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Floor Speech
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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, last week, the day before Thanksgiving, our Nation's Capital experienced a horrific tragedy. Just blocks from the White House, two National Guard members were ambushed by a gunman. One of the victims, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, tragically, succumbed to her wounds. The second, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, is currently fighting for his life.
We join thousands of Americans who are praying for him and for a full and complete recovery, lifting up his family and also lifting up the family of Sarah Beckstrom.
Now, these two young, brave, patriotic Americans answered the call of duty to serve their Nation in uniform, and, for that, they were gunned down in cold blood.
What do we know about the shooting suspect? He is a 29-year-old Afghan national. He entered the country in 2021 during President Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. He is among nearly 200,000 Afghan nationals who were relocated to our country by the Biden administration under Operation Allies Welcome. This program was part of Biden's larger effort to make illegal immigration legal.
At the time, my Republican colleagues and I demanded answers from the administration about how they could possibly vet all the evacuees amid this chaotic withdrawal.
We must never forget that 13 U.S. servicemembers were murdered by a suicide bomber at the Abbey Gate during the evacuation, including SSG Ryan Knauss of Tennessee.
The Biden administration, however, insisted that the evacuees were properly vetted. The morning after the Abbey Gate bombings, Biden's Press Secretary Jen Psaki told the American people that all Afghan nationals were ``screened and vetted prior to being allowed into the United States.''
Well, that was a lie and a lie that has now cost the life of a U.S. servicemember.
In 2022, an inspector general report from the Department of Homeland Security found that the Biden administration ``admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States,'' noting that ``some information used to vet evacuees through U.S. government databases . . . was inaccurate, incomplete, or missing.''
We can be grateful that President Trump is taking decisive action to strengthen vetting and prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. He has halted visas for Afghan nationals and bolstered the vetting process for aliens from 19 high-risk countries. This is what it looks like when a President puts the American people first, and Congress should do everything possible to work with DHS and to support these efforts.
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