A day before 29-year-old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal opened fire on two National Guardsmen patrolling near the White House, the NGO that reportedly settled the shooter in the United States condemned President Donald Trump for ordering further vetting of refugees.
On November 25, World Relief, one of nine voluntary organizations contracted by the State Department to facilitate housing and employment assistance for refugees, issued a press release in response to an internal memo from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) requiring additional scrutiny of all refugees who entered the country during the Biden administration.
In the statement, World Relief president and CEO Myal Greene called the additional vetting a “moral and ethical betrayal of due process,” and VP Matt Soerens said that it would “retraumatiz[e]” refugees brought to the United States.
The following day, according to witnesses, Lakanwal fired on the guards while shouting, “Allahu akbar.” Twenty-year-old Specialist Sarah Beckstrom died from her wounds, and 24-year-old Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe is still in serious condition.
Greene insisted in World Relief’s statement that the Afghans had been sufficiently vetted.
“Refugees admitted under the U.S. refugee resettlement program have undergone some of the most rigorous vetting of any immigrant lawfully admitted into the United States, yet this sweeping re-interview initiative is nothing less than a calculated effort to strip lawful status from thoroughly-vetted, law-abiding people,” he said.
But according to a 2022 Department of Homeland Security inspector general report released under Biden appointee Alejandro Mayorkas, the chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal left significant gaps in information, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) often lacked significant data for the entries, such as “name, date of birth, identification number, and travel document data.” In one sample of 88,977 evacuee records, 417 lacked first names, 242 lacked last names, 11,110 had January 1 birthdates, and 7,800 had missing or invalid travel documents.
“We also determined CBP admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States,” DHS investigators concluded.
A 2024 DHS report involving three Department of Homeland Security divisions — CBP, USCIS, and ICE — similarly found that CBP did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees and that DHS’s “fragmented” process resulted in chaotic conditions that led to lost information and background checks that were deferred until after departure from Afghanistan. During his April 2025 confirmation hearing, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Joe Kent said that after reviewing data from the National Counterterrorism Center, he found that more than 1,400 Afghans with suspected links to ISIS had been admitted into the country.
The New York Times reported on November 27 that World Relief was involved with resettling Lakanwal in Washington State, but since then, the organization has declined to elaborate, telling NPR they “cannot confirm whether or not [they] have served any specific client without permission from [their] federal government partners who administered the process for bringing Afghans to the United States beginning in 2021.”
What is known is that the State Department designated Whatcom County, Washington, which includes Bellingham, where Lakanwal resided, as a resettlement site for Afghan evacuees under Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome (OAW). World Relief’s local office there was tasked with aiding refugees’ initial integration.
While the NGO, founded in 1944 by the National Association of Evangelicals, once relied almost entirely on private contributions, today the bulk of its funding comes from the federal government.
In 2021, it received $56 million in federal grants and contracts and only $13 million in private contributions. Through its work with the Soros-funded Evangelical Immigration Table, World Relief is heavily involved in lobbying churches and evangelical organizations to back bills that would grant legal status to illegal immigrants.
In 2018, they launched the “I Was a Stranger” challenge, a “40-day Scripture-reading guide composed of short Bible passages that relate in one way or another to the theme of immigration.” This curriculum, which many critics argue cherry-picks and manipulates Scripture for progressive policy aims, was sent to churches across the country, and Soerens’ work promoting it was published and promoted in influential evangelical publications like Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition.
The Daily Wire reached out to World Relief, and they responded with a statement from Soerens saying, “Based on news reports, the alleged perpetrator in the attack in Washington, D.C., did not enter the United States as a refugee and thus would not have been subject to the re-interview process to which our press release was responding.”
However, Trump’s order for further vetting of Afghan nationals admitted under the Biden administration also applies to those who entered the U.S. via humanitarian parole under OAW. It targets all Afghan arrivals from January 20, 2021, to February 20, 2025—including the ~76,000 OAW evacuees processed post-2021 U.S. withdrawal.
Soerens said World Relief stands by their statement of condemnation, and they have not changed their position opposing additional vetting of refugees.
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