National Guard shooting heightens immigration tensions as suspect charged with first-degree murder

A US official on Friday said an Afghan national accused of shooting two members of the National Guard will now face a first-degree murder charge, after one of the soldiers succumbed to her injuries. The development came as Donald Trump reiterated his vow to halt migration from what he called “third world countries.”

The upgraded charge intensifies the case against the suspect, identified as 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who US media have reported previously served in the “Zero Units,” a CIA-supported Afghan paramilitary group.

Jeanine Pirro, Washington DC’s attorney, told the Fox News programme Fox & Friends that prosecutors were moving from assault charges to first-degree murder. “There are certainly many more charges to come, but we are upgrading the initial charges of assault to murder in the first degree,” she said.

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Calling the attack premeditated, Pirro added: “It is a premeditated murder. There was an ambush with a gun toward people who didn’t know what was coming.”

Pirro’s announcement comes after Attorney General Pam Bondi pledged on Thursday to “seek the death penalty” against Lakanwal, describing him as a “monster."

Pirro said Lakanwal opened fire with a .357 Smith and Wesson revolver on a group of guardsmen on patrol just a few blocks from the White House on Wednesday, the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Sarah Beckstrom, a 20-year-old West Virginia National Guard member deployed in the US capital as part of Trump’s crackdown on crime, died from her wounds, the president said on Thursday.

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He said the other soldier wounded in the attack, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, was “fighting for his life."

“We still have hope,” Pirro said of Wolfe.

“He’s still in critical condition. We are doing everything we can to assist his family."

The shooting has brought together three politically explosive issues: Trump’s controversial use of the military on American soil, immigration, and the lingering legacy of the 20-year conflict in Afghanistan – America’s longest war.

‘Rigorous re-examination’  

On late Thursday, Trump pledged on Truth Social to “permanently pause” migration from “all Third World Countries” and threatened to reverse “millions” of admissions granted under his predecessor Joe Biden, in a new escalation in his anti-immigration stance.

When asked which specific nationalities would be affected, the US Department of Homeland Security, pointed AFP to a list of 19 countries – including Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Iran and Myanmar – facing US travel restrictions under a previous order from Trump in June.

Separately, Joseph Edlow, Trump’s director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), said on Thursday he had ordered a “full-scale, rigorous re-examination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern."

When asked to specify the countries, the USCIS referred AFP to the same list of 19 countries.

More than 1.6 million US green card holders, roughly 12 percent of the total permanent resident population, were born in the countries listed, according to the latest immigration data available on the agency’s “Eligible to Naturalize Dashboard” analysed by AFP.

Afghanistan, which has over 116,000 green card holders, is also affected by a total halt of immigration application processing, ordered by the Trump administration after the shooting.

CIA director John Ratcliffe said the suspect, Lakanwal, had been part of a CIA-backed “partner force” fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

He added that he had been brought to the United States as part of a program to evacuate Afghans who had worked with the agency after the Taliban toppled the American-backed government in 2021.

Lakanwal had been living in the western state of Washington with his family and had driven across the country to the capital, officials said.

The heads of the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security and other senior Trump appointees all insisted that Lakanwal had been granted unvetted access to the US because of lax asylum policies in the wake of the chaotic final US withdrawal from Afghanistan under former president Biden.

However, AfghanEvac, a group that helped resettle Afghans in the US after the military withdrawal, said they had undergone “some of the most extensive security vetting” of any migrants.

With inputs from agencies