Shawn Vandiver, founder of Afghan EVAC, addresses the U.S.’s moral obligation to Afghanistan’s wartime allies after Kabul’s fall, citing 77,000 evacuated under Operation Allies Welcome with rigorous vetting—DoD, CIA, DHS, CBP, and law enforcement. He debunks claims by Trump-aligned figures like Christy Noam that security checks were skipped, noting the suspect received asylum in April 2025, and argues PTSD—not radicalization—drives instability among veterans and former counterterrorism operatives, including those who served in CIA-backed Zero units at age 15. Vandiver blames systemic failures on underfunded support for allies and Trump’s diversion of federal law enforcement to political theater, like Home Depot arrests, leaving critical gaps exposed by a September double-veteran shooting incident. Afghan EVAC’s Enduring Welcome program has since granted 195,000 admissions, yet relies entirely on private donations amid government neglect. [Automatically generated summary]
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So Afghan EVAC is an organization dedicated to making sure that the United States and our allies follow through on the promises that we made to locally employed staff and others who served our mission or stood up for the idea for democracy over our 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Everybody remembers the pictures of Afghans falling off planes desperate to get out.
Afghan EVAC stood up during the fall of Kabul.
I got a call from my friend Lucky.
He said, brother, I'm stuck on this mountain or goon.
I think I'm going to die.
Will you grant my last wish and get my family back to San Diego?
Now, I didn't serve in Afghanistan.
I served off the coast of Iraq, off the coast of Africa, all over South America in the global war on drugs.
But this fight is my fight because how we close out our longest war really matters.
It matters to me.
It matters to veterans all over this country and frontline civilians and others who served in our longest wars.
And look, we've got to follow through on this.
And it was working during the last administration.
And it's been reported that that alleged shooter that fired on the National Guard and killed one member and critically wounded another came into the United States through Operation Allies Welcome in September of 2021.
Can you tell us about that program and how many Afghans came into the United States through that program?
So first off, our hearts go out to the tragic, to the families of the two National Guardsmen who were shot, critically injured, and killed last week.
It's an awful situation.
Nobody should ever have to experience the scourge of gun violence that our country has all the time.
Operation Allies Welcome brought in about 77,000 Afghans.
Allies Welcome was the emergency evacuation of Afghanistan.
It only lasted a few months, and that was getting people on planes, getting them vetted before they got on those planes, getting them vetted after they arrived in the third country, more vetting before they left, even more vetting when they arrived, more vetting while they were here, and continual vetting until they got to permanent status.
Many of those folks never got to permanent status or haven't yet.
And then Operation, or not Operation, Enduring Welcome is the long-term end-to-end comprehensive policy to keep our promises to our wartime allies that Afghan EVEC built with the Biden administration.
It's our strongest, safest, most secure legal immigration pathway in our country's history.
And all told between Allies Welcome and Enduring Welcome, there's about 195,000 Afghans that have come into the country.
So remember, screening and vetting is all about who are you connected to?
What are you doing?
Are you connected to terrorist organizations?
Are you committing crimes?
Are you doing things that are not compatible with coming to the United States?
Now, the truth is, our vetting is insanely secure.
For refugees, especially, it's the gold standard around the world.
It looks like multi-agency checks, certainly the Department of Defense or Department of War, if you're Pete Hegseth, the Central Intelligence Agency, other intelligence community agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, USCIS, international law enforcement, local law enforcement.
It's this comprehensive multi-agency, interagency effort to make sure that all of our watch lists are checked and all of that.
And that happens over and over and over for these folks.
So when Christy Noam and Donald Trump and JD Vance and Kash Patel get up and Pam Bondi get up and lie to the American public and say that the vetting didn't occur, that's just not true.
It's also an absolute fact that the Trump administration also vetted these folks, vetted this man in particular.
He got both chief of mission approval for his special immigrant visa program and asylum approved in April of 2025.
You know, we're still going through all of that information, and I'll let the FBI and DOJ reveal new information.
But I will say we believe he was radicalized since he's been here in this country.
We do believe it was through connections in his home community and state.
And we're going to continue to talk to those who interacted with him, who were his family members, talked to them.
So far, we've had some participation.
But anyone who has information on this needs to know that we will be coming after you, and we will bring you to justice.
We absolutely will persecute you because we do know that we will never allow this to continue to happen in our country.
Allow individuals who came to our country that were unvetted by Joe Biden, allowed to run free and loose.
We are going to bring them to justice and make sure that they're returned out of this country if they aren't here for the purposes of being an American.
Well, I'd say Secretary Noam needs to work on her definitions.
I don't think we've seen anything yet that has shown that he was radicalized.
There's been no indication, and you can rest assured that this PR machine government would be waving the flag of terrorism if there was something to indicate that he'd been radicalized, which means that he was working with some terrorist organization or some bad actor.
What all the evidence seems to point to is that this man was experiencing extraordinary amounts of PTSD.
I used to run a veterans nonprofit called Three Wise Men Veterans Foundation, and we were focused on reducing the stigma associated with PTSD.
This man was exhibiting, as far as all the news reporting is showing, telltale signs.
I don't know that he was radicalized.
I think he was brought here.
And to be clear, there's no reason, excuse, ideology for what he did.
Must be held to full account for his crimes, just like we're holding to account the two veterans from back in September who committed mass shootings several states apart and 13 hours apart.
This man needs to be treated like the criminal that he is.
And the gaps that we are identifying are not with our vetting process.
They're with, first, how we treat the people who fight our wars for us, both American military veterans and our wartime allies.
Once they finish that, this man was 15 years old when we handed him a gun and said, go kill people for us.
And then we brought him here and allowed him to isolate himself in his room.
And lots of people tried to get him help back in 2024 and he never got it.
It was offered.
He declined.
And then this year he was asking for help from the CIA.
The other gap is that President Trump and Christine Ohm and all of these folks defunded our domestic security apparatus that's meant to protect us from loan shooters.
They doged this entire program and then reallocated all these federal law enforcement resources to political stunts at Home Depot and snatching teachers out of classrooms and snatching old grandmas from immigration courts.
So it sort of depends on when they got here and who they are, right?
So for the folks that arrived during Operation Allies Welcome, most of those people arrived on a temporary status called parole.
They were brought out of Kabul to a third country, brought from a third country to a U.S. military base here, and then released into the community after extraordinary amounts of vetting, with instructions to either get...