After National Guard shootings, government cracks down on legal immigration

Washington—— Sophia Nyazi’s husband, Milad, shook her awake at 8 a.m. “ICE is coming,” he told her.

Three uniformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were downstairs in her Long Island, N.Y., home on Tuesday, according to video of her shot from the top of the stairs seen by The Times.

Niazi said agents asked her husband if he was applying for a green card. They told her they had to detain him because two National Guard members were shot a week earlier in Washington, D.C.

“He had nothing to do with that shooting,” Niazi, 27, recalled. “We don’t know that person at all.”

Her protests didn’t matter. The Trump administration has implemented a series of sweeping and unprecedented policy changes aimed at drastically restricting legal immigration pathways, including for immigrants long considered the most vulnerable.

Milad Nyazi, 28, was detained because, like the man charged in the shooting that killed a National Guard member, he was from Afghanistan.

The government has suspended decisions on all applications submitted by asylum seekers to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). In 2021, the United States will withdraw all troops from Afghanistan. It once welcomed visa and immigration applications from Afghans, but this has now been stopped.

Officials have also frozen the processing of immigration cases for people from 19 countries the government considers “high risk” and will conduct a case-by-case review of green cards and other immigration benefits offered to people from those countries since former President Joe Biden took office in 2021.

Immigration attorneys say they are aware of dozens of naturalization ceremonies and green card interviews being canceled for immigrants from Haiti, Iran, Guinea and other countries on the list.

In some cases, immigration officials told immigrants they were ready to issue green cards but were unable to do so because of the new guidelines, said Gregory Chen, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Although it’s unclear exactly how many people will be affected by the new rules, 1.5 million immigrants have filed asylum applications with USCIS.

“These sweeping changes collectively punish a large group of people who were trying to do things the right way,” said Amanda Baran, former director of policy and strategy at USCIS under the Biden administration. “I worry about all the people who dutifully filed their applications but whose lives are now in limbo.”

Administration officials called the Nov. 26 shooting a “terrorist attack” and argued the changes were necessary to protect the country. Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, faces charges in the shooting death of Army Special Forces. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, was seriously injured, Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24.

“Protecting this country and the American people remains paramount, and the American people will not bear the cost of the previous administration’s reckless resettlement policies,” USCIS Director Joseph Edlow said in a statement. Posted on X on November 27. “America’s security is non-negotiable.”

lacanval Not guilty His motives remained under investigation last week. In Afghanistan, he served in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Division.

Officials said Lakanwal entered the United States in 2021 through a Biden administration program that resettled nearly 200,000 Afghans after the U.S. troop withdrawal. He applied for asylum in December 2024 and was approved by the Trump administration in April, according to a statement from the nonprofit #AfghanEvac.

Afghans who have worked with U.S. forces are believed to be in danger if they remain under the Taliban government. The Department of Homeland Security said at the time that in addition to undergoing routine security checks, they underwent additional “rigorous” scrutiny, including biometric and biographical checks by counterterrorism and intelligence professionals.

Two federal reports in 2024 and this year pointed to some lapses in screening, including inaccurate data and the subsequent discovery of 55 evacuees on a terrorism watch list, although the latter report noted that the FBI then followed all necessary processes to mitigate any potential threats.

It’s unclear how the government will vet thousands of people already living in the U.S. legally. The federal government cannot easily strip people of their permanent legal status. However, the threat of reopening the case has alarmed immigrant communities across the country.

As of 2023, approximately 58,600 Afghan immigrants have settled in California, far more than any other state. According to the Migration Policy Institute. Interviews with more than a dozen local community advocates, immigration lawyers and family members of detainees reveal that the federal government is actively rounding up recent Afghan immigrants in the wake of the shooting in Washington.

“Unfortunately, I think the government is politicizing this very tragic event as a way to ban even legal immigration,” said Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “And it certainly has a much broader impact than just the Afghan community.”

Trump administration officials cited the shootings in a series of policy changes last week.

On Friday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it had Set up new center Enhance screening through supplementary review of immigration applications, in part using artificial intelligence. The USCIS Vetting Center in Atlanta will “focus on enhancing the review of aliens and enable the agency to be more nimble in responding to changes in the evolving threat landscape,” the agency said.

On Thursday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said work permits granted to immigrants will expire after 18 months instead of five years. The change includes work permits for those admitted as refugees, awaiting green card applications and awaiting asylum applications.

In a memo on Tuesday. USCIS outlined the suspension of asylum applications and immigration cases from the 19 countries also subject to the travel ban, acknowledging that the changes could cause processing delays but deeming it “necessary and appropriate” when weighed against “the agency’s obligation to protect and preserve national security.”

Immigration is already on high alert as the Trump administration cancels temporary humanitarian programs, reduces refugee admissions (except for a limited number of white Afrikaners) and steps up efforts to try to send those with deportation orders to countries with which they have no personal ties.

Before the Washington shooting, Memo of November 21 It shows that the government plans to review the cases of more than 200,000 refugees admitted during the Biden administration. While asylum seekers apply after arriving in the United States, refugees apply for entry from abroad.

Niazi questioned why Afghans were being singled out, noting that a white man allegedly assassinated Charlie Kirk, but “I didn’t see any ICE agents entering a white man’s house.”

Asked why Milad Niazi was detained, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Public Affairs Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called him a criminal and cited two arrests on suspicion of domestic violence.

“Deputy Minister [Kristi] “Noem, the Department of Homeland Security has been working diligently to identify and apprehend known or suspected terrorists and criminal illegal aliens who entered through Biden’s fraudulent parole program, and work to remove criminals and public safety threats from our country,” McLaughlin said in a statement.

Niazi said the charges did not stem from an incident of physical violence but were dropped and his record was later expunged.

She and her husband got engaged in Afghanistan in 2019 and applied for a fiancé visa because Nyazi is a U.S. citizen. Their application was approved in 2021. Soon after, as the Taliban took over, the U.S. government allowed Milad Nyazi to fly to the United States. Niazi said he has a green card application pending.

The couple’s three-year-old daughter screamed and cried as the father was handcuffed and taken away on Tuesday. He has a court hearing this week.

Afghans at all stages of the legal immigration process — not just those who have received deportation orders — are being targeted, said Zahra Bilu, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and others. At least 17 Afghans have been detained in the Bay Area since Monday, she said.

Lawyers say many of the Afghans detained last week have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border and are seeking asylum there.

Paris Etemadi Scott, legal director of the Pars Equality Center in San Jose, said three of her clients, an Afghan mother and her two sons in their early 20s, were detained on Dec. 1 during a routine ICE inspection. All have pending asylum claims, she said.

Rebecca Olszewski, lead attorney for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said her Afghan client, who also has a pending asylum case, made his monthly virtual check-in on Friday and was told to show up in person the next day, where he was detained.

Since the shootings, government officials and the president have used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants. On Dec. 1, Noem announced a travel ban on 19 countries on

At a Cabinet meeting the next day, Trump called Somali immigrants “trash” who “have nothing to contribute.” (Days later, Noem said the administration would expand the travel ban to more than 30 countries.)

On Thanksgiving Day, Trump Said about his social media platforms He intends to “permanently halt all immigration from Third World countries” and deport those “incompatible with Western civilization.”

In recent days, a ghostly quiet has fallen over the North Sacramento area where Shafiullah Hotak frequents, a city with a particularly dense Afghan population. Hotak, 38, an Afghan immigrant, worked as a community development program manager for Lao Families, a refugee resettlement organization, until federal spending cuts forced him out of work in May.

On Thursday, immigration agents knocked on the door of an apartment complex on Marconi Avenue where hundreds of Afghans had settled. An Afghan-owned tax and bookkeeping firm with just one employee is usually packed with clients. A nearby park was deserted, where teenagers played football and groups of children played after school. The queues at the halal market, famous for its Afghan sesame bread, have also disappeared.

“The situation in our community reminds me of when we used to go work in Afghanistan,” Hotak said. “We have to take a different route every day because people are being targeted by those who oppose the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. There are bombings and shootings.”

Hotak said “kill the eyes” is advice used by America’s enemies in Afghanistan to advise how to deal with Afghans on the ground assisting troops in an effort to blind them.

“But now those ‘eyes’ are in the United States, and the U.S. government is looking to capture them and put them in jail,” Hotak said.

era Staff writers Castillo reported from Washington, and Hussein and Uranga reported from Los Angeles.