Trump adds more vitriol to anti-immigrant rhetoric

When the history of Donald Trump's second presidency is written, 26 November 2025 may well go down as a particular landmark.

- Robert Tait WASHINGTON

On the eve of Thanksgiving, a lone gunman shot two West Virginia national guards, Sarah Beckstrom, and Andrew Wolfe, as they were on patrol outside Washington DC's Farragut West metro station, a short walk from the White House-and thereby opened the floodgates to a wave of racist and anti-immigrant invective that seemed extreme even for Trump.

Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries the following day, while 24-year-old Wolfe is said to be slowly recovering from "critical" wounds.

But Trump seemed to focus less on the fates of the two guardsmembers whose deployment he had ordered to combat a supposed "crime wave" than the origins of the suspected assailant, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a recent immigrant from Afghanistan.

Lakanwal, 29, who has been charged with murder, served with a CIA-linked Afghan "partner force" before arriving in the US in 2021 following Washington's chaotic withdrawal from the Afghan war in a resettlement programme created by Joe Biden's administration and which saw the admission of 190,000 Afghans in the country. He was granted asylum this year by Trump's administration, after vetting, but is said to have encountered acute mental health problems.