Far-Left Representative Ruben Gallego (D-AZ-03) voted to bring Afghans to the U.S. through Operation Allies Refuge (OAR) in 2021-2022, whose backgrounds were not thoroughly investigated first.
Gallego voted with Democrats in a party-line vote in the House on September 21, 2021, to approve OAR with a Continuing Resolution that provided the program with “supplemental appropriations for Afghanistan evacuees.” The bill allowed many Afghans into the country who had not provided aid to the U.S., in sharp contrast to previous bipartisan legislation that only authorized allowing those who had assisted the U.S. to enter the country, exceeding the refugee cap.
One of them, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, was arrested on Monday and charged with “conspiring to conduct an Election Day terrorist attack in the United States on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist organization (FTO),” according to the Department of Justice.
Carolyn Wren, a senior advisor to Kari Lake, who is running against Gallego for U.S. Senate, posted on X, “Here’s Ruben Gallego demanding to fly unvetted Afghan citizens to the United States. 20 days later, Tawhedi, an Afghan citizen, entered the US and has since been plotting a mass terrorist attack on our country. Thank God the FBI caught him. The Left’s policies are dangerous.”
She included a post from Gallego welcoming Afghan refugees. He said, shortly before he voted in support of the bill allowing refugees who had not assisted the U.S., “Be bold @potus ! The American public is with you. We want to rescue those that helped us in Afghanistan. Land them at US bases.”
According to the DOJ criminal complaint, Tawhedi was “seen in a video recorded on July 20 reading to two children text that describes the rewards a martyr receives in the afterlife … participated in pro-ISIS Telegram groups, and contributed to a charity which fronts for and funnels money to ISIS.” The DOJ said “in a post-arrest interview, Tawhedi allegedly confirmed the attack was planned for Election Day targeting large gatherings of people, during which he and the juvenile were expected to die as martyrs.”
Tawhedi entered the country through OAR after September 9, 2021, a senior U.S. official told Just the News.
There were 124,334 people transferred to the U.S. under OAR, the vast majority of them Afghan nationals. It is the “largest non-combatant evacuation operation airlift in U.S. history.” The Biden administration admitted that only 40 percent or more of them assisted U.S. forces or were related to a family member who did — they became eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, where they could obtain green cards and embark on a path to citizenship.
According to Immigration Forum, over 70,000 of the refugees were not processed through the SIV program but were let into the country through humanitarian parole. These were in addition to the numbers of refugees already allowed from Afghanistan, which was increased by the Biden administration in 2021.
Republicans objected to the program. Former senior Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News the bill was “breathtaking in scope.” He said, “This bill is a mass migration bill from Afghanistan. It has nothing to do with any prior service to the U.S. government, nothing to do with Special Immigrant Visas — whatever your view may be of that program — it’s just a mass migration bill from Afghanistan.”
Miller predicted, “Open borders to Afghanistan, replete with green cards, citizenship and chain migration will bring into the United States, extremism, jihadism, and Islamist fundamentalism.”
Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) accused Biden of trying “to award unlimited green cards to people who didn’t serve alongside our troops and who may even threaten our safety and health — all while exempting them from the normal refugee screening process.”
At the time, former Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman said that although he supported the resettlement of Afghan allies, “it is becoming abundantly clear that the majority of those being processed are Afghan evacuees without a record of supporting our efforts.”
Fox News reported that “for background checks and screening, it specifies only that the refugees must complete checks ‘to the satisfaction of the Secretary of Homeland Security.’”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on X / Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Ruben Gallego” by Ruben Gallego.
