Last summer, when things went bad in Afghanistan and the U.S. had to evacuate that country on the double, the Biden administration–caught flat-footed as always–was in a quandary about how to deal with the tens of thousands of Afghan collaborators thought to be at the mercy of the newly triumphant Taliban.
Thus was born Operation Allies Welcome, an ad-hoc program dependent upon the traditionally little-used Humanitarian Parole feature of immigration law that permits the waiver of any immigration regs standing in the way of desired alien resettlement.
Primarily under that program, approximately 76,000 Afghanis have since been more-or-less permanently resettled in the U.S. (though, legally–as though that matters–such parole is good for only two years). Not surprisingly, the scant attention paid to screening the parolees has finally, after a year, been officially noted by a government agency.
The Office of Inspector General (OIG) of DHS published a report this week revealing that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States. As a result, DHS may have admitted or paroled individuals into the United States who pose a risk to national security and the safety of local communities.”
DHS immediately took issue with its own agency’s report, insisting that it had not paroled individuals with derogatory information on their records–because their records at that time did not have that information. The derogratory info came later, after those individuals had passed the initial check and been admitted.
But that’s the point. In their rush to cover up the Biden government’s acute embarassment over the hasty withdrawal, DHS officials simply did not look carefully enough at thousands of Afghanis, none of whom qualified for official refugee status or for “Special Immigrant Visas.”
As usual, no one knows the extent of the resulting security breach. The Pentagon admitted earlier this year that “at least 50” evacuees had been admitted with “potentially significant security concerns.” In a letter last month to the Department of Defense (DoD), Senators Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) quoted a whistleblower charging that the administration “evacuated 324 individuals from Afghanistan into the United States who appeared on DoD’s watchlist, which includes known suspected terrorists.” [Emphasis added.] For its part, the OIG uncovered discrepancies in more than half of the nearly 90,000 records they checked.
Regardless of the numbers, the episode makes clear that the handling of potentially dangerous former collaborators after a failed mission is yet one more reason why we should not, in the words of John Quncy Adams, “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
One more item: Coincidentally or not, last week the government announced it was curtailing use of Humanitarian Parole for the time being and replacing Operation Allies Welcome with Operation Enduring Welcome. This time, they promise, they will do better.
For more, see the Fox News.