[ Katrina Trinko is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump denounced the shooting of two National Guard members as an “act of terror” in remarks Wednesday night and said the suspect was originally from Afghanistan.

Referring to the “monstrous ambush-style attack just steps away from the White House,” Trump said, “This heinous assault was an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror. It was a crime against our entire nation.”

He did not name the suspect, but said the suspect in the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. Wednesday had come from Afghanistan to the United States in 2021.

“I can report tonight that based on the best available information, the Department of Homeland Security is confident that the suspect in custody is a foreigner who entered our country from Afghanistan, a hellhole on Earth,” the president said, speaking from Palm Beach, Florida.

“He was flown in by the Biden administration in September 2021 on those infamous flights that everybody was talking about, nobody knew who was coming in, nobody knew anything about it,” Trump added.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on social media platform X that “[e]ffective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”

In a post on social media platform X, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote that the suspect “is an Afghan national who was one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome on September 8, 2021, under the Biden Administration.”

According to a 2024 report from the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, about 77,000 Afghans “were granted humanitarian parole into the United States for 2 years” under Operation Allies Welcome.

In 2022, a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report raised concerns about the program, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis authored by Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow; Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center; and Steven Bradbury, who was then a distinguished fellow at Heritage.