The US Department of Homeland Security inspector general has found errors in the background and eligibility checks of 40% of asylum cases involving Afghans who entered the country after the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. According to the department, the errors could have increased the risk of admitting people suspected of terrorism and other dangerous criminals.<\/p>\n
In a review of a sample of 678 cases, the inspector general found that aliases had not been recorded in 303 cases, security checks had not been carried out in 23 cases, and more than 150 cases had documentation problems. The report warned that these shortcomings may have prevented US Citizenship and Immigration Services from identifying links between applicants’ names and derogatory information, and may have put the completeness of immigration files at risk.<\/p>\n
In two cases, aliases were not recorded and the documentation was incomplete. According to the report, these involved people who may not have been eligible to enter the United States because of terrorism-related ties. In one of the cases, additional documents were not included and review by a senior official was not approved; in the other, the documents were included, but the option to agree or disagree with the analysis was not marked.<\/p>\n
The review began after staff at US Citizenship and Immigration Services warned that a 2023 settlement agreement had pushed them to handle cases faster than the time needed for a thorough background check. However, the report says that after the Department of Homeland Security agreement in September 2023, there was no statistically significant increase in the error rate.<\/p>\n
Republicans had previously voiced concerns about the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome programme, which brought more than 70,000 Afghans to the United States after the withdrawal of US forces in 2021. US media also reported that more than 5,000 of those relocated were flagged for national security-related issues.<\/p>\n
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who was resettled in the United States through the programme, shot two National Guard soldiers in an incident near the White House; one soldier was killed and the other was seriously wounded. After the incident, Donald Trump ordered the suspension of processing Afghan immigrant cases, but the process has recently resumed following a court order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US watchdog finds errors in 40% of Afghan asylum cases, raising concerns over security checks and immigration records.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23001,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,2,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-migrant-news","category-secondary-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}