Key Points
- Nearly 75,000 Afghan refugees were flown out of Kabul by the Biden administration.
- Many of them were unvetted and couldn’t provide a visa or any kind of identification.
- Senators. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Rick Scott (R-FL) wrote a letter to the DHS to express their concerns.
President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was hasty, reckless, and irresponsible. 13 service members lost their lives, thousands of Americans and American allies were left stranded, and billions of dollars worth of cutting-edge military equipment abandoned.
Then there are the 75,000 Afghan refugees the Biden admin knows almost nothing about.
According to a recent classified briefing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, it was revealed that the vetting process for Afghan refugees lifted out of Kabul was not thorough and could present potential national security threats.
Committee members Senators. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Rick Scott (R-FL) wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security to express their concerns.
“More than 120,000 individuals were airlifted out of Afghanistan. Of that number, the U.S. reportedly evacuated around 80,000 people and of those, 5,500 were Americans and over 73,000 were Afghans or other foreign nationals. Some of those Afghan nationals are currently housed in military installations in the U.S. We write today to request information about how your agencies are vetting/screening these individuals,” the Senators wrote.
“In testimony at a Senate committee hearing, Secretary Blinken confirmed, ‘most of them were not’ vetted before leaving the Karzai airport and despite Blinken’s assurances that these individuals were vetted before arriving on U.S. soil, we are still concerned about your agencies’ ability to fully vet these individuals if they do not have any identification documents and cannot prove who they claim to be,” the letter continues.
“It is beyond unacceptable that several months after President Biden’s disastrous and deadly withdrawal we still do not have a full account of all the Americans who are still trapped in Afghanistan or a full account of the Afghans who were evacuated to the U.S.”
The administration’s lack of transparency on vetting and transportation procedures have many expecting the worst — and with Biden’s track record, how can you blame them?
The Washington Free Beacon estimates more than 12,000 Afghan refugees arrived without visas or any kind of proper identification. And, according to internal emails between those involved in the evacuation efforts, flights were irresponsibly filled to “excess,” making any effort to properly vet passengers an impossible task.
At this point, there’s no telling how many of the evacuees are linked to terrorist groups or how many have previous criminal records. But Senators Johnson, Hawley, and Scott will get answers —they’re giving the administration until the end of the year to respond.