emran Feroz laid out in his recent Truthout op-ed, abundant evidence suggests that the suspected shooter, an Afghan asylee named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was shaped by serious trauma-related post-traumatic stress disorder following his years of service on behalf of U.S. empire, and that he was trained as a boy to commit violence as part of the “CIA’s own paramilitary forces in Afghanistan: the Zero Units.” The CIA-backed militia has been linked to war crimes in Khost, Kandahar, and elsewhere.
And despite these facts, the white supremacist administration of Donald Trump has seized on the shooting not to reevaluate CIA practices or mental health supports in the U.S., but instead to collectively punish as many communities of color as possible.
Trump Inflicts Collective Punishment on Immigrants
Instead of exploring the roots of Lakanwal’s unravelling by reevaluating the CIA’s vast landscape of war crimes, littered with the blood of untold numbers of Afghans and other brown-skinned peoples, the Trump administration is ramping up an already draconian and racist anti-immigrant crackdown.
Related Story
The aftermath of the November 26, 2025, shooting in Washington, D.C. has underscored yet again that we live in a white supremacist world where people of color are target practice for racist leaders, and where the actions of one are enough to incur collective punishment against all.
As Emran Feroz laid out in his recent Truthout op-ed, abundant evidence suggests that the suspected shooter, an Afghan asylee named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was shaped by serious trauma-related post-traumatic stress disorder following his years of service on behalf of U.S. empire, and that he was trained as a boy to commit violence as part of the “CIA’s own paramilitary forces in Afghanistan: the Zero Units.” The CIA-backed militia has been linked to war crimes in Khost, Kandahar, and elsewhere.
And despite these facts, the white supremacist administration of Donald Trump has seized on the shooting not to reevaluate CIA practices or mental health supports in the U.S., but instead to collectively punish as many communities of color as possible.
Trump Inflicts Collective Punishment on Immigrants
Instead of exploring the roots of Lakanwal’s unravelling by reevaluating the CIA’s vast landscape of war crimes, littered with the blood of untold numbers of Afghans and other brown-skinned peoples, the Trump administration is ramping up an already draconian and racist anti-immigrant crackdown.
Related Story
Suspect in National Guard Shooting Brought the CIA’s Shadow War Home
Rahmanullah Lakanwal was between 14 and 16 years old when he became a CIA-backed militiaman in Afghanistan. By Emran Feroz , Truthout December 3, 2025
It has halted the processing of legal immigration applications for green cards and citizenship by Afghan nationals — the very people the CIA and its proxies have victimized for years — and people from more than a dozen other non-white nations such as Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. And it has stopped all decisions on asylum cases across the board.
The Trump administration … has halted the processing of legal immigration applications for green cards and citizenship by Afghan nationals — the very people the CIA and its proxies have victimized for years.
In the wake of the National Guard shootings, Trump has also launched Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Minneapolis and St. Paul aimed at the Somali immigrant community, and denounced Somalis and their homeland as “garbage.”
After the shooting, Trump lost no time in announcing that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.”
Imperatives of U.S. Empire Were at the Heart of Lakanwal’s Formation
In the wake of the D.C. shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Lakanwal was “radicalized since he’s been here in this country,” and that it happened “through connections in his home community and state,” but she has offered no proof to back her assertions.
Meanwhile, Trump has accused the Biden administration of improperly vetting Lakanwal and allowing him and his family to resettle in the U.S. after American troops withdrew from Afghanistan as part of a program called Operation Allies Welcome. But it was actually during Trump’s tenure in April 2025 that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services formalized Lakanwal’s status and the status of his immediate family members as asylees.
If Lakanwal is indeed responsible for the National Guard shooting as suspected, the publicly available information currently suggests that the shooting was at least in part the embodiment of “blowback,” a term often used in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to describe the unintended consequence of U.S. wars.
Afghan witnesses have described members of the CIA-backed Zero Units as acting with complete impunity. Directed and insulated by the CIA, Lakanwal and his colleagues operated as de facto warlords, conducting night raids and extrajudicially killing civilians suspected to be Taliban members. It’s no wonder a member of the Bellingham, Washington, community where Lakanwal and his family resettled described the suspect as isolated and erratic, and “not … functional as a person, father and provider.”
The U.S. Has Inflicted Unimaginable Violence Against Afghans
Lakanwal’s case appears to be the only one of an Afghan committing an act of violence toward uniformed members of the U.S. military apparatus on U.S. soil. But for decades now, the U.S. has brought untold violence to Afghanistan — a history that the Trump administration is likely to ignore.
When the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA responded by arming and training proxy warriors called the Mujahideen to fight the Red Army. A decade later, after a million Afghans were killed in the crossfire, the Soviets gave up and withdrew. Following that, warring Mujahideen factions fought one another for power, killing tens of thousands of Afghan civilians in the process with U.S.-supplied weapons.
Enter the Taliban, a fighting force drawn from Afghan refugees of the war, supported by U.S. allies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Taliban took over Afghanistan in the ’90s and ushered in an era of draconian rule. When Saudi fundamentalist Osama bin Laden masterminded the 9/11 attacks, his presence in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was enough for George W. Bush’s administration to launch the so-called “war on terror,” a full-scale act of collective punishment on the Afghan people, culminating in the longest war in U.S. history.
At home that war was accompanied by the USA PATRIOT Act under which countless immigrants from Muslim and Arab nations in the U.S. were racially profiled, vilified, imprisoned, and deported.
President Joe Biden finally withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021. But the CIA persisted, promising to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely — funding, training, and arming men like Lakanwal who saw their participation as a potential pathway to resettling in the U.S.
Why Aren’t We Talking About Gun Violence?
In the wake of the shooting, Trump and his allies have been quick to fixate on Lakanwal’s identity as a recently resettled Afghan immigrant, and that of his victims as white American armed forces, using these details to exploit the incident to its fullest in service of the MAGA agenda.
Trump’s exploitation of the D.C. shooting highlights the worst of the U.S. empire’s bloodlust colliding with the worst of its anti-immigrant racism.
If Trump truly cared about preventing such senseless acts of violence, he could promote any number of policies that would actually make a difference: gun control, mental health treatment — and a reevaluation of CIA-led violence in other nations. Indeed, horrific as the shooting was, it was hardly remarkable in a nation awash in guns, where gun violence claims the lives of 125 people per day nationwide.
If Trump insists on drawing demographic conclusions about shootings, he should be pressed to examine statistics showing that 84 percent of mass shooters are white and almost all are men, and take action to address what’s prompting white men — like Tyler Robinson, the man suspected of fatally shooting Charlie Kirk — to resort to vigilantism and gun violence. But we don’t live in a world where fairness and logic inform government decisions.
Trump’s exploitation of the D.C. shooting highlights the worst of the U.S. empire’s bloodlust colliding with the worst of its anti-immigrant racism. It is white supremacy in action on the global and national stage. Such collective punishment is just as morally reprehensible today as it was after 9/11.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Sonali Kolhatkar
Sonali Kolhatkar is a monthly contributor to Truthout. She is an award winning multimedia journalist and author. She is the host and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, a nationally syndicated weekly television and radio program airing on Pacifica stations and Free Speech TV. She was most recently Senior Editor at YES! Media covering race, economy, and democracy, and is currently Senior Correspondent for the Economy for All Project at the Independent Media Institute, and a monthly columnist for OtherWords, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her writings have been published in LA Times, Salon, The Nation, In These Times, Truthdig, and more. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible (Seven Stories, 2025), Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023), and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories, 2006). Her first novel, Queen of Aarohi will publish in 2027 by Red Hen Press. Her website is www.SonaliKolhatkar.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment