But since former President Joe Biden’s 2021 disastrous withdrawal, we’ve taken in more than 200,000 poorly vetted Afghans. Some of them were indeed genuine allies of the United States, just as many in the visa lines in Saudi Arabia in 2001 were harmless travelers.

But which ones?

As Congress considers bills to bring in even more Afghans, federal whistleblowers have come forward to ask, why would we admit more people when we didn’t properly vet the 200,000-plus Afghans we’ve already let in?

Those whistleblowers have revealed that the Biden administration conducted rushed, superficial, and compromised vetting of the Afghans who rushed aboard our airplanes in 2021, and those who followed over the next few years.

Whistleblowers report that federal employees were pressured to increase admissions. One government contractor is said to have hired more than 200 Afghan nationals to process cases involving their own countrymen — an unprecedented arrangement in U.S. immigration programs.

That matters because the consequences of inadequate vetting are no longer hypothetical. Several recent cases show some Afghans let in as “allies” are willing to commit acts of terrorism — making a second 9/11 a frightening possibility.

Later this fall, we will commemorate the first anniversary of the shooting of two National Guard troops just blocks from the White House by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan brought to the United States through Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome.

Lakanwal, who in Afghanistan had taken paid assignments from U.S. special operations forces, had indeed been vetted — but only for his reliability as a gun for hire, not for his loyalty to America or his belief in our values.

In October 2024, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi was arrested in Oklahoma after planning an ISIS-inspired attack on U.S. polling places on Election Day. Tawhedi had entered the United States through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program for Afghan “allies”. He was helped by his mother-in-law — also vetted by the Biden program — who became the first person ever indicted by the U.S. Alien Terrorist Removal Court.

The same week as the 2025 National Guard shooting, federal authorities arrested Mohammad Dawood Alokozay, who threatened a suicide bombing in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, expressed support for the Taliban, and said he had come to the U.S. to kill Americans.

In Virginia, immigration agents arrested yet another Afghan, Jaan Shah Safi, for providing support to ISIS and supplying weapons to his father, a militia commander in Afghanistan. Like Lakanwal and Alokozay, Safi came to the U.S. under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome program.

How many other vetting failures will we find out about in the coming years?

The first step to fixing this would be re-vetting of the hundreds of thousands of Afghans brought here since 2021. Their original vetting was through a program that federal whistleblowers and even Afghan immigrants have claimed allowed bribery and fraudulent documents, with little or no background checks.

Many of the over 70,000 Afghans who have SIVs and green cards will be eligible to apply for naturalization starting in 2027 — they must be prioritized for re-vetting, including a close look at whether they’ve traveled back to Afghanistan. Whistleblowers estimate more than half the Afghans with SIVs were not allies at all, but fraudsters and Taliban sympathizers who provided fake documents and false statements to immigration and State Department officials.

Some self-appointed Afghan advocacy groups argue sending Afghans back would put their lives in jeopardy. But whistleblowers report some of the “vetted” Afghans have traveled back to Afghanistan and returned to the United States, again and again. Anyone with a fear of losing his life to the regime would not willingly return to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to visit relatives or get married.

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Yet the Afghan advocates and immigration lawyers know Afghan immigrants are traveling back and forth. It’s so bad that one well-known Afghan advocacy leader is on video urging Afghans — who in applying for asylum attested they feared for their lives — to stop traveling back to Afghanistan!

No foreigner should be let into the United States without careful vetting. But the Biden administration’s frivolous and lackadaisical approach to national security means we also need to do re-vetting, which will take time and cost money — but it’s the only way we can stop the next 9/11.

Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.