Amid a national immigration crackdown, the fallout from the recent shooting of two National Guardsmen by an Afghan national in Washington, D.C., has thrust the precarious status of Afghan nationals in the U.S. into the spotlight.
In Richmond, Axios reported earlier this week that local Afghan families have seen citizenship oath ceremonies and visa appointments canceled in the wake of the shooting.
According to the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), nearly 200,000 Afghans were relocated to the U.S. as SIV holders, refugees, and asylees between August 2021 and the start of the second Trump term. As reported by the Associated Press, Virginia has resettled more Afghan refugees per capita than any other state.
Back in August, escalating enforcement had already reached Henrico, where 19-year-old Arman Momand, a legal resident from Afghanistan, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and held at the Farmville Detention Center before being released.
Henrico’s Momand is now a green card holder, but he was nearly deported over misdemeanor charges.
He arrived in the U.S. with his family in 2021 and held Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) status at the time of his arrest, a designation for individuals who face retaliation for assisting the U.S. military abroad. Despite receiving no court-issued jail time, Momand was detained by ICE, held for two months at the Farmville Detention Center, and placed into expedited removal proceedings, a process that would have required his return to Afghanistan.
His detention reflects a broader shift in federal enforcement priorities emphasizing mandatory detention over alternatives for supervision. In Virginia, non-citizen arrest rates have tripled within the first seven months of 2025 compared to the last full year, according to available data.
Despite his legal status, “he’d already been detained, and ICE has a lot of discretion in terms of when they let someone go if they have ongoing proceedings,” Momand’s lawyer, Alejandra DeJesus Pinto, said.
While Momand was held in custody, his family continued the process of applying for permanent residency. He ultimately completed his green card interview by video from inside the detention center. The interview was successful, and Momand was granted his green card while still in ICE custody.
After two months, he was released.
Momand’s case, and others throughout the country, have demonstrated how much the Trump administration has expanded the nation’s deportation infrastructure. The second Trump term now includes an increasing number of cases in which the government has moved to deport immigrants with green cards and visas, from high-profile cases like Mahmoud Khalil’s to the review of all refugees admitted to the U.S. during the Biden administration, including individuals with green cards.
While the countries affected by the administration’s response to the D.C. shooting were not specified, Joseph Edlow, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said on social media that he has “directed a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every green card for every alien from every country of concern,” and a USCIS announcement named Afghanistan among 19 “high-risk” countries.
“The president can restrict or suspend entry of immigrants from certain countries or processing of asylums, but his power to do so is limited and subject to court review,” DeJesus Pinto said. “We will have to wait and see how this plays out on a large scale, how far this administration chooses to pursue this, as well as how far the courts are willing to allow them to pursue it.”
The suspected D.C. shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national who underwent vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the U.S., the Washington Post reported. He first entered the U.S. in 2021 as part of Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden administration program that helped resettle Afghan nationals following the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. He applied for asylum in December 2024, which was granted in April 2025.
“[The Trump administration] is looking to remove more people, more quickly, with less process,” said Amanda Frost, a professor of law and director of the Immigration, Migration and Human Rights Program at the University of Virginia School of Law. “They’ve made every effort to do that, the Alien Enemies Act being one major example; the attempts to revoke student visas; encouraging people to self-deport; using terrorism as a way to take away student visas.”
“It’s clear that the Trump administration is exploiting this horrible tragedy to further its anti-immigrant agenda, as evidenced by the many policies they have enacted and proposed targeting immigrants and refugees, including Afghans,” said Kimberly Grano, a litigation staff attorney with IRAP. “Blanket efforts to deny or take away immigration benefits, including from individuals already in the U.S., on the basis of nationality, raise serious legal questions.”
In May, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Afghans in the U.S., with the White House stating that they no longer faced a threat in their home country. That same month, the administration welcomed the first group of white South African, or Afrikaner, refugees under an executive order mandating the prioritization of their resettlement, claiming the group faces racial discrimination in South Africa.
The ICE website features a public catalog of recent arrests emphasizing the agency’s focus on the “Worst of the Worst.” On the ground, however, those with minor charges or no charges at all, something multiple federal judges have found unlawful, appear to be increasingly targeted.
Estimates by The Marshall Project found that more than 1,800 people with traffic violations were deported between January and August 2025, and that people with no criminal convictions made up two-thirds of the more than 120,000 deportations between January and May 2025.
Ultimately, contemporary U.S. immigration proceedings are increasingly defined by vastly expanded legal discretion and a widening net for non-citizens. Virginia’s substantial population of Afghan nationals are among many local immigrant groups seeing their futures blurred as a result.
Main photo: A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III evacuates 823 fleeing Afghan citizens from Hamid Karzai International Airport on 15 August 2021.
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