The late-November 2025 incidents involving Afghan evacuees from Operation Allies Welcome (OAW) exposed deep structural weaknesses within the United States’ (US) security and immigration systems. The attack by Rahmanullah Lakanwal – an evacuee who had served alongside US forces in Afghanistan and later radicalized after resettlement – killed one National Guard member and injured another on November 26. This event followed the arrest of another evacuee, Mohammad Dawood Alokozay, for issuing a bomb threat on November 25. Together, these cases triggered an expansive federal response: the suspension of adjudications for Afghan-linked immigration cases, a sweeping re-vetting of individuals from 19 designated high-risk countries, and a broader threat by President Donald Trump to “permanently pause migration from all third world countries.” While designed to address immediate vulnerabilities, these actions reflect a deeper national struggle with two parallel radicalization ecosystems: one shaped by external jihadist ideology exploiting immigration gaps, and another – far more lethal – rooted in domestic white supremacist extremism and facilitated by longstanding bureaucratic fragmentation.
Meanwhile, on December 3, 2025, an Afghan national, Jan-Shah Safi, was arrested in Virginia for allegedly aiding Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-KP). The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed Safi was an “illegal alien terrorist” who entered the country, under OAW, on September 8, 2021, in Philadelphia. He had applied for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), however, his application was “terminated” after TPS was ended for Afghans.
The jihadist threat pathway revealed in these incidents reflects entrenched failures in both the vetting process and post-arrival integration. A 2024 DHS Inspector General audit found systemic flaws that resulted in more than 5,000 evacuees being flagged only after entry, caused by incomplete biometrics, inconsistent inter-agency screening, and weak information-sharing mechanisms. The more consequential lapse, however, emerges after resettlement, where structural deficiencies leave individuals without adequate mental health support, community integration, or monitoring of online behavior. DHS assessments have found that roughly 68 percent of radicalization indicators among recent arrivals stem from isolation, unaddressed trauma, economic stagnation, and exposure to unregulated online propaganda. Lakanwal, a former Central Intelligence Agency asset with documented post-traumatic stress disorder, exemplifies how individuals can fall through these systemic gaps. His trajectory aligns with what researchers describe as a hybrid radicalization model: ideological “push” factors from groups such as IS-KP combine with US-specific “pull” factors – grievances, social alienation, and unmonitored digital spaces – to produce the final pathway to violence.
Despite these failures, the federal response to the November incidents represented a sweeping overreaction when contextualized within the broader landscape of extremist violence in the US. Since September 11, 2001, jihadist-inspired attacks have resulted in approximately 100 to 150 deaths, with only 14 occurring in the last three years, all from a single attack in New Orleans on January 1, 2025. In sharp contrast, data from the Anti-Defamation League for 2015-2024 attributes 328 of 429 extremist-related murders – about 76 percent – to white supremacists and other far-right actors. In 2024 alone, far-right extremists were responsible for all 13 recorded extremist murders. Across the last decade, fatalities linked to white supremacist networks have consistently surpassed those driven by jihadist ideology, reflecting a decentralized, accelerationist movement thriving on fringe online platforms and encrypted communication spaces.
Yet the official responses to these two domains differ dramatically. The rapid, heavy-handed measures taken after the Afghan-linked cases stand in stark contrast to the comparatively restrained posture toward domestic extremism. Political rhetoric surrounding the January 2021 Capitol attack, ongoing debates over possible pardons for rioters, and efforts to minimize the severity of far-right violence all point to a normalization that blunts the urgency of countering homegrown extremism. This asymmetrical response – punitive and sweeping when threats appear foreign, lenient and polarized when they originate domestically – undermines strategic coherence, erodes public trust, and suggests deep-seated racial biases in national security policy.
While jihadist and white supremacist threats differ in ideology and origin, both exploit similar structural weaknesses. In the jihadist context, vulnerabilities arise from flawed vetting, uneven information-sharing, and poor post-entry monitoring. In the far-right context, the primary failure lies in a fragmented domestic intelligence architecture. An April 2025 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed that only 55 percent of tips related to domestic violent extremism were effectively shared between the DHS and Federal Bureau of Investigation, reflecting the same inter-agency coordination failures that destabilized OAW screening procedures. Whereas jihadists may enter through border-level gaps, domestic extremists flourish within the seams between federal, state, and local law enforcement.
A coherent national strategy must therefore transcend partisan narratives and racialized security assumptions. Reforms on the immigration side require periodic re-vetting, but also robust, federally funded community-based interventions addressing isolation, trauma, and online vulnerability. Countering far-right extremism demands full implementation of GAO recommendations, expansion of fusion-center coordination, and regulatory oversight of digital platforms from which roughly 80 percent of extremist plots originate. Above all, the US requires an integrated intelligence framework that bridges the artificial divide between foreign-inspired and domestic threats, enabling the sharing of behavioral risk indicators across agencies. The November 2025 incidents underscore the urgent need for such a holistic, data-driven modernization. Focusing solely on immigration overlooks the broader, deadlier threat landscape, obscures systemic institutional decay, and risks punishing entire communities for the actions of a few.
