I was pouring my second cup of coffee on Thanksgiving morning when the news alert hit my phone. Another attack in the capital. Another young American life cut short. This time it wasn’t a truck plowing through a crowd or a bomb in a backpack; it was a single gunman, an Afghan national who came here in 2021, walking up to National Guard troops and opening fire just blocks from the White House.
Twenty-year-old Specialist Sarah Beckstrom from West Virginia didn’t make it. Her fellow soldier is still in critical condition. And the country is left asking the same painful question we’ve somehow managed to avoid answering for four long years: how many more times does this have to happen before we admit the obvious?
A Tragedy That Didn’t Have to Happen
Let’s be brutally honest. This wasn’t random. It wasn’t “mental health.” It wasn’t workplace violence.
The shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, arrived in the United States through the chaotic evacuation operation after Kabul fell. Tens of thousands of Afghans were brought here under programs with noble-sounding names, but the vetting, according to everyone who actually worked the files, was essentially nonexistent. People were waved through with little more than a name check against lists that everyone knew were incomplete.
We were told to trust the process. We were called racist for asking basic questions. And now a young woman who volunteered to serve her country is dead because of it.
The Moment Everything Changed
Video of the attack is hard to watch. You see the soldiers doing routine patrols, part of a deployment that was quietly expanded in recent months for reasons the administration never fully explained. Then a man walks up, pulls a revolver, and starts shooting at point-blank range. The Guardsmen returned fire and neutralized the threat, then immediately began rendering aid to each other. That’s who we are as Americans. That’s the kind of people we send to protect us.
Sarah Beckstrom was twenty years old. She had her whole life ahead of her. Andrew Wolfe, the airman still fighting for his life, is twenty-four. These aren’t abstract statistics. These are daughters and sons, brothers and sisters.
“We are devastated to confirm the death of our own, Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, who was shot in the line of duty near the Farragut Square Metro Station.”
West Virginia National Guard statement
The Warnings We Ignored
People in the intelligence community have been sounding the alarm for years. Former targeting officers, analysts who spent decades hunting terrorists overseas, have gone public with numbers that should have triggered national emergency protocols long ago.
One former senior intelligence official recently estimated there could be thousands of trained fighters already inside the country. Not potential radicals. Not people who might become extreme. Trained. People who know how to build bombs, conduct surveillance, execute complex attacks.
We didn’t listen. Or worse, some people actively worked to silence those voices.
- Over 90,000 Afghans brought in with minimal screening
- Millions more from high-risk countries crossing the southern border
- Terror watch list encounters at record highs
- Multiple attacks already this year linked to recent arrivals
And yet the official terror threat level never moved. The warnings went unanswered. Cities continued declaring themselves sanctuaries. Judges blocked basic enforcement actions.
The Political Response Was Immediate
President Trump didn’t wait for the investigation to conclude. He didn’t issue a measured statement about waiting for all the facts.
He ordered an immediate surge of 500 additional National Guard troops to Washington and made something very clear: this ends now.
Late Thanksgiving night, he posted what may be the most consequential immigration policy announcement in modern American history:
“I will permanently pause migration from all Third World countries… terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions… remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States… Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.”
That phrase — reverse migration — is going to define the next four years.
This Was Never Just About Immigration
Let’s be crystal clear about something. The soldiers weren’t deployed to DC to hand out turkey dinners. They weren’t there to clear homeless encampments, though that was the public explanation that made some people feel better.
They were there because someone, somewhere in government knew we were sitting on a powder keg.
The New Orleans truck attack on New Year’s. The attempted bombings that were quietly stopped and never made major headlines. The watch list hits at the border that spiked dramatically. All of this was connected. Anyone paying attention could see the pattern emerging.
But admitting the pattern meant admitting failure on a scale that would end political careers. So the warnings stayed classified. The threat level stayed comfortable. And Sarah Beckstrom paid the price.
What Reverse Migration Actually Means
For years we’ve talked about deportation in abstract terms. Ten thousand here, fifty thousand there. Roundups of criminal aliens. It always sounded manageable, almost routine.
What’s being discussed now is different. This is about fundamentally reversing a decade of policy that treated national borders as optional and national security as secondary to humanitarian optics.
- Ending federal benefits for non-citizens
- Reviewing and potentially revoking citizenship obtained under questionable circumstances
- Prioritizing removal of anyone with ties to extremist ideology
- Complete pause on entries from high-risk regions
- Massive expansion of detention and removal capacity
This isn’t going to be pretty. It’s not supposed to be. When you’ve allowed a crisis to fester this long, the cure is necessarily going to be painful.
The Human Cost of “Compassion”
We were told that questioning the Afghan evacuation was cruel. That asking whether we could properly vet tens of thousands of people in weeks was xenophobic. That suggesting maybe, just maybe, we should prioritize American lives over symbolic gestures was heartless.
Sarah Beckstrom’s blood on a DC sidewalk is the price of that compassion.
Every time someone called basic prudence “racism,” they were making attacks like this more likely. Every time a judge blocked deportation of someone with known terrorist ties, they shifted the risk onto American citizens. Every time an activist group helped someone disappear into the interior rather than face removal, they became complicit in what followed.
This isn’t hyperbole. This is cause and effect.
Where We Go From Here
The old rules are gone. The era of pretending this problem would solve itself is over.
We’re going to see military resources for domestic security in ways we haven’t since the Civil War. We’re going to see immigration courts overwhelmed and detention facilities expanded dramatically. We’re going to see fights in Congress, in the courts, in the streets.
But here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: most Americans are ready for this fight. The silent majority stopped being silent sometime around the moment Sarah Beckstrom’s heart stopped beating.
We can argue about how we got here. We can point fingers and assign blame. But at the end of the day, there’s only one question that matters:
How many more American kids have to die before we decide that being called names is a price worth paying to keep our country safe?
Specialist Sarah Beckstrom answered that question with her life.
The rest of us don’t get to look away anymore.
